Besides her Tony-nominated adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, Wendy Kesselman’s plays include The Executioner’s Daughter; The Notebook; The Foggy Foggy Dew; The Last Bridge; I Love You, I Love You Not; Maggie Magalita; Merry-Go-Round; The Shell Collection; My Sister in This House, A Re-imagined Version (Deaf West Theatre); The Graduation of Grace and Spit. She also wrote the book, music and lyrics for The Juniper Tree, A Tragic Household Tale; A Tale of Two Cities; Becca and The Black Monk: A Chamber Musical, which will have its CD release in fall 2015.
Among other honours, she has received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize; the AT&T Onstage Award; The New England Major Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in the American Theatre; the first annual Playbill Award; the Roger L. Stevens Award; the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award,; the Lecomte du Noüy Annual Award; Meet the Composer Grants; Guggenheim, McKnight and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships; and a Writers Guild of America Award for her screen adaptation of John Knowles’s A Separate Peace. Her other screenplays include Sister My Sister (adapted from My Sister in This House) and I Love You, I Love You Not.
This extraordinary drama, produced to acclaim at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and at NYC's Second Stage, tells the story of a celebrated 1930's French murder case, in which two maids sisters were convicted of murdering their employer and her daughter. This very cinematically structured work explores the motivations which led the sisters to commit murder.
The Diary of Anne Frank (Adaptation by Wendy Kesselman)
The Diary of Anne Frank (Adaptation by Wendy Kesselman)
by Wendy Kesselman
In this transcendently powerful new adaptation by Wendy Kesselman, Anne Frank emerges from history a living, lyrical, intensely gifted young girl, who confronts her rapidly changing life and the increasing horror of her time with astonishing honesty, wit, and determination. An impassioned drama about the lives of eight people hiding from the Nazis in a concealed storage attic, THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK captures the claustrophobic realities of their daily existence—their fear, their hope, their lau...
Wendy Kesselman has taken 'The Juniper Tree' (the Brothers Grimm story), and turned it into a haunting little musical in the shape of a ballad... The events - including murder and cannibalism - are gruesome, but the telling has a childlike Story Theatre quality... as exemplified by her ballad of The Juniper Tree and her earlier play My Sister in This House, the versatile Miss Kesselman has a fabulist's view of guilt and retribution. - The New York Times
A 14 year old Hispanic immigrant who lives with her working mother in a New York City studio apartment, Maggie is trying hard to blend into the American lifestyle and she's succeeding. But she's also forgetting the beauty and pride of her heritage. Now that she has an American boyfriend, she wants to have even less to do with her native culture. Grandmother comes from the old country and upsets Maggie's plans: she can't speak English, can't dress American, can't cook American. She just can't b...
