Outlaw Theatre: Field Notes from the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival (1978-1995)

In 1978 Obie-award winning New York playwright Murray Mednick brought his friends Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes together with a group of actors and younger playwrights to Claremont outside Los Angeles to stage the first Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop/Festival. On an annual basis the Festival continued for the next eighteen years, extending the experimental ferment of the Off-Off Broadway movement into new and unique forms of theatrical expression. Featuring formal essays and reminiscences by a collection of participants-including David Henry Hwang and Migdalia Cruz, as well as Festival luminaries John O'Keefe, John Steppling, and Mednick himself-Outlaw Theatre is the first authoritative look back at this exciting legacy. The book will be a valued source of inspiration and craft notes for a new generation of young playwrights and theatre artists looking to shake things up as they craft the new.