John O'Keefe (playwright)
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John O'Keefe (playwright)
John O'Keefe (born 1940) is an American playwright, director and solo performer. Notable awards include the 2002 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for ''Times Like These'', and a Bessie Award for ''Shimmer'', which was also made into a motion picture by American Playhouse. Born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1940, O'Keefe was raised in a series of Catholic orphanages and juvenile homes. He began singing in church choirs at the age of five and pursued his musical interests, subsequently receiving a vocal scholarship at the University of Iowa, where he earned a BA degree in philosophy and an MFA in theater. O'Keefe moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s, beginning an affiliation with the Magic Theatre The Magic Theatre is a theatre company founded in 1967, presently based at the historic Fort Mason Center on San Francisco's northern waterfront. The Magic Theatre is well known and respected for its singular focus on the development and product ... that continues to this day. O'Kee ...
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Bessie Award
The New York Dance and Performance Awards, also known as the Bessie Awards, are awarded annually for exceptional achievement by independent dance artists presenting their work in New York City. The broad categories of the awards are: choreography, performance, music composition and visual design. The Bessie Awards were established in 1983. History and description The Bessie Awards were established in 1983 by Dance Theater Workshop and named in honor of Bessie Schonberg, an influential mid-20th-century teacher of modern dance and former head of the dance department at Sarah Lawrence College. The awards honor exceptional choreography, performance, music composition and visual design in dance and allied art forms. Nominees and award winners are chosen by the Bessie Selection Committee, which consists of dancers, dance presenters, producers, choreographers, journalists, critics and academics. Since 2010, the awards have been overseen by an independent steering committee in partnershi ...
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American Playhouse
''American Playhouse'' is an American anthology television series periodically broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Overview It premiered on January 12, 1982, with ''The Shady Hill Kidnapping'', written and narrated by John Cheever and directed by Paul Bogart. Its final broadcast, ''In the Wings: Angels in America on Broadway'', a rerun of a behind-the-scenes look at Tony Kushner's award-winning play in two parts, aired on January 1, 1994. The series proved to be the springboard for the careers of numerous performers, including David Marshall Grant, Laura Linney, A Martinez, Conchata Ferrell, Eric Roberts, Lynne Thigpen, John Malkovich, Peter Riegert, Lupe Ontiveros, Ben Stiller, and Megan Mullally. As part of WGBH's development of the Descriptive Video Service (DVS), ''American Playhouse'' was one of the first U.S. television programs to air with audio description for the visually impaired on the Secondary audio program (SAP). After trialing the system durin ...
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Waterloo, Iowa
Waterloo is a city in and the county seat of Black Hawk County, Iowa, United States. As of the 2020 United States Census the population was 67,314, making it the eighth-largest city in the state. The city is part of the Waterloo – Cedar Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area, and is the more populous of the two cities. History Waterloo was originally known as Prairie Rapids Crossing. The town was established near two Meskwaki American tribal seasonal camps alongside the Cedar River. It was first settled in 1845 when George and Mary Melrose Hanna and their children arrived on the east bank of the Red Cedar River (now just called the Cedar River). They were followed by the Virden and Mullan families in 1846. Evidence of these earliest families can still be found in the street names Hanna Boulevard, Mullan Avenue and Virden Creek. On December 8, 1845, the ''Iowa State Register and Waterloo Herald'' was the first newspaper published in Waterloo. The name Waterloo supplanted the o ...
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University Of Iowa
The University of Iowa (UI, U of I, UIowa, or simply Iowa) is a public university, public research university in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. Founded in 1847, it is the oldest and largest university in the state. The University of Iowa is organized into 12 colleges offering more than 200 areas of study and seven professional degrees. On an urban 1,880-acre campus on the banks of the Iowa River, the University of Iowa is Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". In fiscal year 2021, research expenditures at Iowa totaled $818 million. The university is best known for its programs in health care, law, and the fine arts, with programs ranking among the top 25 nationally in those areas. The university was the original developer of the Master of Fine Arts degree and it operates the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which has produced 17 of the university's 46 Pulitzer Prize winners. Iowa is a mem ...
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San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of California cities by population, fourth most populous in California and List of United States cities by population, 17th most populous in the United States, with 815,201 residents as of 2021. It covers a land area of , at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City, and the County statistics of the United States, fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 91 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income (at $160,749) and sixth by aggregate income as of 2021. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include ''SF'', ''San Fran'', ''The '', ''Frisco'', and '' ...
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Magic Theatre
The Magic Theatre is a theatre company founded in 1967, presently based at the historic Fort Mason Center on San Francisco's northern waterfront. The Magic Theatre is well known and respected for its singular focus on the development and production of new plays. Sean San José is the Artistic Director. History The Magic Theatre originated in 1967 when John Lion, a student of Jan Kott at the University of California, directed a production of Eugène Ionesco's ''The Lesson'' at the Steppenwolf Bar in Berkeley. The theatre's name came from a crucial location in Hermann Hesse's 1927 novel '' Steppenwolf'': "Anarchist Evening at the Magic Theatre, For Madmen Only, Price of Admission Your Mind". The Magic's first real success came with plays written by renowned Beat poet Michael McClure, who sustained an eleven-year residency. The theatre reached a turning point when company members wanted to restructure it as a collective. Lion responded by moving the theatre across the bay to San ...
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Shimmer (play)
''Shimmer'' is a 1988 award-winning one-man play by American playwright John O'Keefe. It is a solo performance, portraying multiple characters, that describes life on a harsh juvenile detention farm in the Midwest in the 1950s. Plot The solo actor in ''Shimmer'' tells the story by becoming each character in turn. The play takes place in 1956, in a harsh Midwestern juvenile detention center, where two boys befriend each other. To survive the brutal environment, the two create their own fantasy world, in which the movement of streams and breezes becomes a language that travels between dimensions, a language the boys call "shimmer." The two boys are eventually locked up, and they are ultimately forced to carefully plan and carry out an escape. Background O'Keefe wrote ''Shimmer'' after financial restrictions ended his plans for a five-actor play that had been commissioned, by American Inroads in San Francisco, in 1987. O'Keefe then asked if he could do a solo play, and the proposal ...
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University Of Iowa Alumni
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the designation is reserved for colleges that have a graduate school. The word ''university'' is derived from the Latin ''universitas magistrorum et scholarium'', which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". The first universities were created in Europe by Catholic Church monks. The University of Bologna (''Università di Bologna''), founded in 1088, is the first university in the sense of: *Being a high degree-awarding institute. *Having independence from the ecclesiastic schools, although conducted by both clergy and non-clergy. *Using the word ''universitas'' (which was coined at its foundation). *Issuing secular and non-secular degrees: grammar, rhetoric, logic, theology, canon law, notarial law.Hunt Janin: "The university i ...
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1940 Births
Year 194 ( CXCIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Septimius and Septimius (or, less frequently, year 947 ''Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 194 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * Emperor Septimius Severus and Decimus Clodius Septimius Albinus Caesar become Roman Consuls. * Battle of Issus: Septimius Severus marches with his army (12 legions) to Cilicia, and defeats Pescennius Niger, Roman governor of Syria. Pescennius retreats to Antioch, and is executed by Severus' troops. * Septimius Severus besieges Byzantium (194–196); the city walls suffer extensive damage. Asia * Battle of Yan Province: Warlords Cao Cao and Lü Bu fight for control over Yan Province; the battle lasts for over 100 ...
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