Jack Gilhooley
In 1997-98, Jack Gilhooley was awarded his second Florida Artists' Grant for The Machine. (His first was in 1990 for Connemara Dreaming.) He also won the West Central Florida Playwright's Process Best Play award with Afterlife (as he had with The Split in 1996 with co-author Jo Morello). He served as guest playwright at The Centaur, Quebec's leading English-language theatre, as the recipient of NEA International and Canada Council grants for 1995. That NEA grant was the author's second, the previous one having been an Individual Artist award in 1978. The Machine--about the Pendergast political juggernaut in Kansas City of the '20s and '30s--won Utah State University's national "Playfest" award in 1995. It subsequently received rehearsed readings with Ed Asner as "Boss Tom" the same year at the Mark Taper Forum in LA and in 1996 at The Asolo Theater in FL. Also, his Hi-Rollers was produced at Orlando's Valencia Character Company after winning its 1995 Best Florida Play award.
As a Fulbright grant recipient, Gilhooley served as lecturer/playwright at Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, for 1993-94. He also received a development grant from The Pilgrim Project in 1993 to bring his Big Tim And Maggie (co-authored with noted historian Daniel Czitrom) to New York after it was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association as Best Play Outside of New York City for 1993. The play premiered at Mount Holyoke College in December 1992, when he was a guest faculty member/playwright for the fall semester.
His play Dancin' To Calliope--winner of the Festival of Southern Theatre award in 1989--ran in Miami (1993). It was previously produced for CPB radio and played throughout the ’80s with John Lithgow and Christine Baranksi. Other recent plays have been produced in LA and on Theatre Row in NYC. THE TIME TRIAL (originally produced by Joe Papp with Tommie Lee Jones) was London-optioned, and is published by Broadway Play Publishing Inc in the collection PLAYS FROM THE NEW YORK SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL.
In the nineties, aside from the Florida state grants, he was awarded a NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for 1991 for Connemara Dreaming, which was also selected for the Carnegie Mellon 1990 Showcase of New Drama. ("In this contemporary family play of humor, rage, sorrow and compassion, Gilhooley achieves some of the lyrical eloquence of the great Irish writers who sang of the pain of families.") Connemara Dreaming also won the Lexington (KY) Actors Guild Best play Award in 1991.
In 1989, Gilhooley was selected as an international fellow at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland.
An alumnus of New Dramatists, he has had many plays produced in New York (in addition to the NY Shakespeare Festival) in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, with presentations at Circle Rep, The Phoenix, Manhattan Theatre Club, Theatre for the New City, on Theatre Row, and in other venues. His works have also been presented coast-to-coast, in Europe and in Australia.
Gilhooley’s plays also have been developed at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center (1977), Aspen Playwrights Festival (1984), Sundance Playwrights Lab (1983), Avignon Festival (1984), Mt. Sequoyah New Play Retreat (1991) and North Carolina Playwrights Festival (1992). He's twice been commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville (1979 & ’80) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (Earplay and American Playhouse). Previous awards include grants from PEN (1985), the Carnegie Fund (1987), a Shubert Fellowship (1973), and five production subsidies from the Ford Foundation. He has been guest artist/fellow at the MacDowell Colony (’76), Yaddo (’83), the Djerassi Foundation (’86), the Millay Colony (’79), the Albee Foundation (’78) and the Dorset Colony (throughout the ’80s). He's published by Samuel French, New American Library, Broadway Play Publishing, Smith & Kraus and Palmetto Press.
CRITICAL COMMENTS
In The Time Trial, Jack Gilhooley,
another exceptional talent, presented us with a cultural
experience quite different from that of the average civilized
theatregoer. Yet the predicament of a gang of smalltown, Southern
outcasts struck me as profoundly human. Speaking in a language as
brutal and quick-witted as any New York street person's, they
spend the day drinking and watching cars circle a race track. In
many ways the play became a powerful account of lives going in
circles; of drugs, sex, and "speech" going nowhere. For
these people, small-town America has become a raw, bloody place
with no way of fitting in or getting out; a kind of destructive
maze con-taining nothing of lasting value. It's a mordant and
unsparing work written without apology and, in an odd way, aimed
directly at us.
Joseph Papp, Plays from the New York Shakespeare
Festival
The Brixton Recovery . . .is a
wistful romance with a steeliness beneath the surface . . . has a
precise sense of character, atmosphere and imagery . . . echoes
with the sound of the Brixton streets, of the punch-drunk battler
on the international circuit and the restless nomads who move
between countries searching for new lives.
Mel Gussow, New York Times
... Alongside Shaw, Coward, Moliere,
Chekov and Ibsen, and inter-mingled with Williams, Miller,
Pinter, Albee, Hellman and O'Neill are Athol Fugard, Ed Bullins,
Tom Stoppard, Sam Shepard, Jack Gilhooley,
Lanford Wilson, David Mamet and David Rabe, as some of the most
frequently produced writers in the American theatre today.
Theatre Profiles/3, Theatre Communications Group
A good deal of the credit...goes, of
course, to Gilhooley who has an infallible ear for real-life
human speech--and a remarkable skill for getting it onto the
stage. He is equally adept at capturing the surface
idiosyncrasies that turn faces in the crowd into human
characters. If the playwright were a camera, certain primitive
tribes would surely ban him, for fear he would capture their
souls.
Marilyn Stasio about "Afternoons in Vegas", New York
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