In making the announcement, artistic director Kent Thompson said that "Douglas brings remarkable experience having served in similar capacities at McCarter Theatre Center and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He was our first choice in an outstanding field of candidates."
In this new position, Langworthy will be responsible for managing the literary department of the Denver Center Theatre Company and will be the primary contact for playwrights and agents – including recruitment, management, evaluation and development of scripts under commission and consideration. He will immediately meet and work with nationally-known playwrights Lee Blessing, Constance Congdon, Steven Dietz, José Cruz González and others currently working on Denver Center commissioned works.
In addition he will plan and execute the annual Colorado New Play Summit each February – this season presenting four readings of new plays and three world premiere productions – Our House by Theresa Rebeck with Daniel Fish, Lydia by Octavio Solis and Plainsong by Eric Schmiedl based upon the novel by Kent Haruf.
His duties as dramaturg will include providing research in support of productions, writing and editing educational and outreach materials, and planning a wide range of production related activities — including symposia, audience discussions and talkbacks.
Douglas Langworthy served as dramaturg and director of play development at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ, for two years and director of literary development and dramaturgy at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for seven. While at OSF he served as dramaturg on the world premieres of David Edgar's Continental Divide and Nilo Cruz's Lorca in a Green Dress, as well as new plays by Robert Schenkkan (Handler) and Octavio Solis (Gibraltar and El Paso Blue), and Jerry Turner's new translation of Ibsen's Rosmersholm. While there he also developed a new adaptation of Dumas' The Three Musketeers with Linda Alper and Penny Metropulos and a new translation of Brecht's The Good Person of Szechuan, both for the 1999 season. In the 2004 season, he collaborated with director Ken Albers on a new adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit, and dramaturged the world premiere of Oedipus Complex, a new adaptation by Frank Galati based on the writings of Sophocles and Freud. In his tenure at the Festival he served as production dramaturg on over 25 productions. Langworthy has translated 15 plays from German, which include Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind, Medea by Hans Henny Jahnn, and The Prince of Homburg, Penthesilea and Amphitryon (National Theatre Translation Fund Award) by Heinrich von Kleist and both Quartet and Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller.
He was also the dramaturg for Target Margin Theater in New York, which produced his translation of Goethe's Faust. For Target Margin, he also co-wrote the libretto for The Sandman, a new opera with music by Thomas Cabaniss, and developed a new stage adaptation of The Nutcracker, both based on stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann.
For The Acting Company in New York, he has dramaturged Charles Smith's new adaptation of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Jeffrey Hatcher's Murders by Poe, adapted from the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. For the Oregon Shakespeare Festival he recently collaborated with Penny Metropulos and Linda Alper to write lyrics and book for the new musical Tracy's Tiger, based on the novella by William Saroyan, with music by Sterling Tinsley.
Bruce K. Sevy is director of new play development at DCTC.
Visit www.denvercenter.org for more information.
