Moisés Kaufman, the artistic director of the Tectonic Theatre Project and the force behind Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project, is developing two new and typically ambitious projects for the troupe.
One, titled And Yet It Moves, is described as "an investigation into the lives of Galileo and Brecht." The other, Apollo Et Hyacinthus, is based on the first musical composition written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, when a child prodigy of 11.
"And yet it moves" are the immortal words astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei uttered just after the Catholic Church forced him to renounce his theory that the Earth rotated and orbited the Sun. Several famous plays have been written about the Italian scientist, including Brecht's own politically-inflected Galileo.
Kaufman will direct Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife at Playwrights Horizons next season.
* Moisés Kaufman has been awarded a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting.
Kaufman made his mark with Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, a documentary-style account of the trial and sentencing of poet and playwright Oscar Wilde at the turn of the 20th century. Kaufman went on to co-write and direct The Laramie Project, about the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard. The play transferred from a run in Denver to an Off-Broadway engagement and has exploded in the regional theatre scene. The play was recently made into a television film for HBO. Kaufman directed the picture.
Past Guggenheim fellows include David Auburn and Rebecca Gilman.
—By Robert Simonson
