Professors Pick 5: Assistant Professor of Theatre Matt Chiorini’s picks for Top 5 Playwrights
1.) Anton Chekhov. He only gave us four (and a half) plays before he died in 1904 at the age of 44, but he really did change all entertainment as we know it, even what we watch today. It may be a stretch to say that you can trace “Two and a Half Men” back to Chekhov, but it’s not far off. Every time anyone talks about the weather instead of what they’re really thinking or feeling, someone owes Chekhov a “thank you.”
2.) William Shakespeare. Duh. I wouldn’t be allowed to teach theatre if I didn’t list Shakespeare. It’s an understatement to say that he was a brilliant playwright, but let’s not forget that the man also wrote a handful of pretty terrible plays before we rush to canonize him. That’s why he’s only second on the list.
3.) Mary Zimmerman. Contemporary playwright and director. She takes these ancient epics (“The Odyssey,” “Arabian Nights,” Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”) and adapts them into really intelligent and creative theatre. I haven’t yet directed one of her shows, but I’ve been ripping off her ideas for years.
4.) The Marx Brothers. Not playwrights, technically, though they did start in Vaudeville and wrote the bulk of their own material. When they were huge stars on Broadway, they were so famous for improvising their lines that at one performance the actual playwright, while in conversation backstage, stopped mid-sentence, listened to the onstage dialogue and said: “I thought I just heard one of my original lines.”
5.) Lucas Chiorini. This precocious four-year-old has already written such soon-to-be-immortal works as “The Creepy Detective,” “That’s Not a Panda” and his best-known work: “Hummus and Joe,” a heart warming tale of Joe, who attempts to remove the hummus on his head with the help of superheroes, construction workers and math problems, plus there’s a twist at the end that you really never see coming. Next season, Boot and Buskin will only be producing plays by this imaginative young playwright.
