Paul D'Andrea
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Paul D'Andrea | |
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| Born | February 2, 1939 Boston, MA |
| Nationality | American |
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Paul Philip D’Andrea (born February 2, 1939 in Boston, MA) is an American playwright, scholar, and theatrical producer. He authored the plays The Trouble with Europe, Two-Bit Taj Mahal, Nathan the Wise, A Full-Length Portrait of America, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, and, co-authored with playwright Jon Klein, The Einstein Project. He is also notable for founding the Theater of the First Amendment (TFA) in Washington, D.C..
Early Life and Education
D’Andrea was born in the South End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, of Italian immigrant parents, and educated at Belmont High School, Harvard, and Oxford. After studying with Perry Miller, Alfred Harbage, E. M. Purcell, Paul Freund, B. F. Skinner, Archibald MacLeish, Andrew M. Gleason, and Douglas Bush at Harvard, and Ian Crombie, R. M. Hare, and Gilbert Ryle at Oxford, he decided to work in literature and theater, having discovered that Shakespeare is the freest of speakers, because his plays are the DNA of verbal art. [1]
He earned a BA in Physics at Harvard, got halfway through a MPhil in Philosophy at Oxford when illness in the family required him to return to Boston. He earned an MA in English literature and a PhD in Renaissance literature, specialty Shakespeare, from Harvard.
He picked up theater craft wherever he could, with Peg Wurl and Fraser Kent at Hull House in Chicago; the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis; Dale Wasserman’s Midwest Playlabs; with Edward Kaye-Martin at Wisdom Bridge Theater in Chicago; at Charles Fuller’s theater workshop in Harlem; with Alan Schneider at Juilliard; with Timi Near at San José Repertory Theater; with directors Akin Babatunde in Dallas and Domenico Polidoro in Rome; New Dramatists in New York; and three summers at Sundance.
Career
D’Andrea’s plays are notable for their voice, quotability, [2]support from audiences, [3] choice of themes—the real energy crisis4, the decontamination of God, [4] [5] [6] the moral responsibility of scientists8 —range of subject matter, and innovative use of the physical stage. [7] In his review in the Hollywood Reporter of The Trouble with Europe, Ron Pennington wrote, “D’Andrea may be one of the most original American theatrical voices since Sam Shepard.” [8]
Because of the importance of the theme, at the premiere of Nathan the Wise (D’Andrea’s adaptation of Gotthold Lessing’s 1779 German play), a member of the audience gave the theater manager a check for $10,000.00 to begin a fund to finance a PBS Television production of the play.11 Nathan was produced as a 90-minute feature on PBS station WETA/TV and (translated into Italian as Nathan il Saggio) was chosen as the subject for discussion in Rome on the occasion of “Nostra Aetate,” a festival of religious tolerance. The discussants were Walter Cardinal Kasper, President of the Pontifical Commission for Relations with the Jews; Talmudist Rav Adin Steinsaltz; Amos Luzzato, President of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities; and Dr. Taysier Mandour, member of the Interreligious Dialogue Committee of el Ahzar and member of the Supreme Islamic Council. Italian national television RAI/TV produced a documentary on the festival and the play. [9] [10] [11]
D'Andrea’s sources range from his own investigative journalism to scholarship. With his teenage son, he traveled to an unusual American town to interview the citizens that voted to kill their local bully and acted on their “yes” vote.15 He has written plays about Albert Einstein, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Lorenzo de’ Medici, and the hero of world Islam, Saladin. [12]
His plays have been produced at the Actors Theater of Louisville, the Berkshire Theater Festival, Illusion Theater, the Julian Theater, the Magic Theater, the Mark Taper Forum, NPR, the Phoenix in New York, PBS TV, and Teatro Dionysia in Rome.
References
External links
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