Wilson's longtime director/interpreter/champion Marshall Mason made this announcement on his
Facebook page yesterday:
To all friends and admirers of Lanford Wilson: Our great writer and my closest friend passed away this morning at 10:45. The doctors say it was a peaceful, painless end. I’m very happy that just a couple of days ago Jeff Daniels and Jon Hogan serenaded him in his hospital room, and that he had the pleasure of hearing his songs. Words cannot express the loss we all will feel, but we must be grateful for the bountiful beauty he bestowed upon us. His funeral will be in his beloved Sag Harbor, where he will be laid to rest Monday, March 28, only a two weeks before what would have been his 74th birthday.
I find it hard to imagine Lanford Wilson old and dead since for me his dramatic voice was always one of youth. Or maybe that's just because he was such a looming figure in the American theatre of
my youth. Growing up in the 80s, it seemed he was the most ubiquitous American playwright. Everywhere you turned--Broadway, Off Broadway, a school playhouse, the NY Times, Applause Bookstore...there he was. I remember TV commercials for
Fifth of July on Broadway, the landmark Steppenwolf
Balm in Gilead that came to NY's Circle in the Square,
Tally's Folly winning the
Tony Pulitzer, the production of
The Hot L Baltimore that my drama teacher was crazy enough to stage in my high school! (I played Katz, the manager), and John Malkovich's crazy long hair in
Burn This.
A child of the Caffe Cino world of the 1960s (the cradle of Off Off Broadway), Wilson's wider impact on American Theatre came years later. While we think of Mamet and Shepard as the dominant American playwrights of this era, Wilson was probably even more widely produced in the 1980s. (Especially from
Talley's Folley in 1979 to
Burn This in 1986.) Maybe because his work, being less hindered by obscenity, nudity, or just weirdness than his contemporaries, was more palatable to the general public. But despite the wholesomeness that some mistakenly read into his depictions of the Ozark "heartland" he so often wrote about, Wilson was as attracted to seediness, torment, and depravity as anyone. (Any high school who mounts the perennial
Rimers of Eldrich, for example, expecting an easy replacement for
Our Town will be disappointed.)
I also grew up identifying Wilson as the exemplar of a kind of lyrical American naturalism that was the dominant strain of that era's mainstream drama. This made him enormously influential I think. And of course, like all great "realists," there's always a surprising amount of magic, meta-theatricality, and overt contrivance just beneath the surface if you choose to look for it.
All in all, I suspect his work will be more and more appreciated by critics and the academy as his prime era of the 1970s - 1980s recedes even more into the past and becomes "theatre history."
Meanwhile, we've all had close encounters with Lanford Wilson plays in our theatrical coming of age. What's yours?
(NY Times
obit here, as well as a tribute by
B. Brantley--the first of many appraisals and remembrances to come, I'm sure. Check out the Times' "
slideshow," too for indelible images of the moments Wilson has given to actors over time.)