OUR FIRST PODCAST! And what a delight it was to have playwright Charles Gershman with us on our first podcast. Tune in to hear us sing here!
Charles Gershman is a Midwest-bred queer playwright/screenwriter. Charles is a Dramatists Guild Foundation Playwriting Fellow, a Chesley/Bumbalo Playwriting Award winner, and a Relentless Award and Princess Grace Award semifinalist.
Their play Quik-Mart was presented digitally by The New Group (dir. Arpita Mukherjee) in 2020. Their award-winning play The Waiting Game premiered at 59E59 Theaters in 2019. Their play Free & Proud recently had an acclaimed run in the UK (Edinburgh Fringe, Theatre503), where it was nominated for the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award and the SIT-Up Award and called ‘One of 10 must-see queer shows in town’ (London Evening Standard). It is published by Bloomsbury.
Their digital short, Oedipus 2.0.2.0, was commissioned as part of AFO Solo Shorts and nominated for a 2021 Drama League Award.
Charles has been a visiting assistant professor of writing at Wesleyan University since 2021.
In the DGF Fellows Program they have been developing an untitled new play about a modern family and their foster teen, with mentorship from Diana Son. Other work has recently been produced or supported by the Flea Theater, All For One, the American Playwriting Foundation, the Lark, the Workshop Theater, the Blank Theatre, and the King’s Head Theatre (London).
Charles earned an MFA in dramatic writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2018 and a BA in history at Columbia University. Charles is also a proud member of the BMI Lehman-Engel Musical Theatre Librettist Workshop.
“PODCAST OF THE ABSURD” hosts discussions on all things as they relate to theatre. Critic Martin Esslin coined the term THEATRE OF THE ABSURD which began in Paris and spread to New York in the 1950s. It followed on from Dadaism and Surrealism in the 1920s and ’30s and was not driven by realism, plot, character development, or traditional notions of theatre. Instead, absurdist theatre focuses on the state of mind of its characters as they’re trapped in illogical and incomprehensible situations. It came after World War II when artists began to rebel against traditional notions of theatre and created what playwright Eugène Ionesco called “anti-theatre” in response to a world that seemed devoid of reason and purpose. Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter are defining dramatists of the genre. But, the best examples of work would have to begin with Alfred Jarry’s UBU ROI written in 1896 which paved the way for modernist theatre. Stay tuned...
Podcast of the Absurd - chArles gershman