Overview

Richard Barr: The Playwright’s Producer is a biography of producer Richard Barr (1917-1989), who worked on Broadway, off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre, and off-off-Broadway at the Playwrights Unit. Crespy’s research material includes nearly sixty interviews with actors, directors, designers, stage managers, and fellow producers who worked with Barr; the producer’s personal papers; and Barr’s own unpublished memoirs.

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Reviews

""Thank you, David Crespy, for turning a brilliant and long overdue spotlight on the life and career of Richard Barr, one of the seminal figures of twentieth-century theater. Crespy reminds us how much of today's theater finds its roots in Barr's work as a discoverer, nurturer, and producer of new work, as a man who restructured a sclerotic commercial theater, as a man who changed the rules--in short, all the daring he learned as Orson Welles's assistant in the legendary Mercury Theatre. Everyone working in theater today owes a debt to the remarkable Richard Barr.""--John Guare, playwright ""David Crespy's book is a stellar parade and a fascinating portrait of a producer as a young, then mature, man. Richard Barr is a 'present at the birth' character, as he crosses our theatre's history in too many ways to count. Now, thanks to Professor Crespy, we can be present too. We're with him on his opening nights, including the joyous bloodlettings of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on Broadway. We can stumble upon an intrepid line of gay men waiting for tickets to the pre-Stonewall run of The Boys in the Band and grieve a community decimated by AIDS. We can witness the passion of a man who would hock his house to put a play up. If you care about the American theatre, Barr is a man to know.""--Todd London, artistic director, New Dramatists

"""Thank you, David Crespy, for turning a brilliant and long overdue spotlight on the life and career of Richard Barr, one of the seminal figures of twentieth-century theater. Crespy reminds us how much of today's theater finds its roots in Barr's work as a discoverer, nurturer, and producer of new work, as a man who restructured a sclerotic commercial theater, as a man who changed the rules--in short, all the daring he learned as Orson Welles's assistant in the legendary Mercury Theatre. Everyone working in theater today owes a debt to the remarkable Richard Barr.""--John Guare, playwright ""David Crespy's book is a stellar parade and a fascinating portrait of a producer as a young, then mature, man. Richard Barr is a 'present at the birth' character, as he crosses our theatre's history in too many ways to count. Now, thanks to Professor Crespy, we can be present too. We're with him on his opening nights, including the joyous bloodlettings of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on Broadway. We can stumble upon an intrepid line of gay men waiting for tickets to the pre-Stonewall run of The Boys in the Band and grieve a community decimated by AIDS. We can witness the passion of a man who would hock his house to put a play up. If you care about the American theatre, Barr is a man to know.""--Todd London, artistic director, New Dramatists"

Author Information

David A. Crespy is professor of playwriting and dramatic literature at the University of Missouri at Columbia. He is the author of Off-Off Broadway Explosion.

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