The concert piano was my first artistic achievement, and I was on my way to fame and fortune playing Mozart concertos at 8 (prodigious, unless you consider that he was writing them at 8), when an accident to my left arm deprived me of my “pianist’s trump card.” My father, a consummate musician, piano-player and band leader, consoled me by making me his vocalist at the age of 12. With a mouth full of braces, a prom dress and a ponytail, I began singing with his big band, a career that stayed with me until his death in 1986. However, college and teaching were my true goals, and I graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a B.A. and an M.A. in French and Linguistics. I went on to teach in university and secondary schools until 1974, when the Muse called and sent me to New York to study and practice acting. In 1978, while sitting backstage on Broadway, I began translating and adapting Molière’s THE LEARNED LADIES, just for the fun of it. When it was finished, I sent it to a good friend at Temple University to get his expert opinion. Two weeks later he called and said they were producing it in their next season. My playwriting career was off and rolling.

In 1991, Carey Perloff decided to produce THE LEARNED LADIES at Classic Stage Company in New York. After poring over the 5 translations she had been sent, she chose mine. From that decision came my first New York production, starring Jean Stapleton. Upon Ms. Perloff’s transfer to grander theatrical shores at ACT in San Francisco, she produced it again in 1993, with Ms. Stapleton revisiting her triumphant portrayal of Philamente, and the play was the hit of the season. Meanwhile, I continued to pursue my acting and writing careers simultaneously, writing backstage, offstage, in stairwells and during all those glorious free days that life in the theatre so generously gives us. The result was TARTUFFE: BORN AGAIN, a modern adaptation of the famous play about the infamous religious hypocrite. To provide English speaking audiences with a more accessible milieu, and because we already had a fine standard translation, I updated the play to the 1980’s and set it in Baton Rouge, with Tartuffe as a televangelist. In 1995, my friend John Glover won the Tony Award for his dual portrayal in “Love, Valour, Compassion!” I sent him a congratulatory letter and a copy of my latest effort, explaining that he was my role model for the sculpting of this modern Tartuffe. With my script in hand and his Tony in the other, he knocked on a few doors and in 6 months he was back on Broadway, and I was making my first trip to the Citadel. Unfortunately Circle in the Square was on very shaky financial ground and listing like the Titanic. Although we had a successful production, it was a limited run (with limited financial rewards) and I found myself back in L.A. doing office work to survive. A 40-hour week did not daunt my Muse, however, and during evenings and weekends I began working on THE GAMESTER, my second Regnard and a very timely subject—compulsive gambling in Paris in 1699. (roughly the 300th anniversary of its première). Chicago’s prestigious Northlight Theatre decided to give it its world premiere in 2001, to critical and popular acclaim (see reviews!). While waiting for its legs, it was a finalist for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Playwriting Award in 2000. Then in 2003 The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis gave it a splendid, sumptuous production. In 2005 A.C.T. in San Francisco gave The Gamester its third glorious production, which was yet again acritical and popular bonanza. Dramatists' Play Service published later that year. Another one of my plays that has sat in a drawer for 10 years, SCHOOL FOR TROPHY WIVES, is scheduled for a workshop production by CalRep in April of 2006. I've also recently co-written a book of brand new classical monologues (with a modern twist) that should be in theatrical book stores by 2006.

Obviously, I have chosen to work in a very specific medium: the adaptation of classical plays for the modern American stage. Or, perhaps it chose me. Because I am a true theatre person and not a scholar, I am able to infuse otherwise archaic classical works into living, breathing and entertaining entities. I sometimes wonder how I developed such a specific talent, but upon reflection, it’s a perfect melding of all my other talents. I have my parents and my grandmother to thank for it. My father gave me the music, ergo, the rhythm, so that it is very easy for me to hear the beat of the lines, (not to mention all those song lyrics that gave me the love and knowledge of rhyme). My grandmother, a former actress on the Russian and American stage, bequeathed to me my love for the theater. From the time I could see over the seats, she would take me with her to see plays of all kinds. She died with theater tickets in her purse and made me promise I’d go. From my Irish mother I inherited my love of writing and my wit. She had the gene, unexpressed until the very end of her short life, and it was two weeks after she died, on a Greyhound bus heading back to New York, that I finished the last adapted section of THE LEARNED LADIES, an impassioned speech on artists and their art. I think she’d be happy to see the talent realized in her offspring.

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