Don Nigro is an American playwright; his plays ''Anima Mundi'' and ''The Dark Sonnets of the Lady'' have both been nominated for the National Repertory Theatre Foundation's National Play Award. He has won a Playwright's Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment For The Arts, grants from the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council, and twice been James Thurber Writer In Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio.

Personal life

Don Nigro was born on September 30, 1949 and currently lives near

Malvern, Ohio Malvern is a village (United States)#Ohio, village in northwestern Carroll County, Ohio, Carroll County, Ohio, United States. The population was 1,110 at the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census. It is part of the Canton–Massillon metropolitan ...

. He grew up in Ohio and Arizona. He received a

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

in English from

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

in 1971 and a

Master of Fine Arts A Master of Fine Arts (MFA or M.F.A.) is a terminal degree in fine arts, including visual arts, creative writing, graphic design, photography, filmmaking, dance, theatre, other performing arts and in some cases, theatre management or arts admini ...

dramatic arts Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been ...

from the Playwrights Workshop at

the 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 org ...

in 1979. At various times he has taught at the Ohio State University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Indiana State University, the University of Iowa, and Kent State University. Nigro has listed some of his major dramatic influences as Shakespeare and the Jacobeans,

Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic expe ...

Harold Pinter Harold Pinter (; 10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanne ...

, Peter Barnes,

Tom Stoppard Sir Tom Stoppard (born , 3 July 1937) is a Czech born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and politi ...

, and the early work of

John Arden John Arden (26 October 1930 – 28 March 2012) was an English playwright who at his death was lauded as "one of the most significant British playwrights of the late 1950s and early 60s". Career Born in Barnsley, son of the manager of a glass f ...

and Edward Bond. He lists his major non-dramatic influences as the work of

William Butler Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...

, T. S. Eliot,

William Faulkner William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of ...

Ford Madox Ford Ford Madox Ford (né Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer ( ); 17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals ''The English Review'' and ''The Transatlantic Review'' were instrumental in ...

Marcel Proust Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (; ; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel ''In Search of Lost Time'' (''À la recherche du temps perdu''; with the previous Eng ...

and

Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, as well as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known bo ...

. He also lists the

King James Bible The King James Version (KJV), also the King James Bible (KJB) and the Authorized Version, is an Bible translations into English, English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and publis ...

Buster Keaton Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966) was an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He is best known for his silent film work, in which his trademark was physical comedy accompanied by a stoic, deadpan expression ...

, and

the Marx Brothers The Marx Brothers were an American family comedy act that was successful in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in motion pictures from 1905 to 1949. Five of the Marx Brothers' thirteen feature films were selected by the American Film Institute (AFI) ...

Career

Nigro has written more than 400 plays, 187 of which have been published by Samuel French, Inc. in 54 volumes. and now his entire collected works, published and unpublished, is available on the

Samuel French Samuel French (1821–1898) was an American entrepreneur who, together with British actor, playwright and theatrical manager Thomas Hailes Lacy, pioneered in the field of theatrical publishing and the licensing of plays. Biography French foun ...

web site. One of these, ''Ravenscroft'', was adapted into the film ''The Manor'', with

Peter O'Toole Peter Seamus O'Toole (; 2 August 1932 – 14 December 2013) was a British stage and film actor. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began working in the theatre, gaining recognition as a Shakespearean actor at the Bristol Old Vic ...

. His long cycle of Pendragon County plays, now numbering well over two dozen and still growing, traces American history from the eighteenth century to the present through the lives of several generations of interconnected families from an east Ohio town. These include ''Glamorgan'', ''Horrid Massacre In Boston'', ''Armitage'', ''Fisher King'', ''Green Man'', ''Sorceress'', ''Tristan'', ''Pendragon'', ''Chronicles'', ''Anima Mundi'', ''Beast With Two Backs'', ''Laestrygonians'', ''The Circus Animals' Desertion'', ''Dramatis Personae'', ''The Reeves Tale'' and ''November''. His cycle of Russian plays includes ''Pushkin'', ''Gogol'', ''An Angler In The Lake Of Darkness'' (about

Leo Tolstoy Count Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyTolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; russian: link=no, Лев Николаевич Толстой,In Tolstoy's day, his name was written as in pre-refor ...

), ''Emotion Memory'' (about

Anton Chekhov Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (; 29 January 1860 Old Style date 17 January. – 15 July 1904 Old Style date 2 July.) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career ...

), ''A Russian Play'', ''Rasputin'', and ''Mandelstam''. His plays about art and artists include ''Hieronymus Bosch'', ''Dutch Interiors'' (about

Vermeer Johannes Vermeer ( , , see below; also known as Jan Vermeer; October 1632 – 15 December 1675) was a Dutch Baroque Period painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. During his lifetime, he was a moderately succe ...

), ''Blood Red Roses'' (about the Pre-Raphaelites), ''The Daughters of Edward D. Boit'' (based on the painting by

John Singer Sargent John Singer Sargent (; January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more ...

), ''Netherlands'' (about

Van Gogh Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, inclu ...

), ''Sphinx'' (about

Franz Von Stuck Franz von Stuck (February 23, 1863 – August 30, 1928), born Franz Stuck, was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, and architect. Stuck was best known for his paintings of ancient mythology, receiving substantial critical acclaim with '' The ...

), ''Madonna'' (about

Edvard Munch Edvard Munch ( , ; 12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian painter. His best known work, ''The Scream'' (1893), has become one of Western art's most iconic images. His childhood was overshadowed by illness, bereavement and the dr ...

), ''Europe After The Rain'' (about

Max Ernst Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German (naturalised American in 1948 and French in 1958) painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism ...

), ''Picasso'' (about the invisible squirrel in a painting by Braque), and ''City of Dreadful Night'', (inspired by the paintings of

Edward Hopper Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Hopper created subdued drama ...

). His Inspector Ruffing plays include ''Mephisto'', ''Demonology'', ''The Rooky Wood'', ''Creatures Lurking In The Churchyard'', ''Ravenscroft'', ''Widdershins'', and ''Phantoms''. Other plays include ''Machiavelli'', ''Ardy Fafirsin'', ''A Lecture By Monsieur Artaud'' (about

Antonin Artaud Antoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (; 4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), was a French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist, actor and theatre director. He is widely recognized as a major figure of the E ...

), ''Grotesque Lovesongs'' (originally commissioned by producer

Saint Subber Arnold Saint-Subber (February 18, 1918 – April 19, 1994), usually known as Saint Subber, was an American theatrical producer. Early life Subber grew up in New York City, where both of his parents were theatre ticket brokers. He attended New York ...

), ''Mariner'' (about

Christopher Columbus Christopher Columbus * lij, Cristoffa C(or)ombo * es, link=no, Cristóbal Colón * pt, Cristóvão Colombo * ca, Cristòfor (or ) * la, Christophorus Columbus. (; born between 25 August and 31 October 1451, died 20 May 1506) was a ...

), ''Jules Verne Eats A Rhinoceros'' (about reporter

Nellie Bly Elizabeth Cochran Seaman (born Elizabeth Jane Cochran; May 5, 1864 – January 27, 1922), better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist, industrialist, inventor, and charity worker who was widely known for her record-breaki ...

), ''Punch and Judy'', ''Boar's Head'' (about the lives of the supporting characters at the Boar's Head Inn in Shakespeare's mentioned but unwritten scenes from his ''Henry IV'' plays), ''Loves Labours Wonne'' (about Shakespeare), ''Paganini'', ''Lucia Mad'' (about the daughter of

), ''Cinderella Waltz'', ''Specter'', ''Monkey Soup'', ''Don Giovanni'', ''The Count of Monte Cristo In The Chateau D'If'', ''Quint And Miss Jessel At Bly'', ''The Girlhood Of Shakespeare's Heroines'', ''Terre Haute'', ''The Transylvanian Clockworks'', ''Seascape With Sharks and Dancer'', ''Henry And Ellen'' (about

Henry Irving Sir Henry Irving (6 February 1838 – 13 October 1905), christened John Henry Brodribb, sometimes known as J. H. Irving, was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility ( ...

and

Ellen Terry Dame Alice Ellen Terry, (27 February 184721 July 1928), was a leading English actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born into a family of actors, Terry began performing as a child, acting in Shakespeare plays in London, and tour ...

), ''The Dark Sonnets Of The Lady'' (about

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies explained as originatin ...

and his patient Dora), ''Seduction'' (inspired by

Søren Kierkegaard Søren Aabye Kierkegaard ( , , ; 5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on ...

's ''Diary of a Seducer''), ''Rainy Night At Lindy's'' (about the last night of gangster

Arnold Rothstein Arnold Rothstein (January 17, 1882 – November 4, 1928), nicknamed "The Brain", was an American racketeer, crime boss, businessman, and gambler in New York City. Rothstein was widely reputed to have organized corruption in professional athleti ...

), ''What Shall I Do For Pretty Girls?'' (about the tangled relationship of

Maud Gonne Maud Gonne MacBride ( ga, Maud Nic Ghoinn Bean Mhic Giolla Bhríghde; 21 December 1866 – 27 April 1953) was an English-born Irish republican revolutionary, suffragette and actress. Of Anglo-Irish descent, she was won over to Irish nationalism ...

, her daughter

Iseult Gonne Iseult Lucille Germaine Gonne (6 August 1894 – 22 March 1954) was the daughter of the Irish republican revolutionary Maud Gonne and the French politician and journalist Lucien Millevoye. She married the novelist Francis Stuart in 1920. ...

, and Yeats' automatic writing wife

Georgie Hyde-Lees Georgie Hyde-Lees (born Bertha Hyde-Lees, 1892 – 1968)

), ''Maelstrom'' (about

Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe (; Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is wide ...

), ''Traitors'' (about the

Alger Hiss Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was an American government official accused in 1948 of having spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Statutes of limitations had expired for espionage, but he was convicted of perjury in con ...

Whittaker Chambers Whittaker Chambers (born Jay Vivian Chambers; April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer-editor, who, after early years as a Communist Party member (1925) and Soviet spy (1932–1938), defected from the Soviet underground (1938), ...

case) and ''My Sweetheart's the Man in the Moon'' (about

Evelyn Nesbit Evelyn Nesbit (born Florence Evelyn Nesbit; December 25, 1884 or 1885 – January 17, 1967) was an American artists' model, chorus girl, and actress. She is best known for her years as a young woman in New York City, particularly her inv ...

and

Stanford White Stanford White (November 9, 1853 – June 25, 1906) was an American architect. He was also a partner in the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, one of the most significant Beaux-Arts firms. He designed many houses for the rich, in additio ...

). He is also known for his cult work ''The Curate Shakespeare As You Like It'', subtitled ''Being the record of one company's attempt to perform the play by

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

''. ''Martian Gothic'' was commissioned by The Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York as part of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project and developed earlier at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. Nigro's plays have been produced at the McCarter Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the WPA Theatre, the Hudson Guild Theatre, Capital Repertory Company, the New York Fringe Festival, the Berkeley Stage Company, Manhattan Class Company, the People's Light And Theatre Company, the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Theatre X, the Secret Rose Theatre, Inertia Productions, the Hypothetical Theatre, the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the Oldcastle Theatre, the Porthouse Theatre, the Old Creamery Theatre, the Sacramento Theatre Company, the Strain Theatre Company, the Apothecary Theatre Company, Gravity and Glass, Theatre NXS, Renaissance Theatreworks, Look At The Fish Theatre Company, at Teatr Syrena in Warsaw, Teatr Julius Slowakie in Kraków, toured in Germany by the Munich-based company SpielArt, at the First International Mystery Festival, toured in India, in London, Munich, Mexico City, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Belgium, Slovenia, South Africa, Tehran, Hong Kong and Beijing. John Clancy's production of ''Cincinnati'', with Nancy Walsh, won Fringe First and Spirit of the Fringe awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Best of Fringe at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in Australia, and later toured in England and Wales. His plays are frequently done by many Off Off Broadway companies in New York. Nigro's plays have been translated into Italian, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Polish, Dutch, Lithuanian and Chinese. in November 2012 a Spanish version of ''Seascape With Sharks And Dancer,'' translated by Tato Alexander and featuring

Bruno Bichir Bruno Bichir Nájera (born 6 October 1967) is a Mexican actor and one of the members of the Bichir family. Biography Bichir was born in Mexico City. He started his acting career at the age of five in several theater, film and television series. ...

and Tato Alexander, opened at Teatro El Granero in Mexico City. This production was revived in Mexico City in 2013 and later toured in Mexico. In June 2013 ''Marina'' and ''Mata Hari'' were produced in New York by Nylon Fusion Theatre Company, both featuring actress Tatyana Kot and directed by Ivette Dumeng. In 2015 ''Gorgons'' was produced by the Drama Theatre of Petrozavodsk and the Drama Theatre of Yelets, in Russia. In 2016 ''Don Giovanni'' was produced by the Yermolova Drama Theatre in Moscow, ''Gorgons'' at the Aggelon Vima Theatre in Athens, Greece, and ''Nebuchadnezzar'' at the Vene Theatre in Tallinn, Estonia. The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at the Ohio State University in Columbus has archived a large collection of Nigro's scripts and related materials. See also McGhee, Jim: ''Labyrinth: The Plays Of Don Nigro'' (University Press Of America, 2004).

References

External links

*
Index of Don Nigro's Works
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nigro, Don Living people University of Iowa alumni Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences alumni 1949 births Writers from Ohio People from Malvern, Ohio Ohio State University faculty University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty Indiana State University faculty University of Iowa faculty Kent State University faculty 21st-century American dramatists and playwrights 20th-century American dramatists and playwrights