Background
Mac Wellman was born John McDowell Wellman on March 7, 1945, in Cleveland, Ohio, United States to the family of John Holley Wellman and Margaret Erwin.
American University, Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Mac Wellman graduated from the American University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967.
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Mac Wellman received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968.
University School, Shaker Heights, Ohio, United States
Mac Wellman studied at University School at Shaker Heights, Ohio.
(Harm's Way takes place in a mythical American West where ...)
Harm's Way takes place in a mythical American West where every action is more than it seems. These are the fantastical adventures of Santouche, a very angry person, as he attempts to make sense of his understanding of law and order in a world of other angry persons. The action does not unfold in any specific time or place. However, all the characters drink from the same poisoned well, which is recognizably American and western. The time might be anytime in the last seventy years, or even not impossibly in the next.
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1978
(The Bad Infinity is the first published collection of pla...)
The Bad Infinity is the first published collection of plays by one of America's best-known and most widely performed experimental playwrights. Mac Wellman's biting social satire, Joycean language games, outrageous humor, and provocative subject matter have been the focus of critical acclaim on both coasts and stormy controversy on Capitol Hill. Now, with the publication of eight of his most provocative works of recent years, the playwright hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "one of the contemporary stage's premier masters of syntactical scat" is introduced to an even broader audience.
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1982
(An edition of the first two plays in Mac Wellman's highly...)
An edition of the first two plays in Mac Wellman's highly successful quartet of plays. An edition of the first two plays in Mac Wellman's highly successful quartet of plays.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1892295520/?tag=2022091-20
1992
(These two plays are the second of Wellman’s award-winning...)
These two plays are the second of Wellman’s award-winning quartet of plays involving, in one way or another, characters who have taken up with or have been highly influenced by birds - particularly crows of the nation of Rational Biped. With wit, humor, nostalgia, and just plain American orneriness, Wellman’s second quartet will delight readers and theater-goers alike. Living in Brooklyn, New York, Mac Wellman teaches at Brooklyn College. He has had over 40 plays produced and has won major awards for his work including several Obies, McKnight and Rockerfeller Foundation grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim foundation. His most recent novel is Q’s Q, published by Green Integer earlier this year.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1931243719/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(In this, his second novel, Mac Wellman continues his expl...)
In this, his second novel, Mac Wellman continues his exploration begun in his award-winning plays A Murder of Crows and The Hyacinth Macaw - of a low-rent rural America, festering in the backwater pollution from the urban environment. Wellman's astonishing Ohio-like world has been tagged by some theatergoers and critics as "Macland," a world peopled by cantankerous, wistful, confused, and frightened people who have lost parts of their body, their minds, and their souls to the perpetual machine of the American dream. In Annie Salem, young Jack Scan hangs out in the local woods near the Anger River valley, where he witnesses strange goings-on and discovers the rare "blue monkeys" of the semi-wilds.
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2000
(Almost 20 years ago, when I was a critic by profession, a...)
Almost 20 years ago, when I was a critic by profession, a wise theater friend took me to my first Mac Wellman play - she'd grown tired of hearing me rant against a dumb, conventional 'avant-garde' of images. I wanted language, ideas, great but non-narrative passions. I saw Mac's work, and there they were. Still are. Mac Wellman's poetry, on and off stage, is ever-inventive, witty, angry, playful and exactly as a contrarian in form and spirit as our culture deserves.
https://www.amazon.com/Miniature-Mac-Wellman/dp/1931824037/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(I know of no one who knows more than Mac Wellman about th...)
I know of no one who knows more than Mac Wellman about the interstices between desire and nonsense, as well as those between the po-mo psyche's inevitable nihilistic impulses, and whatever the legacy left by our prehensile ancestors, those comic apes staring out of the frame with their classic bananas. These poems are heady fragmented forays into that uncharted territory. Poetry needs Mac Wellman the way fiction once needed Swift and Pynchon.
https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Elegies-Mac-Wellman/dp/1931824169/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(This collection includes Albanian Softshoe, Mister Origin...)
This collection includes Albanian Softshoe, Mister Original Bugg, Cleveland, Bad Penny, Cellophane, Three Americanisms, Fnu Lnu, Girl Gone, Hypatia, The Sandalwood Box, and Cat’s Paw. Written between 1983 and 1998, they showcase Wellman’s ongoing exploration of the limits of language and the consequences of humanity in the postmodern world.
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2005
(At a time when most serious drama being written and produ...)
At a time when most serious drama being written and produced for the American stage aspires only to mainstream acceptance and high-toned mediocrity, an innovative new generation of playwrights based in New York City has emerged, crafting works that challenge and undermine the conventional structure, language, and characterization of commercial theater while rejecting outdated notions of the avant-garde. New Downtown Now brings together ten new works that exemplify the playfulness, excitement, and possibilities of the theater. Characterized by fragmenting structure, hypnotic rhythms, kaleidoscopic imagery, unpredictable characters, and lyrical language, these plays resemble puzzles from which the writers are teasing revelations.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Downtown-Now-Anthology-Theater/dp/0816647313/?tag=2022091-20
2006
(Playwright, poet, and novelist Mac Wellman has created, i...)
Playwright, poet, and novelist Mac Wellman has created, in his newest fiction, a hilarious satire of American theater the climaxes in a performance resulting in the death of the Theater company’s chief and in the end of more than one theater career.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933382511/?tag=2022091-20
2006
(Each story in A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds ...)
Each story in A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds is set on a different asteroid. But this is not standard science fiction fare. Consider this first sentence: "If you are to gain a correct impression of how we operate, and how the MerryThought works, you might logically begin with the observation that all of us on Wu have the same name: Mary Carnivorous Rabbit." Another story is set on a hairball. Best known as a playwright, Mr. Wellman has always written poetry and fiction, including two novels. In 2003, he was the recipient of a lifetime achievement Obie award.
https://www.amazon.com/Chronicle-Madness-Small-Worlds/dp/0963919261/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(Two September is set in post-WWII Vietnam, when Ho Chi Mi...)
Two September is set in post-WWII Vietnam, when Ho Chi Minh had visions of a free country and a newly formed House UnAmerican Affairs Committee blacklisted a young, female American writer who believed in truth, justice, and humane social order. In 2003, The Village Voice gave a Lifetime Achievement Award to Mac Wellman.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881454176/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(From three-time Obie Award-winner Mac Wellman comes this ...)
From three-time Obie Award-winner Mac Wellman comes this complex and provocative play about two simple events. Yamaha Nazimova drops a glove. Jewel Beckett picks it up. Between these two occurrences, a band of moths, fingers, demons, and all-too-human pronouns sing 27 choruses rich with puns, reversals, exclamations, whisperings, cries of loss, cries of victory, arguments, and resolutions.
https://www.amazon.com/Left-Glove-Mac-Wellman/dp/0984414207/?tag=2022091-20
2011
(Mac Wellman's new collection of poetry is so singular, so...)
Mac Wellman's new collection of poetry is so singular, so original that there is no one writing poetry today quite like him. His fanciful, satirical world is filled with addresses to magical figures such as the silent Mahoon. They appear, as in his plays, in a language we can only slightly glimpse, as if the author were speaking from some alien planet. Leaves speak, things get 'skyudgled' and fly away like 'dead bats.' It is a marvelous world which once you enter you will want to visit again and again.
https://www.amazon.com/Split-Stick-Miniaturist-Divan-Mac-Wellman/dp/1931824460/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(Linda Perdido, the story of the antisocial Linda Perdido ...)
Linda Perdido, the story of the antisocial Linda Perdido told by her well-behaved sister Qua, is a memoir like no other. Set in a vast and unknown region in the Midwest, Mac Wellman’s Linda Perdido chronicles the lives of two sisters: Linda and Qua Perdido. Linda is bad, acting out every antisocial impulse she has and then some; Qua is good but comes to hate her sister, though she chooses to write a memoir about her, thus Linda Perdido. Their lives are complicated by many figures, among them the Traveler, a lonely man who follows the migration patterns of a strange bird, the Perdido Macaw; the Counter-Terrorist, who gets his facts wrong and cannot decipher the ominous chatter; a FedEx delivery man, Donn Morocco, who loses his mind after his truck is stolen by the rampaging Linda. These and others meet and complicate each other’s lives, often ruinously, culminating at what will become Ground Zero on the day before the attacks.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EB6HOPI/?tag=2022091-20
2013
(Poetry. AWE is the tale of the three dead letters of the ...)
Poetry. AWE is the tale of the three dead letters of the English language: Thorn, Eth, and AE. The teller of these stories, for there are more than one, is an old cat (O/C) with the sad excuse of a story tale, er, tail; and a mess of other possible tails and worlds (that is), a mess of If(f)s; both blissful and broken by the sheer, immense particularity of it all; and so he glows in the dark. A wise cat among wonders. A cat who challenges all tails but his own.
https://www.amazon.com/Awe-Mac-Wellman/dp/1946433241/?tag=2022091-20
2019
artist educator playwright author poet
Mac Wellman was born John McDowell Wellman on March 7, 1945, in Cleveland, Ohio, United States to the family of John Holley Wellman and Margaret Erwin.
Mac Wellman studied at University School at Shaker Heights, Ohio. He graduated from the American University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967. He received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968.
After earning a degree in International Relations from the American University and marrying his first wife Nancy Roesch (1967), Wellman focused on poetry at the University of Wisconsin. He earned his Masters degree in English and taught for a few years, but it was a chance meeting while touring Europe that put his career on track.
While hitchhiking in the Netherlands, Wellman had the good fortune to be picked up by Annemarie Prins, a Dutch theatrical director/producer. A friendship blossomed and the two began making radio plays together. The first was based on a long poem of Wellman’s, Nobody, followed by The Memory Theatre of Giordano Bruno. In 1975 the team directed their first stage production, Fama Combinatoria, at Theatre de Brakke Grand in Amsterdam.
Wellman continued to experiment in poetry and theater, merging the two to create his own style. 1977 saw his first published collection of poetry, In Praise of Secrecy, while 1979 witnessed his first New York City theatrical production, Starluster. During the late seventies, Wellman moved to New York City and married a Dutch journalist, Yolanda Gerritsen. But by the early 1980s, he hit a creative wall. Soon he officially began writing under his nickname, Mac, and his career as a playwright took off. He gained national exposure and became known as a “downtown” playwright in New York City with productions like Soho Repertory’s Energumen (1985) and BACA Downtown’s Cleveland (1986), Cellophane (1988) and Sincerity Forever (1990). In 1990 Wellman received his first Obie. In a three-way tie (with himself) he won Best American Play for Terminal Hip, Bad Penny, and Crowbar. A Best Playwriting Obie followed in 1991 for Sincerity Forever. Among his honors were NEA grants in 1990 and 1995, and a Guggenheim fellowship in 1990. Throughout the 1990s Wellman’s scripts were produced nationally and internationally, while he regularly added the role of a teacher (at New Dramatists, Yale, Brooklyn College, etc.) to his repertoire. In 1997 he was honored with a six-month festival of his work, The Mac Wellman Festival, which featured thirty of his plays staged in four cities. Wellman received his third Obie in 2003, this time for Lifetime Achievement.
(At a time when most serious drama being written and produ...)
2006(I know of no one who knows more than Mac Wellman about th...)
2005(Playwright, poet, and novelist Mac Wellman has created, i...)
2006(Two September is set in post-WWII Vietnam, when Ho Chi Mi...)
2008(These two plays are the second of Wellman’s award-winning...)
1997(In this, his second novel, Mac Wellman continues his expl...)
2000(Almost 20 years ago, when I was a critic by profession, a...)
2002(This collection includes Albanian Softshoe, Mister Origin...)
2005(The Bad Infinity is the first published collection of pla...)
1982(Mac Wellman's new collection of poetry is so singular, so...)
2012(Linda Perdido, the story of the antisocial Linda Perdido ...)
2013(From three-time Obie Award-winner Mac Wellman comes this ...)
2011(Harm's Way takes place in a mythical American West where ...)
1978(Each story in A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds ...)
2008(An edition of the first two plays in Mac Wellman's highly...)
1992(Poetry. AWE is the tale of the three dead letters of the ...)
2019Mac Wellman determinedly practices a vigorous, if undernourished, alternative to the ever “Fabulous Invalid.” Attending a Wellman play means assembling rambling, often politically pointed and mind-bending speeches into a coherent narrative, albeit one the playwright has carefully composed for a particular stage. There may not, however, be a stage, not as we usually know it. His is a world of phantasm, environmental decay, bigotry, evil, longing. In a Wellman play, the end of the world seems just around the corner but then it turns out the corner is not all that close - it may even be behind us, an even scarier proposition. The point is simply that all is not lost. In such plays as Terminal Hip Dracula, Swoop, Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, and The Hyacinth Macaw, he has determined to unmask the illusions that undermine the value of experience with a showman’s love of artifice and an absurdist’s sense of dread. For Wellman, patriotism is a love of American speech, which he offers in all its deeply disturbed and poetic glory.
Mac Wellman married his first wife Nancy Roesch in 1967. During the late seventies, Wellman moved to New York City and married a Dutch journalist, Yolanda Gerritsen.