Theatre: The Lively Art

About the Author

Alvin Goldfarb

Megan Geigner

Megan E. Geigner is a theatre historian, performance scholar, and writing specialist who teaches in the Cook Family Writing Program at Northwestern University. Her courses focus on racial and ethnic representation, design, business and technical communication, and self-expressive writing. Dr. Geigner has had the pleasure of teaching theatre courses at Illinois State University, City Colleges of Chicago, the United States Naval Academy, and the University of Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama from Northwestern University.

Dr. Geigner is a co-author of Living Theatre with Drs. Goldfarb and Wilson. She is the co-editor of Makeshift Chicago Stages (Northwestern UP) and Theatre after Empire (Routledge). A specialist in Chicago theatre history specifically, she has published extensively on the city's performance history, including pieces on Columbus Day, the Little Theatre movement, Irish dance, and August Wilson. She serves in leadership for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and she works on theatre productions at such places as Chicago's TimeLine Theatre, Court Theatre, and Remy Bumppo, among others.

Edwin Wilson

Ed Wilson attended Vanderbilt, the University of Edinburgh, and Yale University where he received the first Doctor of Fine Arts degree awarded by Yale. He has taught at Vanderbilt, Yale, Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Most recently he has been Executive Director of the Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author or co-author of three of the most widely used college theater textbooks in the U. S. The tenth edition of his pioneer book, The Theater Experience was published in 2006 by McGraw Hill LLC. The sixth edition of his text Theater: The Lively Art (co-authored with Alvin Goldfarb) will be published by McGraw Hill in theDecember, 2006. The fourth edition of his theater history, Living Theatre: Histories of Theatre, (also co-authored with Alvin Goldfarb) will be published in December, 2006. He is also the editor of Shaw on Shakespeare, recently re-issued by Applause Books.


He has produced plays on and off Broadway and served one season as the resident director of the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia. He also produced a feature film, The Nashville Sound, recently made available on DVD. He is the author of two original plays, a farce, The Bettinger Prize, and a play about Ponce de Leon, Waterfall. He wrote the book and lyrics for a musical version of Great Expectations. All three have been given a series of successful readings in New York City and elsewhere. Great Expectations was given a full production for three weeks in February and March, 2006, at the Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanoke, Virginia. He conceived the idea of a musical revue of the songs of Jerome Kern which had a well-received try-out production in the fall of 2004 at Catholic University in Washington, D. C.
 
Ed has served a number of times on the Tony Nominating Committee and the Pulitzer Prize Drama Jury, most recently on the Pulitzer Jury in 2003. For twenty two years he was the theater critic of the Wall Street Journal. A long time member of the New York Drama Critics Circle, he was president of the Circle for several years. He is on the board of the John Golden Fund and was also for many years on the Board of the Theater Development Fund, of which he served as President.