Ranked #1 of Chicago Tribune's Top 10 Shows To Watch This Fall

Lanford Wilson was born April 13, 1937 in Lebanon, Missouri, but lived in many places, including California and Chicago, before finding New York. His playwrighting education consists of a 1959 adult education class at the University of Chicago called “What is a Play?” (In retrospect, he laughs, “I thought, I don’t know how to write a play. I don’t even know what a play is.”) The Café Cino in Greenwich Village housed Wilson’s first productions; he hit Off-Broadway with the 1964 debut of Balm in Gilead at La MaMa. “The show remains an homage to what we were all doing back then,” he recalls.

Of his process, Wilson explains: “I’m a sponge…. Just listening to people, I become them.”

“I was so excited by the sound of what was around me, those incredibly vibrant though maybe burned-out lives banging against each other. … they’re all yelling and screaming, saying, ‘No, no, no, me, me, me, me.’ I was attracted to the idea of putting that onstage.”

“I sat at the counter and wrote down everything I heard: a journal of Needle Park, an exercise in construction and sound.”

“The New York sound was so overwhelming. I couldn’t write fast enough.”

Wilson was a founding member of Circle Repertory, welcomed in 1969 by Mel Gussow’s headline: “suddenly, real plays about real people.”

He’s won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the Outer Circle Award, and an Obie for Hot L Baltimore (1973), an Obie for The Mound Builders (1975) and the Pulitzer for Talley’s Folly—as well as a number of lifetime achievement awards.

Balm in Gilead spends “a week or two” in an all-night cafe on New York’s Upper Broadway with a group of drifters, junkies, prostitutes, and hustlers—“losers who refuse to lose”—following their loves and dreams and bargains and schemes and fixes.

 “This is how life was in our century, and future generations will savor the song,” writes longtime collaborator, director Marshall W. Mason. Wilson’s style has been described as “lyric realism,” which in Mason’s words is “a kind of realism that I feel is the voice of the native American theater, but it is realism that is elevated in its language. It takes the language people speak and makes it more musical.”

Wilson names Charles Dickens as his biggest influence, yet his work has been compared to Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Lillian Hellman.

In the New York Times review of Circle Rep’s 1984 Balm in Gilead revival, Michiko Kakutani connects Wilson’s body of work: “what these disparate characters all share is a peculiarly American sense of dislocation, a sense of having lost connection with their pasts.”

** Quotations from Lanford Wilson are taken from the following sources:

Irvine, Daniel, press release, “’Disneyland it ain’t…’: Balm in Gilead opens at ASU.” Arizona State University, March 18, 1999.
Kakutani, Michiko. “I Write the World As I See It Around Me.” The New York Times. July 8, 1984. Shewey, Don . “Lanford Wilson: I Hear America Talking.” Rolling Stone, July 22, 1982.

DISCARDED DETRITUS:

 “Skating across the surface of monumental truths, Wilson astonishes us with his richly textured metaphors and thematic layering.” – director Amy Luskey-Barth

“I write what’s in the air.” --LW

For many, Balm in Gilead remains connected with Steppenwolf’s 1981 production, a gritty rock’n’roll catapult towards fame for the young company. Circle Rep revived the show in 1984 to great accolades under John Malkovich’s direction, with many Steppenwolf members in the cast.