Ransom Center Magazine

playwright

Playwright Arthur Miller’s archive comes to the Harry Ransom Center

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The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archive of American playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005). Obtained from the Arthur Miller Trust, the archive spans Miller’s career. [Read more…] about Playwright Arthur Miller’s archive comes to the Harry Ransom Center

Mel Gussow’s interviews with actors, playwrights, writers, and directors to be digitized

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The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has awarded the Ransom Center a “Recordings at Risk” grant for $24,600, supporting the project “Preserving the Interview Recordings of Mel Gussow, American and British Theater Critic.” The Ransom Center holds the Gussow (1933-2005) papers. [Read more…] about Mel Gussow’s interviews with actors, playwrights, writers, and directors to be digitized

Celebrating the reissue of Adrienne Kennedy’s memoir

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The Harry Ransom Center celebrates the reissue of Adrienne Kennedy’s groundbreaking memoir People Who Led to My Plays from Theatre Communications Group. First published in 1987 as a response to the frequently asked question of what inspirations have influenced her work, Kennedy recorded brief, fragmentary memories covering 1936–1961. A deeply influential and radically innovative kind of memoir, novelist Ishmael Reed called these glimpses into her life “a new form of black autobiography.” [Read more…] about Celebrating the reissue of Adrienne Kennedy’s memoir

Research at the Ransom Center: Terrence McNally’s connections

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By Raymond-Jean Frontain

What brings people to the theater, a speaker explains in “Hidden Agendas”—a sketch that Terrence McNally wrote in the early 1990s in response to a censorship crisis at the National Endowment for the Arts—is “the expectation that the miracle of communication will take place. […] Words, sounds, gestures, feelings, thoughts! The things that connect us and make us human. The hope for that connection!” [Read more…] about Research at the Ransom Center: Terrence McNally’s connections