Michael McGuire has had plays produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival (with Kevin McCarthy and Bob Balaban) and the Mark Taper Forum (with Ken Mars and Nan Martin) among others, including the American Theatre of Actors in New York, the Source in Washington, DC, at theatres in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, Germany. THE SCOTT FITZGERALD PLAY was chosen by Joy Williams as a Breakthrough book and published by the University of Missouri Press. BACKPACKER was grand prize winner and produced at the 9th Annual Great Platte River Playwrights’ Competition. LA FRONTERA won the $10,000 Prism International Competition and was published in Prism International. There have been staged readings of his plays at the American Place Theatre, directed by Wynn Handman, NYU, the Living Theatre, Lamb’s with Tammy Grimes and Bob Stattel, the Public, the Hudson Guild, two at Lincoln Center with Tammy Grimes, Richard Merrill, and Michael Zaslow, all in New York, the Organic in Chicago, the Odyssey in Los Angeles.“Plays by Michael McGuire” reviewed:"Here are some of the things I admire about Michael McGuire as a playwright: He takes chances. He understands that plays should be `about' something. He understands that playwriting must be a socially responsible act. He understands that to be truly entertaining a play must involve us deeply. He understands that each play must have its own identity—its own voice. I wish all playwrights understood this."Edward Albee "McGuire's writing is hauntingly thoughtful, inexorably true."Publisher's Weekly "...events in this play are ordered by a tightly controlled imagination; Mr McGuire's aim is to keep testing the emotional limits of the audience until the last light goes out."D J R Bruckner, New York Times "As with all of Mr McGuire's work, these plays are mysterious, lyric, and full of strange, and often startling surprises."Christopher Martin, Founding Director, C S C Repertory "This is not hit or miss experimentation, but the mature work of an artist with a love for words and a highly developed sensitivity for the theatrical."John Schneider, Artistic Director, Theatre X "As I've suggested, what makes his plays special is their literariness. I don't mean anything like mere rhetoric, but in the theatricality a verbal delicacy of feeling, with nuances of perception that you'd expect to find in more private forms. He was always, in the theater, resistant to those who were dismissing language because they never thought much of it, or even when they did because, in his view of theater, the beginning is the word. That may or may not be true, but if we're going to have language on stage would that more playwrights had as fine a sense of it as Michael McGuire."Herbert Blau, Byron W. and Alice L. Professor of the Humanities, University of Washington "...People willing to enter [the play's] own special world will certainly find it puzzling but also memorable...it is a different kind of theatrical experience."Clive Barnes, New York Times
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