Charles L Mee Jr Popular Books

Charles L Mee Jr Biography & Facts

Charles L. Mee (born September 15, 1938) is an American playwright, historian and author known for his collage-like style of playwriting, which makes use of radical reconstructions of found texts. He is also a Special Lecturer of theater at Columbia University. Early life and career Mee was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1938. He contracted polio at the age of fourteen. His memoir A Nearly Normal Life (1999) tells how that event informed the rest of his life. After graduating from Harvard University in 1960, Mee moved to Greenwich Village and became a part of the Off-Off-Broadway scene. Between 1962 and 1964, his plays were presented at venues that included La MaMa E.T.C., Caffe Cino, Theatre Genesis, and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. In 1961 Mee began work at American Heritage publishing company and eventually became the editor of the hardback bi-monthly Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts. He was also the Advising Editor and then Contributing Editor of Tulane Drama Review – now called TDR and published from New York University – until 1964 and its Associate Editor from 1964 to 1965. Literary career To support himself and his family, Mee turned from writing plays to writing books in 1965. Lorenzo De'Medici and the Renaissance, the first of his many nonfiction books, was published in 1969 by HarperCollins Juvenile Books. At the same time, he increasingly became caught up in anti-Vietnam War politics, campaigning for anti-war congressional candidates and writing anti-war polemics. He did not return to writing for the theater for 20 years. In the 1970s, he became the co-founder and chairman of The National Committee on the Presidency, a grassroots organization which called for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. His political activism led to his writing of political histories for the general public. His Meeting at Potsdam (1975), about the 1945 Potsdam Conference, was chosen as a main selection of the Literary Guild, and was adapted for both film and television by David Susskind. He wrote other books on summit diplomacy, international power sharing, and American history, including The End of Order: Versailles 1919 (1980); The Marshall Plan: The Launching of Pax Americana (1987), and The Genius of the People (1987), about the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World (1993) was Mee's final published work of history. A Visit to Haldeman and Other States of Mind (1976) was described as "part autobiographical meditation, part elegiac crank letter to the American Republic, part confession and part essay on democratic politics" in a review by Time. Greil Marcus, in 2002, said that it was one of the best books he had read about American patriotism. In 2017, Dwight Garner in his New York Times "American Beauties" column, about "undersung American books of the past 75 years," described the work as "[o]ne of the finest and least-known books about Richard M. Nixon's presidency and the shrinking American soul". Playwriting career Mee returned to playwriting in 1985. His libretto for choreographer Martha Clarke's Vienna: Lusthaus was his first produced script since his Off-Off Broadway days. In 2002 Mee revised about a third of his Vienna: Lusthaus script. It was reprised as Vienna: Lusthaus (Revisited). Clarke and Mee collaborated again in Belle Époque (2004). For years he continued working his day job as the editor-in-chief at consumer health publisher Rebus, Inc. and writing books. Mee's daughter, Erin B. Mee, also became involved in theater. In 1988 she was invited to direct a production at HOME for Contemporary Theatre and Art in SoHo. She chose to premiere her father's play, The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem (1988), which received positive reviews from The Village Voice and The New York Times. The play was picked up by Joseph Papp for a run at The Public Theater. In 2000 Erin B. Mee staged another production of The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem at The Market Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she updated with the dramaturg for this production.Another Person is a Foreign Country (1991) was the first of Mee's many collaborations with the director Anne Bogart. The En Garde Arts site-specific performance took place in the courtyard of the decrepit Towers Nursing Home in New York City. In 1992 his Orestes was directed by Robert Woodruff at the University of California, San Diego and by Anne Bogart at the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI). In the summer of 1992, Tina Landau directed an En Garde Arts production as Orestes 2.0 on an abandoned pier on the Hudson River in Manhattan. This play was the first of ten plays for which Mee used the Greek texts as a base and added new fragments of text; he then would "throw the scaffolding away and call whatever remained the script." In 1996, his The Constitutional Convention: A Sequel, was produced by Clubbed Thumb.In 2001 Erin B. Mee staged the premiere of her father's First Love at New York Theatre Workshop. He had written it specifically for her to direct, and it starred Ruth Maleczech and Fred Neumann of Mabou Mines. Erin Mee staged a second production in 2002 at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco with Joan Mankin and Robert Parnell.In other plays, Mee explores twentieth-century American history and culture through the points-of-view of contemporary visual artists in: bobrauschenbergamerica (Robert Rauschenberg), Hotel Cassiopeia (Joseph Cornell), soot and spit (the musical) (James Castle), and Under Construction (Jason Rhoades and Norman Rockwell). His comedies and romances include Summertime, First Love, True Love, Big Love, Wintertime, Fetes de la Nuit, A Perfect Wedding, and Fire Island. As source material, Mee would use Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Molière, Anton Chekhov, René Magritte paintings, Bollywood musicals, and his own writing. He is the only resident playwright of the theatre ensemble SITI Company, for whom he wrote Orestes, bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia, Under Construction, and soot and spit (the musical). Mee was the Signature Theatre Playwright-in-Residence for the 2007–2008 season. In 2008, Shakespeare and Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt collaborated with Mee to write Cardenio. It premiered at American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in 2008.In 2014 Mee co-wrote This Is Not A Theatre Company's Pool Play. Audiences sat at the edge of the pool with their feet in the water for an exploration of America's long, joyful, and complicated relationship with the swimming pool. The production included synchronized swimming, an existential boatman, musical numbers, and a snarky fish, along with stories about segregated pools, and a meditation on pollution. Sarah Lucie of Show Business Weekly said: The entirety of the play is well executed, featuring a strong ensemble that has absolutely no fear of diving into whatever quirky material is presented to them. Their playfulness is contagious, ultimately creating an uplifti.... Discover the Charles L Mee Jr popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Charles L Mee Jr books.