PLAYWRIGHT: DAVID HARROWER
Born in Edinburgh in 1966, David Harrower now lives in Glasgow, Scotland. After dropping in and out of college and working menial jobs as a young man, he embarked on a disciplined course of self-education, reading library books obsessively eight hours a day for two years. His first play, KNIVES IN HENS (1995), was a critical and popular success. PRESENCE (2001), DARK EARTH (2003) and KILL THE OLD TORTURE THEIR YOUNG (2003) soon followed. Harrower has also written dramatic adaptations and translations – of Pirandello, Chekhov and Schiller among them – as well as projects for BBC television and film. But it was BLACKBIRD (2005) that triggered his career’s meteoric rise.
BLACKBIRD
The Edinburgh International Festival commissioned Harrower to write BLACKBIRD, premiering it in 2005. Receiving exceptional reviews, it was moved to London’s West End and Stockholm in 2006, produced in New York and San Francisco 2007, and in 2008 toured the UK and was then produced all around the world.
BLACKBIRD earned the prestigious Laurence Oliver Award (Britain’s version of the Tony’s) in 2007, jettisoning it to the forefront of outstanding new plays. It also won the Critics Award for Theatre in Scotland in 2006 and earned Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago a Joseph Jefferson Award for “Best Acting” this past autumn.
Harrower’s inspiration for BLACKBIRD was a newspaper account of sex-offender Tony Studebaker, a military man who made contact with an underage girl on the internet, later having a sexual relationship with her. (The play does not follow the story of that trial literally.) As a result of the Studebaker case, Britain introduced laws regulating Internet chat rooms that allowed older adults to “groom” underage victims.
According to Harrower, BLACKBIRD at one point contained 15 characters, 4 locales, the ghost of Marvin Gaye and a performance by a children’s choir. “You kind of have to go to that stupid place… to get back,” said the playwright. He then cut the cast down to 3 and finished the play in 4 weeks. The resulting work’s literary style is reminiscent of David Mamet’s with its distilled, staccato, strangely poetic dialogue.
BLACKBIRD is a challenging work for actors, director and audience members alike. Its subject is painful and disturbing. But the work’s authenticity and artistry struck both our Artistic Core and Play Selection Advisory Committee as haunting and outstanding. Renaissance is proud to premiere this provocative and stunning drama to the Milwaukee community. We hope that its unflinching examination of human interactions sheds light on this dark issue.
- Marie Kohler
