David Crespy

As a playwright, my creative interest lies primarily in the writing of new plays, although I enjoy work with new work in other ways through new play development, directing, acting, and serving as a production dramaturg. Currently I am working on three new plays: Wallace's Line, a dream play that pits a fundamentalist Kansas science teacher against her own conscience as she contemplates teaching evolution in her seventh grade classroom the next morning; William & Bettie: A Civil War Romance, a new musical theatre work that I am developing with Professor James M. Miller exploring the letters of William and Bettie Hill, a Keytesville, Missouri couple, separated by the events of the American Civil War, and a new comedy, Houseblend, about a midwestern family oddly mixed between divorced spouses, multiple anxiety-ridden children, and confused grand-parents, narrated by Lab-Basset mix named Lucy. Other creative projects included my direction of Sam Shepard's Fool for Love in Spring of 2005 and Adrianne Adderley's Under the Shadow of the Sword, which Adrianne had writte in my graduate playwriting seminar and for which she received the Region V KCACTF David Mark Cohen nomination.

I worked with all our playwrights in the Missouri Playwrights Workshop.  We've presented well over a hundred plays at the workshop, including the work of students, faculty, staff, and members of the Columbia writers community.  At the workshop we've listened to the plays in readings by MU student actors, addressed criticism we heard by faculty, students and other members of the MU community, and revised the plays several times.  Plays that have been first developed at the Missouri Playwrights Workshop include The Hollow and Leaving Hannibal by Mary Barile, Ain't Nothin' Quick 'n Easy by David White, Taste of Buffalo and Witches Quorum by David Eshelman, Under the Shadow of the Sword by Adrianne Adderley, Jukebox by Andréa Onstad, as well as plays by faculty and visiting artists including William Yellow Robe, Lynne McMahon, Syl Jones, Henry Sullivan, Michael Kramer. I'm very proud of our Visiting Playwrights Series that I've developed in cooperation with Professor Sherrod Santos of the MU Center for Literary Arts, and which has included Tony Kushner, Jonathan Miller, Edward Albee, John Guare, and this year, Lanford Wilson, Toni Press-Coffman, Lynn Nottage, and Mac Wellman.

Part of my applied research is the ongoing playwriting program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and I have established several projects which I administer including the Missouri Playwrights Workshop which is our weekly playwrights Salon on Tuesday evenings during the Fall and Winter semesters; the Mizzou New Play Series, which is a week-long festival of staged and concert readings of new work; the Summer Repertory Theatre Comedies-in-Concert Series, where we staged a new comedy in a single afternoon; Mizzou on Broadway, a program for bringing new students plays in workshop production to New York City's York Theatre, and our Columbia Young Playwrights Festival--which is a service-learning project, bringing students into the schools to each playwriting to youth.

In terms of my research I am focusing on two areas: the history of new play development in the American theatre, and an examination of the dramaturgy of dreams and dream structure in nonlinear, nonrealistic plays.  My major published study is Off-Off-Broadway Explosion, the idea of which I developed with Back Stage Books editor Dale Ramsey, and completed with the help of Robbie Capp and Mark Glupke. Off-Off-Broadway Explosion explores the world of 1960s Off-Off-Broadway, including the Caffe Cino, La Mama, E.T.C., Judson Poets Theatre, Theatre Genesis, and the Albee-Barr-Wilder Playwrights Unit. I am currently writing a book about Richard Barr, entitled He Had to Hock His House: Richard Barr, Edward Albee, and the American Playwright which explores all aspects of the producing partnership between Richard Barr, Edward Albee, and other producers including Clinton Wilder and Charles Woodward on, off, and off-off-Broadway at Albee/Barr/Wilder Playwrights Unit which was founded in New York City's Greenwich Village by Edward Albee, Richard Barr, and Clinton Wilder in the early 1960s. 

Out of this off-off Broadway workshop came many of the mainstream playwrights of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s including Amiri Baraka, Mart Crowley, John Guare, Adrienne Kennedy, Lanford Wilson, Megan Terry, and Paul Zindel among many, many others.  New play development has become an important way of testing and developing new plays, but I think there are both advantages and disadvantages to this process.  I've published an article on the Albee-Barr-Wilder Playwrights Unit in Volume 26 of the 2006 issue of Theatre History Studies.

Recently I have also developed a book chapter about play development and Grant Goodman, an alternative theatre producer in Lawrence, Kansas who has worked very closely with the talented Paul Stephen Lim, a playwright and professor of playwriting, for over 15 years with their English Alternative Theatre. This chapter will be included in a volume edited by Robert Schanke entitled Angels in American Theatre which explores the history of the American theatrical producer in several different essays. I'll be presenting on "Grant Goodman: Alternative Theatre Angel at the ATHE Conference in Chicago in 2006.

A very critical view of the play development process is Douglass Anderson's article "The American Dream Machine: Thirty Years of New Play Development in America" in March 1988 issue of The Drama Review.  A new and wonderful book on this subject, by Michael Wright is: At Work and Play: Developmental Programs and Their Processes which has recently been published by Heinemann (2005). I also highly recommend Donna Breed and David Kahn's Scriptwork (Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), which looks at developmental directing, and Edward Cohen's Working on a New Play (Limelight, 1995)

In terms of my dreamwork exploration of playwriting technique, I have been particularly influenced by Bert States' phenomenological approach to the study of dreaming and fiction.  I am interested in learning how to analyze plays using this approach, as well as in discovering means to writing nonrealistic plays by making use of dreams, dream structure, and dream logic.  I am working on a study of the early plays of Adrienne Kennedy and the later plays of Eugéne Ionesco using this analytic technique entitled "Dreaming in Black and White: the Oneiric Objectified in the plays of Kennedy and Ionesco."  My own plays which are based in a realistic form, frequently crack through this reality through the theatrical use of dreams and dream scenarios.  In my plays, I am very interested in exploring the somewhat disjointed world which exists between dreams and reality.

To this end, I've published a dream play, dream work exercises, and a dream journal in Michael Wright's excellent Playwriting Master Class (Heineman, 2000). The play is Beshert, which I later developed into a three-act play entitled Beshert; or, The Jewish Dating Cycle which has been produced by the MU Dept. of Theatre, under the direction of Dr. Suzanne Burgoyen, and has been read at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska; First Run Theatre Company in St. Louis, MO; and River Union Stage in Frenchtown, NJ. In addition, I've had the opportunity to publish my play Perfect Hair in Gary Garrison's terrific book on the ten-minute play entitled Perfect Ten. Perfect Hair uses some of the dream technique that I've been exploring, as does Violet Palimpsest which was published by the ATHE Playwriting Program in a collection of plays entitled Bind Them Continually.

I'm also developing a curriculum for an advanced playwriting course which uses Service-Learning as a primary component.  My advanced playwriting course taught playwriting in the schools, and as a culminating event established the first annual Columbia Young Playwrights Festival.  The students acted in the plays written by Columbia schoolchildren, giving them their first experiences in playwriting and theatre.  I am examining in my own pedagogical research how Service Learning may enhance the teaching of playwriting to college students.

As part of an MU Summer Research Fellowship, I did a workshop performance of my play Tekíyah at the Corner Playhouse, under the direction of Professor Suzanne Burgoyne, and was later fully produced by the MU Department of Theatre under the direction of Suzanne Burgoyne. and my play Men Dancing was being produced as part of ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) Playwriting Pre-Conference: "Today, I am A Writer."  Men Dancing was produced as part the MU mainstage subscription season, under the direction of Jim Miller and was most recently seen at the Great Plains Theatre Conference which it was a featured full-length play, and performed for a panel including Edward Albee, Mark Lamos, Arthur Kopit, Mac Wellman and Glyn O'Malley.   In addition, River Union Stage of Frenchtown, NJ staged concert readings of both Men Dancing and Beshert; or, The Jewish Dating Cycle this past summer.