Emily Mann and Lanford Wilson
The Pulitzer Prize-winning gay playwright, Lanford Wilson, passed away at the age of 73, leaving behind a long legacy of plays that introduced gay characters into mainstream literary artistry in America. Lanford Eugene Wilson was born in 1937 in Lebanon, Missouri. After his parents divorced, Wilson located to San Diego with his father. In 1962 he moved to New York City (after a brief stint in Chicago) and began writing plays because he did not like what he saw on the Broadway stages.
Mr. Wilson was considered instrumental in drawing attention to Off Off Broadway, where his first works were staged in the mid-1960s. He was also among the first playwrights to move from that milieu to renown on wider stages, ascending to Off Broadway, and then to Broadway with no Off’s whatsoever, within a decade of his arrival in New York. His work has also long been a staple of regional theaters throughout the United States.
Gay identity and struggle is a major theme in Wilson’s work and he has been praised as “one of the first mainstream playwrights to create central, meaningful gay and lesbian characters”, in such critically acclaimed plays as Fifth of July, Burn This, and The Madness of Lady Bright. While his work is in many ways strikingly contemporary, Wilson’s plays were written to serve as encapsulations of moments of modern American history to prevent the stories of how we lived from disappearing.
Lanford Eugene Wilson, 1937-2011
“I want people to see, read my plays and to say: ‘This is what it was like living in that place at that time. People haven’t changed a damn bit. We can recognize everyone,”
-Lanford Eugene Wilson
A toast to Lanford Wilson.
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