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Jeff Zinn
Jeff Zinn (born 1949) is an American director and actor who has appeared in several films by Jay Craven, and in theatre, Zinn played Danny in the off-Broadway production of ''Sexual Perversity in Chicago'' by David Mamet, and Trety in the Broadway production of '' The Suicide'' by Nikolai Erdman. Biography Zinn began his career as a singer-songwriter performing in Boston coffeehouses and clubs including the Unicorn and the Rathskellar. He also performed in several of the G.I. coffeehouses founded by Fred Gardner, known to be “a consequential part of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War era.” Zinn was the resident musician at the first of these, the U.F.O. in Columbia, S.C. until a police raid on a residence he shared with several soldiers (one of whom was AWOL) resulted in his arrest and brief incarceration. At Franconia College (whose president at the time was Leon Botstein) he transitioned from music to theater under the mentorship of Ronald Bennett who had been ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922January 27, 2010) was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist thinker and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote over 20 books, including his best-selling and influential '' A People's History of the United States'' in 1980. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, ''A Young People's History of the United States''. Zinn described himself as "something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist." He wrote extensively about the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and labor history of the United States. His memoir, ''You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train'' (Beacon Press, 2002), was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work. Zinn died of a heart attack in 2010, at age 87. Early life Zinn was born to a Jewish immigrant family in B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Chekhov
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Chekhov (russian: Михаил Александрович Чехов; 29 August 1891 – 30 September 1955), known as Michael Chekhov, was an American actor, director, author and theatre practitioner. He was a nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and a student of Konstantin Stanislavski. Stanislavski referred to him as his most brilliant student. Although mainly a stage actor, he made a few notable appearances on film, perhaps most memorably as the Freudian analyst in Alfred Hitchcock's '' Spellbound'' (1945), for which he received his only Academy Award nomination. Life He was born in Saint Petersburg, the son of Alexander Chekhov (the elder brother of Anton Chekhov) and his wife Natalya Aleksandrovna Golden. It was his father's second marriage. His mother, a Russian Jew, had been the governess to the children from his father's first marriage. He was raised in a middle-class family; his father was in the Imperial Customs Service and was a moderatel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Travolta
John Joseph Travolta (born February 18, 1954) is an American actor. He came to public attention during the 1970s, appearing on the television sitcom ''Welcome Back, Kotter'' (1975–1979) and starring in the box office successes ''Carrie'' (1976), '' Saturday Night Fever'' (1977), '' Grease'' (1978), and ''Urban Cowboy'' (1980). His acting career declined throughout the 1980s, but he enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s with his role in ''Pulp Fiction'' (1994), and went on to star in films including ''Get Shorty'' (1995), '' Broken Arrow'' (1996), ''Phenomenon'' (1996), ''Face/Off'' (1997), ''A Civil Action'' (1998), ''Primary Colors'' (1998), ''Hairspray'' (2007), and '' Bolt'' (2008). Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performances in ''Saturday Night Fever'' and ''Pulp Fiction''. He won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for his performance in ''Get Shorty'' and has received a total of six nominations, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Derek Jacobi
Sir Derek George Jacobi (; born 22 October 1938) is an English actor. He has appeared in various stage productions of William Shakespeare such as ''Hamlet'', ''Much Ado About Nothing'', ''Macbeth'', ''Twelfth Night'', ''The Tempest'', ''King Lear'', and ''Romeo and Juliet''. He has also performed in Anton Chekhov's ''Uncle Vanya'' and Edmond Rostand's ''Cyrano de Bergerac (play), Cyrano de Bergerac''. He was given a Knight Bachelor, knighthood for his services to theatre by Elizabeth II, Queen Elizabeth II in 1994 and is a member of the Danish Order of the Dannebrog. In addition to being a founder member of the Royal National Theatre and winning several prestigious theatre awards, Jacobi has also made numerous television appearances, starring in the 1976 adaptation of Robert Graves's ''I, Claudius (TV series), I, Claudius'', for which he won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts, BAFTA; in the titular role in the medieval drama series ''Cadfael (TV series), Cadfael'' ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jane Anderson
Jane Anderson (born 1954 in California) is an American actress, playwright, screenwriter and director. She wrote and directed the feature film ''The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio'' (2005), and wrote the Nicolas Cage film '' It Could Happen to You'' (1994). She won an Emmy Award for writing the screenplay for the miniseries ''Olive Kitteridge'' (2014). Career Jane Anderson got her start as an actress, before getting her first writing job as a writer and consultant on the sitcom '' The Facts of Life'' (on which she had also appeared). She followed this up by creating the short-lived sitcom ''Raising Miranda'', which was cancelled in its first season. She then had several other TV series gigs, and wrote her first play, ''The Baby Dance'' (1989). Her first film experience was writing the 1993 HBO film ''The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom'', starring Holly Hunter; the film was critically acclaimed, and TV critics Matt Zoller Seitz and Al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elizabeth McGovern
Elizabeth Lee McGovern (born July 18, 1961) is an American actress and musician. She has received many awards, including a Screen Actors Guild Award, three Golden Globe Award nominations, and one Academy Award nomination. Born in Evanston, Illinois, McGovern spent most of her early life in Los Angeles. After attending the American Conservatory Theater and the Juilliard School, she made her feature film debut in ''Ordinary People'' (1980). For her role as Evelyn Nesbit in the musical film ''Ragtime'' (1981), she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She subsequently had lead roles in a number of major studio films, including ''Once Upon a Time in America'' (1984), ''She's Having a Baby'' (1987), '' The Bedroom Window'' (1987), ''The Handmaid's Tale'' (1990), and '' The Wings of the Dove'' (1997). In 2007, McGovern, after years of studying guitar, formed the musical group Sadie and the Hotheads, with whom she has released four studio albums sin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was a playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play ''A Raisin in the Sun'', highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 US Supreme Court case ''Hansberry v. Lee''. After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper ''Freedom'', where she worked with other intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teatro Regio (Parma)
Teatro Regio di Parma, originally constructed as the Nuovo Teatro Ducale (New Ducal Theatre),Martini, "Before the Teatro Regio", pp. 56 is an opera house and opera company in Parma, Italy. Replacing an obsolete house, the new Ducale achieved prominence in the years after 1829, and especially so after the composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was born near Busseto, some thirty kilometres away, had achieved fame. Also well known in Parma was the conductor Arturo Toscanini, born there in 1867. As has been noted by Lee Marshall, "while not as well known as La Scala in Milan or La Fenice in Venice, the city’s Teatro Regio....is considered by opera buffs to be one of the true homes of the great Italian tradition, and the well-informed audience is famous for giving voice to its approval or disapproval – not just from the gallery." The 1,400-seat auditorium, with four tiers of boxes topped by a gallery, was inaugurated on 16 May 1829 when it presented the premiere of Vincenzo Bellini's '' Za ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean-Claude Van Itallie
Jean-Claude van Itallie (May 25, 1936 – September 9, 2021) was a Belgian-born American playwright, performer, and theatre workshop teacher. He is best known for his 1966 anti-Vietnam War play ''America Hurrah;'' ''The Serpent'', an ensemble play he wrote with Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre; his theatrical adaptation of the ''Tibetan Book of the Dead''; and his translations of Anton Chekhov's plays. Early life and education Van Itallie was born in Brussels, Belgium on May 25, 1936, to Hugo Ferdinand van Itallie (an investment banker) and Marthe Mathilde Caroline Levy van Itallie. His family was Jewish. In 1940, when the Nazis invaded Brussels, he fled with his family to France, where they received visas to Portugal from the Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes. They stayed in Estoril, at the Pensão Royal, between 8 July and 28 September 1940. On the same day, they boarded the ''S.S. Hakozaki Maru'' headed for New York City, arriving on 10 October. Van Itallie grew up ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barbara Garson
Barbara Garson (born July 7, 1941, Brooklyn) is an American playwright, author and social activist, perhaps best known for the play '' MacBird!'' Education and personal life Garson attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a B.A. specializing in Classical History in 1964. She was active in the Free Speech Movement, as the editor of ''The Free Speech Movement Newsletter'', which was printed on an offset press that she herself had restored. She was one of 800 arrested on December 2, 1964 at a sit-in at Sproul Hall, Berkeley, following the "Machine Speech" by Mario Savio. In 1968, Garson had a child, Juliet, and in 1969 she went to work at The Shelter Half, an anti-war GI coffee house near Fort Lewis Army base in Tacoma, Washington. In the early 1970s, she moved to Manhattan, publishing short, humorous essays and theater reviews primarily for ''The Village Voice'' as well as plays. ''MacBird!'' Garson's most famous work, '' MacBird!'', a 1966 counterc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theater For The New City
Theater for the New City, founded in 1971 and known familiarly as "TNC", is one of New York City's leading off-off-Broadway theaters, known for radical political plays and community commitment. Productions at TNC have won 43 Obie Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. TNC currently exists as a 4-theater complex in a space at 155 First Avenue, in the East Village of Manhattan. History 1970s Crystal Field and George Bartenieff founded Theater for the New City in 1971 with Theo Barnes and Lawrence Kornfeld, who was the Resident Director of Judson Poets Theatre, where the four had met. Feeling that Judson Poets Theatre had peaked,Interview with George Bartenieff,The Long Run: A Performer's Life, New York Foundation for the Arts, summer 2003. they decided to form a theater of their own for poetic work that would also encompass a community ideal. The impulse to form a company coincided with the availability of a space at the Westbeth Artists Community in the West Village. Bartenief ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andy Kaufman
Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman ( ; January 17, 1949 – May 16, 1984) was an American entertainer and performance artist. While often called a "comedian", Kaufman preferred to describe himself instead as a "song and dance man". He has sometimes been called an " anti-comedian". He disdained telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood, once saying in an interview, "I am not a comic, I have never told a joke. The comedian's promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him. My only promise is that I will try to entertain you as best I can." After working in small comedy clubs in the early 1970s, Kaufman came to the attention of a wider audience in 1975, when he was invited to perform portions of his act on the first season of ''Saturday Night Live''. His Foreign Man character was the basis of his performance as Latka Gravas on the hit television show ''Taxi'' from 1978 until 1983. During this time, he continued to tour comedy clubs and thea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
