CRAIG LUCAS

Craig Lucas’ plays include Missing Persons, Blue Window, Reckless, Prelude to a Kiss, God’s Heart, The Dying Gaul, Stranger, Small Tragedy, Prayer For My Enemy and The Singing Forest.  He wrote the book for The Light In The Piazza, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel; the musical play Three Postcards, music and lyrics by Craig Carnelia; the libretto for the opera Orpheus in Love, music by Gerald Busby; and he has recently completed the libretto for Two Boys, an opera with composer Nico Muhly, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and scheduled to premiere there in a co-production with the English National Opera.  His new English adaptations include Brecht’s Galileo, Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, and Strindberg’s Miss Julie.  His screenplays include Longtime Companion (Sundance Audience Award), The Secret Lives of Dentists (New York Film Critics Best Screenplay), Prelude to a Kiss, Reckless and The Dying Gaul, which he also directed.  He directed Harry Kondoleon’s plays Saved or Destroyed at Rattlestick (Obie Award for Best Director) and Play Yourself as well as his own play This Thing of Darkness (co-authored with David Schulner) at the Atlantic.  He also directed the film Birds of America.  Twice nominated for a Tony (Prelude to a Kiss and The Light in the Piazza), three times for the Drama Desk (Prelude, Missing Persons and Reckless), he has won the L.A. Drama Critics Award (Blue Window), the Steinberg/American Theater Critics Award for Best American Play (The Singing Forest), the Hull-Warriner Award (The Light in the Piazza), the LAMBDA Literary Award (for his anthology What I Meant Was), the Flora Roberts Award, the Excellence in Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Laura Pels/PEN Mid-Career Achievement Award and the Joan Cullman Award; he has twice won the Obie Award for Best Play (Prelude and Small Tragedy).  He graduated from Boston University where he studied with poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck.  He lives in upstate New York and is married to set designer John McDermott.