Барбара Гарсон: Пьесы, активизм и исчезновение из виду.

American politician

Barbara Garson (born July 7, 1941, in Brooklyn) is an American playwright, author and social activist, perhaps best known for the play MacBird!

Garson attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a B. A. specializing in Classical History in 1964. She was active in the Free Speech Movement, as the editor of The Free Speech Movement Newsletter, which was printed on an offset press that she herself had restored. She was one of 800 arrested on December 2, 1964 at a sit in at Sproul Hall, Berkeley, following the "Machine Speech" by Mario Savio. In 1968, Garson had a child, Juliet, and in 1969 she went to work at The Shelter Half, an anti war GI coffee house near Fort Lewis Army base in Tacoma, Washington. In the early 1970s, she moved to Manhattan, publishing short, humorous essays and theater reviews primarily for The Village Voice as well as plays.

Garson's most famous work, MacBird!, a 1966 counterculture drama/political parody of Macbeth is "one of the most controversial plays produced in the 1960s". It was originally intended for an anti war teach in at Berkeley. The first edition, which was self published on the same offset press as the Free Speech Movement Newsletter, had sold over 200,000 copies by 1967 when the play opened in New York in a production starring Stacy Keach, William Devane, Cleavon Little, and Rue McClanahan. While these then unknown actors went on to become fixtures in American theater, movies and television, the author "disappeared from public view at the height of fame". The play has since seen over 300 productions worldwide and sold over half a million copies". Robert Brustein wrote that "Although this play is bound to start a storm of protest (not all of it unjustified) and may even be suppressed by some government agency, it will probably go down as one of the brutally provocative works in the American theater as well as one of the most grimly amusing," and praised Garson as "an extraordinarily gifted parodist."

Garson's next full length play, Going Co op (1972), was a comedy about residents of an Upper West Side apartment house going co op and a floundering left wing political collective that comes home to help organize the tenants who cannot afford to change from renters to owners. It was written with Fred Gardner, who is credited with founding the first of the Vietnam era GI Coffee Houses. Garson's musical children's play The Dinosaur Door, set on a class trip to the Natural History Museum, was performed at the Theater for the New City in 1976. It featured a cast of children including seven year old Mark Vincent, now known as the action hero Vin Diesel. It was awarded an Obie for playwriting in 1977. A Village Voice review said about The Dinosaur Door: "What's so marvelous is the richness of this stew, the world behind the exhibits and the absolutely on the mark funny, sympathetic kids—each special and practical, each a person in his own or her own right. I liked the satirical but warmly affectionate eye with which Garson sees every character and the show's tenderly complex relationships. I like that Garson is not chary with ideas because she is writing for kids." A teleplay of The Dinosaur Door was commissioned by producer director Joyce Chopra in 1982, but no film of the play was made. A full length play, The Department (1983), written for and performed by the organizing group Women Office Workers (WOW), is set in a bank's back office that is about to be automated. The Department, though a light farce, sets out many of the problems that Garson expands on in her 1989 book The Electronic Sweatshop.