SELECTED ESSAYS

Find the full list of essays HERE

---

• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Sarah Ruhl
  ​Sarah may be a connoisseur of loss's melancholy, but she's also a master of ways we get found. A woman answers a dead man’s cell phone and so finds a life. A doctor and his terminally ill patient find in each other their soul mates. 
  

• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Taylor Mac
  ​​Taylor is a marvel, a one-man-woman festival of talent, artistic ambition, political intentionality, and sheer love of theatre. Part Court Jester, part ingénue, all Empress, Taylor writes, acts, sings, plays the ukelele, and works the audience like the expert bar-room drag artist he is, luring us into a universe of glorious provocations.

• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Lynn Nottage
  ​Lynn Nottage's imagination is rangy and bottomless. In plays as varied as Intimate Apparel; Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; Las Meninas; and Ruined, she writes exquisite realistic portraiture, audacious urban satire, wild epic history, and powerful political drama.

• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Anne Washburn
  ​I had a friend who woke up one night upon hearing a burglar in his apartment and seeing the flickering light of a candle the burglar was carrying. My friend feigned sleep—with his wife beside him and his teenage son in the next room. He heard the burglar go through the pockets of the pants slung over a chair.
  

• A Lover’s Guide to American Playwrights​—I Married a Playwright: Karen Hartman
  Todd London's recent addition to his column, A Lover’s Guide to American Playwrights, is about his own personal resident playwright—Karen Hartman—and the “wilderness of mid-career.”
  
  
• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Kia Corthron 
  There is so much to say about Kia, because Kia herself has so very much to say, and because what she says in her work is always so urgent, so vital. Because to fail to listen to what she has to say is to fail some part of our own humanity, to fail in our responsibility as citizens of this world to engage the world.
  
  
• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Lucy Thurber
  Lucy Thurber was born in rural Massachusetts—close to but a world away from all those fancy colleges they got there. Her home was a kind of crazy, a kind of not enough and too much all at once, a mess of that scarcity and abundance that informs so much of her work
  
  
• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Stephen Adly Guirgis
  Guirgis sets his actors free. His truthfulness sets us free. He speaks his heart with the most direct, uncensored eloquence. He calls “a fuckin’ piece-of-dirt-Shanty-Irish Mick-fuck father!” a “fuckin’ piece-of-dirt-Shanty-Irish Mick-fuck father!” His writing shines like the light from an approaching subway car at the moment Jesus hops aboard. 
  
  
• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Eisa Davis
  This very quality defines Eisa Davis’s work: she knows how to listen. I think it was Robert Lewis who said that “acting is listening.” Eisa has taught me that playwriting is listening. In her autobiographical works, she is flooded with the voices of family and history. In The History of Light they are absent voices re-found; in Angela’s Mix-Tape—written for and to her aunt, Angela Davis—the voices are ever-present, even insistent.
  
  
• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Harvey Fierstein 
  Yes, Harvey Fierstein is the downtown drag artist who paraded uptown at a spectacularly young age. Yes, he’s that sassy, tell-it-like-it-is sister wit who came out, in Brooklyn, when other pishers were getting bar mitzvahed. He’s the gay activist who’s been knocking down closet doors ever since. He’s been a Virgil of the gay bar backroom, written plays with beds center stage and moaning in the dark.
  ​
• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Julie Taymor
  Julie Taymor We have been told of a great fall, a great failure. Here is an American auteur director, the papers announce, making sense of that old phrase, “the daily bugle,” who has over-reached, plummeted from the sky, taking untold performers and investors with her.
  
  
• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Edward Albee
  In this installation of A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights, Todd London salutes Edward Albee. 
  
  
• A Lover's Guide to American Playwrights: Horton Foote
  Todd London celebrates Horton Foote's body of work and the impact of memories on both his plays and his life.​

Sarah Ruhl

Taylor Mac

Lynn Nottage

Anne Washburn

Karen Hartman

Kia Cothron

Lucy Thurber

Stephen Adly Guirgis

Eisa Davis

Harvey Fierstein