Marisa Smith On Playwrights in an Hour
I love the theater and I like to help others discover the joy of theater going. I began taking my two sons to the theater as soon as they were old enough to sit relatively still for an hour at a time. I remember attending a performance of Neil Simon's Laughter on the 27th Floor and being confronted in the ladies room by an uptight Boston Matron. How could I expose my young charges to such bad language! Well, I said, I thought the language was pretty darn good, and very funny to boot! She snorted and exited with a huff. But, to this day my kids love to go to the theater and I'm sure Neil Simon helped.Over the years I realized the more I knew about the playwright the richer my experience at the theater was. For example, once I discovered that Anton Chekhov died at the early age of forty-four, that fact added a certain layer of poignancy to any Chekhov production I witnessed. After all, playwrighting is a very personal expression and usually what you see on stage has some intimate connection with the writer.
Wouldn't it be great I thought,if you could read about the writer and the time he or she lived in, find out who were their friends and colleagues and influences in more depth than you might find in the program notes? And I didn't want dry facts, I wanted something lively and fun, something brief and tasty. So the idea of Playwrights in an Hour was born.
Marisa Smith
Publisher