Education
University of Chicago.
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John Susman Edit Profile
John Susman is an American playwright, Theatre director, screenwriter, and film director He received the Uprising Playwright"s Award for his play Tiger Treadwell Takes Tinseltown, produced by the Los Angeles Theatre Unit.
Career
As a director, he has staged many plays including Harold Pinter’s The Lover at the Court Studio Theatre at the University of Chicago. In the 1980s, he worked at Steppenwolf Theatre as their first literary manager in addition to dramaturg and assistant director on many Steppenwolf productions. At Chicago’s Northlight Theatre he ran the FDG/Columbia Broadcasting System New Plays Program to develop new plays funded by Columbia Broadcasting System and administered by the Foundation of the Dramatists Guild.
Fluent in Spanish, he translated into English Bajarse al Moro (Making the Moroccan Run) by José Luis Alonso de Santos.
In 1990, his play Tiger Treadwell Takes Tinseltown was produced at the Ventura Court Theatre by the Los Angeles Theater Unit in Los Los Angeles In 2000, he wrote the play Nelson and Simone that was produced at Chicago’s Live Bait Theater directed by Richard Cotovsky starring Gary Houston and Rebecca Covey.
The play dramatizes the love affair between Chicago literary giant Nelson Algren and French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. In 2003, his play Cafe Society was staged in Oak Park, Illinois at The Circle Theatre"s New Plays Festival.
In 2007, he wrote, directed, and produced the comedy short Making the Manitoba which has screened at over twenty film festivals in the United States, Europe and Japan and had its commercial release on the Digital Video Disc Best Of 16th Raindance Film Festival Shorts.
His short story A California Seder (2012) was published at the online showcase JewishFiction.net A short story, The Rabbi"s Sermon, (2014) was published in Poetica Magazine. Heideman Award.
