|
Profession
|
Playwright, Publisher, Theatre Director, Actor, Poet, Lighting Designer, Lighting technician, Critic
|
|
Michael Townsend Smith is an American playwright. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and educated in Kansas City and at Hotchkiss and Yale. 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 and also active as a director, playwright, and lighting designer. He directed early works by Sam Shepard, Ronald Tavel, MarÃa 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. His plays include "Captain Jack's Revenge," "Country Music," "Cowgirl Ecstasy," "Heavy Pockets," and "Half Life." In the 1980s he worked as 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 Oregon, where he is associated with the Brush Creek Players.
|
