Tommy Smith is a playwright.
Early life
Initially an actor in Seattle, WA, Smith played roles at the
Intiman Theatre
Intiman Theatre Festival in Seattle, Washington, was founded in 1972 as a resident theatre by Margaret "Megs" Booker, who named it for August Strindberg's Stockholm theater. and
Seattle Repertory Theatre
Seattle Repertory Theatre (familiarly known as "The Rep") is a major regional theatre located in Seattle, Washington, at the Seattle Center. It is a member of Theatre Puget Sound[Joe Wenderoth
Joe Wenderoth (born 1966) is an American writer, performer, teacher, and film-maker. He has published six books: four books of poetry, an epistolary novel, and a book of essays. Wenderoth curates "The Seizure State", which appears in the Brookly ...]
's book ''Letters to Wendy’s''.
New York theatre
Hired to come to New York to perform in
Richard Foreman
Richard Foreman (born June 10, 1937 in New York City) is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
Achievements and awards
Foreman has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own plays, b ...
's ''King Cowboy Rufus Rules The Universe,'' Smith was accepted into the Juilliard School's Playwriting Program under
Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman (born September 21, 1947) is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play '' 'night, Mother''. She wrote the book and lyrics for such Broadway musicals as ''The Se ...
and
Christopher Durang
Christopher Ferdinand Durang (born January 2, 1949) is an American playwright known for works of outrageous and often absurd comedy. His work was especially popular in the 1980s, though his career seemed to get a second wind in the late 1990s.
...
. Upon graduation, Smith was invited to The
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier ...
National Playwrights Conference to develop the play ''Air Conditioning''.
The next year, Smith teamed with director May Adrales at the
Soho Rep
The Soho Repertory Theatre, known as Soho Rep,The official website'now use "Soho", with a lowercase h, as do most articles from th''New York Times''/ref> is an American Off-Broadway theater company based in New York City which is notable for prod ...
Writer/Director Lab to develop ''White Hot'', a darkly comic psychological drama. ''White Hot'' premiered at
HERE Arts Center
HERE Arts Center is a New York City off-off-Broadway presenting house, founded in 1993. Their location includes two stages specializing in hybrid performance, dance, theater, multi-media and puppetry in addition to art exhibition space and a cafe ...
and was published in ''The New York Theatre Review''. The foreword by playwright
Craig Lucas
Craig Lucas (born April 30, 1951) is an American playwright, screenwriter, theatre director, musical actor, and film director.
Biography
Born on April 30, 1951, he was found abandoned in a car in Atlanta, Georgia. Lucas was adopted when he wa ...
says:
"
ommy Smithis writing in the shadow of our most daring and politically incendiary of martyred playwright saints,
Sarah Kane
Sarah Kane (3 February 1971 – 20 February 1999) was an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. She is known for her plays that deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological ...
and
Edward Bond
Edward Bond (born 18 July 1934) is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays, among them '' Saved'' (1965), the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of the ...
... This is bleak terrain, a buried cesspool of self-loathing and unseemly, sadistic yearnings in love. The play can be read as a critique of the deadening fallout of our reactionary, materialistic, exploitative and soulless era. It can be read as a bad dream or a soap opera about the banality of evil. However you read it, it doesn’t go down easy."
Adrales and Smith's next collaboration – the boundary-pushing identity drama ''The Wife'' – was hailed by ''The New York Times'' as “excellent …
he play
He or HE may refer to:
Language
* He (pronoun), an English pronoun
* He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ
* He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets
* He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' in ...
is a brew all Mr. Smith’s own, a sort of warped, contemporary ''La Ronde''.”
Los Angeles theatre
Smith collaborated with director Chris Fields – the ousted founder of the Ojai Playwrights Festival – for three successful Los Angeles productions. Their 90s kitchen sink drama ''Firemen'' won five LADCC Awards, including Best Writing, and was named one of the year's best stage shows by ''The LA Times.'' The play also generated controversy for its treatment of a romance between a teenage boy and his school secretary.
The following year, Smith and Fields received glowing reviews for ''Fugue'', a violent choral play about the doomed love lives of classical composers Tchaikovsky, Gesualdo, and Schoenberg. Smith and Fields’ artistic relationship crumbled over contractual misunderstandings with their third and final production, the solo female prose play ''Ghost Light,'' whose single performance nonetheless generated good notices:
"
mith’swords open up onto haunting and darkly grotesque psychic landscapes unreachable by more pedestrian dramatic entertainments,
angingin feeling from the experimental flash fictions of
Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 – July 23, 1989) was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the ''Houston Post'', was managing ...
to the early schizophrenic-styled writing of
Peter Handke
Peter Handke (; born 6 December 1942) is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter. He was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored t ...
."
Collaborations with Reggie Watts
Smith premiered three original pieces – ''Disinformation, Transition'' and ''Dutch A/V –'' at
The Public Theater
The Public Theater is a New York City arts organization founded as the Shakespeare Workshop in 1954 by Joseph Papp, with the intention of showcasing the works of up-and-coming playwrights and performers.Epstein, Helen. ''Joe Papp: An American Li ...
’s Under The Radar Festival with long-time friend and comedian/musician
Reggie Watts
Reginald Lucien Frank Roger Watts (born March 23, 1972) is an American comedian, actor, beatboxer, and musician. His improvised musical sets are created using only his voice, a keyboard, and a looping machine. Watts refers to himself as a "disinf ...
. A fourth piece performed almost entirely in the dark, ''Radioplay'', opened at
PS122. A recording of ''Transition'' at On the Boards helped launch the first-ever live performance download website, OTBTV.
While Smith halted actively collaborating with Watts after the singer failed to credit Smtih for co-writing of the lyrics of viral hits “Fuck Shit Stack” and “What About Blowjobs?”, their pieces played to acclaim and sold-out houses at
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) is a contemporary performance and visual arts organization in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon. PICA was founded in 1995 by Kristy Edmunds. Since 2003, it has presented the annual Time-Based ...
,
The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago),
The Warhol Museum
The Andy Warhol Museum is located on the North Shore of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is the largest museum in North America dedicated to a single artist. The museum holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archive ...
(Pittsburgh),
ICA (Boston),
Ars Nova (New York), among other venues.
Awards
For work as a playwright in the New York theatre scene, Smith was awarded the PONY Fellowship at the
Lark Play Development Center
The Lark, formerly Lark Play Development Center, was a non-profit organization, headquartered in Manhattan, New York that sought to help discover and develop playwrights. It announced its closing in October, 2021.
History
The Lark was founded in ...
. Smith's collaborations with Watts earned the MAP Fund Award and
Creative Capital
Creative Capital is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in New York City that supports artists across the United States through funding, counsel, gatherings, and career development services. Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has commi ...
Award. ''The New York Times'' also credited Smith for helping to establish the Indie Rock Musical genre by writing the book for the
Williamstown Theatre Festival
The Williamstown Theatre Festival is a resident summer theater on the campus of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1954 by Williams College news director Ralph Renzi and drama program chairman David C. Bryant. I ...
musical ''Caravan Man.''
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Tommy
American dramatists and playwrights
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
People from Gig Harbor, Washington