Background
Smith, Michael Townsend was born on October 5, 1935 in Kansas City, Missouri, United States. Son of Lewis Motter and Dorothy (Pew) Smith.
(From the author of "Near the End" comes another rich text...)
From the author of "Near the End" comes another rich text in which dream and reality overlap to generate hauntingly suggestive images and states of mind. Shot through with intimations of heartbreak, parting, and the dissolution of sophisticated structures, the action ranges from California to Central Europe as the narrator drifts through spring at an isolated English country house.
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editor author stage director and producer
Smith, Michael Townsend was born on October 5, 1935 in Kansas City, Missouri, United States. Son of Lewis Motter and Dorothy (Pew) Smith.
Student, Yale University, 1953-1955.
He has worked as a playwright, director, impresario, critic, and lighting designer. As theatre critic for The Village Voice in the 1960s and early 1970s, he was active in the development of an alternative, non-commercial theatre in New York (Office-Office-Broadway) and also active as a director, playwright, and lighting designer. He directed early works by Sam Shepard, Ronald Tavel, María Irene Fornés, Emanuel Peluso, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Soren Agenoux, H. M. Koutoukas, and William M. Hoffman, as well as many of his own plays and plays by Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, Christopher Fry, Gertrude Stein, and others
During the 1960s, he interviewed Wolfgang Zuckermann, the noted manufacturer and scholar of harpsichords, for The Village Voice.
The two became friends and together embarked on projects in the performing arts They ran the Sundance Festival of Chamber Arts, a performing arts festival in rural Pennsylvania, and attempted (unsuccessfully) to revive the fortunes of the Caffe Cino, an early off-off-Broadway coffeehouse/theater near Zuckermann"s workshop in Greenwich Village.
Foreign details, see Wolfgang Zuckermann. Later, in the 1980s, Smith himself became a harpsichord and fortepiano maker.
In the 1990s he was the editor of Santa Barbara Magazine and founded Genesis West, a Santa Barbara theatre company, presenting his own plays and plays by Shepard, Fornes, and George F. Walker.
He was arts editor of the "Santa Barbara Independent" and music and dance critic for the Santa Barbara News-Press. In 2003 he moved to Silverton, Oregon, where he is associated with the Brush Creek Players.
(From the author of "Near the End" comes another rich text...)
Director Lobero Foundation, The Arts Fund of Santa Barbara.
Married Michele M. Hawley, 1974. Children: Julian Bach, Alfred St. John. Married Carol E. Storke, 1992.