Чарльз Ми: Американский драматург и историк

American dramatist (born 1938)

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.

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.

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".

On Mee's website, the (re)making project, he says "There is no such thing as an original play." and that his plays are "composed in the way that Max Ernst made his Fatagaga pieces toward the end of World War I: texts have often been taken from, or inspired by, other texts." An interview with Mee about his work by Erin B. Mee, along with a manifesto and other material, was published in TDR 46:3 (T175).

Mee began using the internet as a textual source for composing his pieces in the early 1990s. He first began making his own work freely available by posting three of his plays on Carnegie Mellon's humanities gopher/ftp/telnet English Server in the mid 1990s. By 1996, with the help of his friend Tom Damrauer, the (re)making project, a web site with his full scripts was launched. It contained an invitation for people to "do freely whatever they want with them." National Public Radio called Mee the "Public Domain Playwright" in 2000 and credited him with touching "a raw cultural nerve" by making his work freely available. Writer Jonathan Lethem credited Mee as one of the inspirations for his "Promiscuous Project" in which he made a selection of his stories available for filmmakers or dramatists to adapt at a dollar apiece. In an explanation about the (re)making project on his current website, Mee says that his plays are protected by copyright if they are "essentially or substantially performed" as he has composed them. He continues, however, to invite others to freely pillage his texts to make their own work, without any attribution to him. Sometime in 2013, concurrent with the launch of a redesigned website, the language regarding patronage changed to the past tense: "Charles Mee's work has been made possible by the support of Richard B. Fisher and Jeanne Donovan Fisher." It is now possible to directly support the project.

Among other awards, Charles Mee is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Obie Awards, for Vienna: Lusthaus (1986) and Big Love (2002), PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for a playwright in mid career, and the Fisher Award given by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.