Among the most frequently published and widely produced playwrights in the world, Don Nigro has continued to build a deeply inter-related but diverse body of dramatic literature over the years, work that is often mysterious and unclassifiable, employing a wide variety of dramatic conventions and styles of presentation. He has written monologues and epics, spare realistic dramas and surreal homicidal puppet farces, plays with music and verse plays. He continues to build the long cycle of Pendragon County plays, which traces the history of America through the lives of several east Ohio families from the eighteenth century to the present, and features many characters whose lives are followed from youth through middle age to old age in a number of plays designed to be presented in a variety of different combinations. Nigro has twice been a finalist for the National Repertory Theatre Foundation’s National Play Award, and has won a Playwriting Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation. He has twice been James Thurber Writer in Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Polish, Greek, Russian and Chinese. John Clancy’s production of Nigro’s Cincinnati, featuring Nancy Walsh, won Fringe First and Spirit of the Fringe awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Best of Fringe at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, and has toured Britain. Seascape with Sharks and Dancer has been in the repertory of Teatr Syrena in Warsaw, and Lucia Mad was produced at Teatr Julius Slowakie in Krakow. Teatro del Fantasma has presented a Spanish translation of The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines in Mexico City. Widdershins was produced as part of the first International Mystery Festival. Nigro’s plays have also been produced in Singapore, Hong Kong and Beijing, and toured India. SpielArt, based in Munich, has translated and toured two productions of his plays in Germany. His work is produced every year in a variety of New York theatres, and has been done at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the McCarter Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Capital Repertory Company, the Hypothetical Theatre, the Berkeley Stage Company, Manhattan Class Company, the People’s Light and Theatre Company, Theatre X, Shadowbox Cabaret, the Hudson Guild Theatre, the WPA Theatre, Inertia Productions, Gravity and Glass Productions, the Strain Theatre Company, the Apothecary Theatre Company, Theatre NXS, and many others, in every state.

Born in 1949 in Canton, Ohio, Nigro grew up in Ohio and Arizona. He has a BA in English from The Ohio State University and an MFA in Dramatic Arts from the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa. Nigro has taught courses in Comparative Literature, Dramatic Literature and playwriting at Ohio State, Iowa, Kent State, Indiana State, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Grotesque Lovesongs was translated and produced on Polish television, and the film The Manor, with Peter O’Toole, is based on his play Ravenscroft. One hundred thirty-five of his plays in forty-eight volumes have been published by Samuel French. The Don Nigro Collection at the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at the Ohio State University contains a growing repository for his manuscripts and other materials.

Check out Don’s plays,
available from Samuel French

Full Length

An Angler in the Lake of Darkness, Anima Mundi, Ardy Fafirsin, Armitage, Blood Red Roses, Boar’s Head, Chronicles, Cinderella Waltz, The Circus Animals’ Desertion, City of Dreadful Night, The Count of Monte Cristo in the Chateau D’I, The Curate Shakespeare As You Like It, Dramatis Personae, Dreams of a Sinister Castle, Fisher King, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Grotesque Lovesongs, Henry and Ellen, Horrid Massacre in Boston, Iphigenia, Jules Verne Eats a Rhinoceros, Laestrygonians, A Lecture by Monsieur Artaud, Lost Generation, Loves Labours Wonne, Lucia Mad, Maddalena, Madonna, Maelstrom, Mandelstam, Mariner, Martian Gothic, Mephisto, Monkey Soup, My Sweetheart’s The Man in the Moon, Nebuchadnezzar, Nightingale, November, The Ogre, Paganini, Pandemonium, Paolo and Francesca, Pelican Daughter, Pendragon, Phoenix, Punch and Judy, Pushkin, Ravenscroft, The Reeves Tale, Robin Hood, Runes, A Russian Play, Seascape with Sharks and Dancer, The Shadows, Sphinx, Sorceress, Tainted Justice, Terre Haute, Thane of Cawdor, Tombstone, Traitors, Transylvanian Clockworks, Tristan, The Winkleigh Murders

Short Plays

Crossing the Bar, God’s Spies, Maupassant, Swedish Movie

Collections

Animal Tales
Banana Man and Other Plays
Barbary Fox and Other Plays
Border Warfare and Other Plays
Deflores and Other Plays
Don Giovanni and Other Plays
Eleanora Duse Dies in Pittsburgh and Other Plays
Emotion Memory and Other Plays
Europe After the Rain and Other Plays
The Foul Fiend Robert Artisson and Other Plays
Further Adventures of Tom and Huck and Other Plays
Genesis and Other Plays
Ghostland and Other Plays
Gorgons and Other Plays
The Great Gromboolian Plain and Other Plays
The Green Man and Other Plays
The Gypsy Woman and Other Plays
Labyrinth and Other Plays
Mutability Cantos and Other Plays
Palestrina and Other Plays
Pendragon County Ghosts and Other Plays
Pictures at an Exhibition
Rainy Night at Lindyr&rs's and Other Plays
Rasputin and Other Plays
Rat Wives and Other Plays
The Red King’s Dream and Other Plays
The Sexton and Other Plays
Something In The Basement and Other Plays
Stella Rose and Other Plays
Tales from The Red Rose Inn and Other Plays
The Watchers and Other Plays
What Shall I Do for Pretty Girls and Other Plays

Q & A with Don Nigro

Q: You have quite a body of work under your belt—over 200 plays—a number of which have enjoyed Off Broadway productions, countless have been performed throughout the country and one, RAVENSCROFT, was adapted into a film. Your pieces range from dramas (to name only one of the many, SEASCAPE WITH SHARKS AND DANCER) to comedies with Gothic flourishes (GORGONS), to flat out farces (MONKEY SOUP). Is there a particular genre you feel yourself more drawn towards or that you enjoy writing for more than others? What’s the first thing you do when you set out to write a play?

A: Actually there’s over three hundred now, but you need to keep in mind that I have nothing else to do here but talk to the squirrels. I don’t really prefer any particular genre to any other. It just depends on what it feels like the play wants to be. Often I’m investigating some sort of genre in a way that subverts it, or turns it inside out. Or what appears to be one sort of play turns out to be something else entirely. That’s what’s so great about the theatre: you can tell any story, do anything. The Elizabethan/Jacobean playwrights taught me that. I don’t care for it when people who like to make rules start telling me you can’t do that because that’s not a play because all plays must have this or that or the other thing. Tragedy contains the seeds of farce and farce the seeds of tragedy and life is like that, too. I’m just holding up the mirror. Except it’s more like the house of mirrors at the carnival.

Every play starts with something itching inside my head that just won’t go away. At a certain point I start writing to find out what it is. No matter what gets it started&mdasha memory, a dream, a historical figure, a painting, a piece of music—whatever apparently arbitrary external impulse sets it going, the play itself always bubbles out of my subconscious, and the writing of it, especially at the beginning, is for me an almost completely irrational process. As things progress, the rational part of my brain helps to mold and shape what comes out, but the worst thing I can do is try to over control it. I’ve got to respect that lunatic buried deep in my soul, no matter how crazy what comes pouring out of me seems. The door inside my head opens and suddenly all this stuff comes flying out. I don’t know why. My job is just to try and record what it says. Then I can take a look at it and respectfully, carefully edit, cut, rearrange a bit. But I’ve got to trust the lunatic who lives in my subconscious. That’s where everything worth writing comes from. For me, every play is an investigation into truth. I never know where I’m going until I get there. And sometimes not even then.

Q: You were born in Ohio, raised in Ohio and Arizona, attended undergrad in the Buckeye State and you now reside there, not far from your childhood home. Looking back now, as a successful playwright, did you ever find it difficult in your early career to practice and pursue your craft without being based in New York City? Is it something you think about today? Do you have any advice for other playwrights who may be in similar situations, or who feel that they will never break into the theatre scene if they don’t live in New York?

A: I’ve had such a strange career. Early on, and for many years, I was a nomadic playwright, moving from production to production, always in rehearsal, sometimes directing and acting, doing playwright-in- residence teaching stints at various universities, frequently in and out of New York, all over the country, really. But as my father, a disabled veteran, began to have increasingly serious health and mobility problems, I found myself having to spend more and more time back here in Ohio, and during the last ten years or so of his life I really couldn’t go anywhere. Part of being a successful playwright is going places and meeting people and forging creative relationships with directors, actors, artistic directors and such, and I was gradually able to do that sort of thing less and less, and probably that’s hurt my career a great deal. But on the other hand, living in the country and writing every day is what has allowed me to create such a large body of work. Constant traveling fries the brain, and always being in production is exhausting. It was very, very important for me to be deeply immersed in all aspects of my productions for many years, but what those experiences did for me was to create a fully functioning theatre in my brain that is really quite a wonderful place. Usually when I write a play I’m also directing it in my head. All playwrights need to do as much theatre as they can, especially early on. And living in New York is probably the best way to create that dense web of relationships that leads to highly visible productions. But I’ve given that up for more time to write. And in the end, the body of work I’ve created will be there for people, if they want it. It’s a trade off, I guess. It’s not easy being a playwright if you don’t live in New York or some other large city. But it’s not easy being a playwright in New York, either. It’s not easy being a playwright, period. All I can say is, try to find circumstances in which you can write as well as you can. The writing comes first. And now anybody can go to the Samuel French web site and find what is pretty much my entire collected works available there, published and not yet published, and I get produced all over the world, and am actually making a living at it. So I really can’t complain.

Q: A number of your full-length and short plays are a part of the Pendragon County Series, the most recent edition, FRENCH GOLD, was published last year in the collection RAT WIVES AND OTHER TALES. This series traces the history of America through the lives of several east Ohio families from the eighteenth century to the present and follows many characters from youth through old age in a number of plays designed to be presented in a variety of different combinations. When you first began the series, did you know you would continue writing for it for as long as you have? Is there something that keeps drawing you back to these families, or is the commonality of story lines and ancestry a natural occurrence with a writer as prolific as yourself?

A: The Pendragon plays just kind of grew, over the years. I did not begin with a grand design. I had written several of them before I had any clear sense how they fit together. Then at some point I began to realize how certain characters I had written about at one stage of their lives could connect up with other characters I’d written about in earlier or later time periods, and gradually the genealogy of the Pendragon/Armitage family began to fall into place, and I was forced to begin keeping track of dates of birth and death and such. Now I have this massive and constantly evolving Pendragon County Encyclopedia which has little bios and time lines and family trees of all the characters in the cycle, as well as quite a few who haven’t clawed their way into plays yet. It’s become a way of looking at all the wondrous and horrifying nightmare of American history reflected in the lives of these people from this one little town, whether they’re heading out into the world and interacting with real folks like Yeats and Twain and Pulitzer, or living out their lives at home. It’s been a great joy to watch this increasingly complex universe grow and evolve, and to watch characters grow and change over the whole span of their lives. There are many more stories to tell here, and I especially love discovering the labyrinth of interconnections as it grows more complex over the years. You can’t force these connections. They just happen.

Q: When and/or how did you know that you wanted to create plays?

A: Before I knew how to write I was imagining personalities and making up elaborate stories for my stuffed animals, toy cowboys and soldiers, and playing cards. As soon as I could hold a pencil in my hand I was scribbling. I wrote everything—fiction, poetry, non-fiction, plays. At some point in my mid teens I started burning everything I’d written, because what I was reading was so much better than what I was capable of writing. But in college, somewhere around 18 or 19, I decided this was stupid, and I started saving everything I wrote, because I realized I could learn from it. I now have forty years worth of journals and notebooks that I still go back to, and I still find inspiration there. At age 20 I was writing a novel about characters who would later appear in the Pendragon plays, living alone in a little red coach house just off the Ohio State campus, and I was really lonely, so I started auditioning for plays, just to have company and meet girls and not be staring at the typewriter all night, and I acted and directed and finally took a playwriting course from David Ayers, who called me into his office one day and announced to me that I was a playwright. I didn’t really believe him, at the time, but a year later I found myself sitting in the Theatre Barn at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, watching the audience watch the first performance of my first production, and by the end of the first act I just knew that was how I was going to spend the rest of my life. There’s a circle full of people with literary skills, and there’s another circle full of people with theatre instincts, but the circles don’t overlap much, as any novelist who’s tried to write a play will tell you. In that little space where the circles overlap, that’s where the playwrights live. Watching that first audience watch my play, I realized that was my territory. It was just astonishing to see how what had been meaningless experience in the world had gotten into my soul and then poured out through my fingers onto paper and then made its way through the sensibilities of the director to the actors and then into the souls of the audience. Watching that happen was a revelation about how art, especially the flesh and blood art of the theatre, can transform suffering and chaos into some sort of inexplicable joy and communion. I just knew that’s what I was going to do.

Q: What inspires you to take on a new project?

A: It can be that itching in my head, from my subconscious, or sometimes there’s an apparently arbitrary external event that seems to somehow unlock the floodgates from inside there. But what gets written is always what I can’t stop thinking about. It just keeps bothering me, even if I don’t know what it is. If I just trust it, even if it seems to make no sense at all, eventually, usually, it will manifest itself as a play. This is the way I investigate the world.

Q: Have you ever come across a production that made you see one of your plays in a new or unexpected way?

A: Probably every production does that. Theatre is such a crap shoot. You never know what you’re going to get. Every production is different, and the people who see any given production of your play usually can’t imagine it could look any different than what they’ve seen there. But you, the playwright, get to see the same text reborn in many different guises, some wonderful, some pretty unfortunate. No matter how carefully you’ve constructed the text, it’s going to look awful if it’s done badly. And it can look much better than you imagined when it’s done well. In the theatre, everybody is absolutely at the mercy of the abilities of everybody else involved, and sooner or later we all end up getting blamed and praised for what the others have done. We’re all going down together in the same sinking ship, so we might as well enjoy it. And every night, on stage, the whole universe is reborn, and anything can happen. Absolutely anything. That’s the beauty of it.