CONSTANCE CONGDON

has been called “one of the best playwrights our country and our language has ever produced” by playwright Tony Kushner in Kushner’s introduction to her collection Tales of the Lost Formicans and Other Plays. Tales of the Lost Formicans and No Mercy received their first productions at ATL’s Humana Festival. Congdon’s other plays include, Casanova, Dog Opera, both produced at New York’s Public Theatre, Losing Father’s Body, Native American (Portland Stage Company, Maine), Lips (Primary Stages), A Mother (starring Olympia Dukakis), commissioned and produced by American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and her latest play, Paradise Street, which is being developed at New York Theatre Workshop. Her most recent production of one of her original plays, at the Port Townsend Public Theater, was of So Far: the children of the Elvi. Her new verse version of Tartuffe will be included in the next Norton Anthology of Drama and is already available in a single- volume edition, also published by Norton. Congdon’s adaptation of Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid, commissioned by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, has been seen in three theaters in a the last year: ACT, Seattle Rep, and the Asolo Theater. Currently, Congdon has been working on a play about water in the western part of the U.S, called Take Me To the River—this play commissioned by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, as well as partially-funded by a grant from the Albert P. Sloan Foundation. Her next play, commissioned by Primary Stages in NYC, is about Robert Mapplethorpe and the NEA crisis, a time when Congdon’s play Casanova received a W. Alton Jones Grant because it contained everything that Jessie Helms thought should be banned in the theater. Congdon has taught playwriting for many years, at the Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Yale School of Drama, but her home is Amherst College where she has been teaching playwriting for 13 years.