ALISON CAREY is co-founder of Cornerstone Theater
Company, and, as resident playwright, helped to develop the company's signature
style of adapting classic plays into modern contexts. She has written or co-written over 25 of the company's
productions, including adaptations of Dickens's Christmas Carol for Arena
Stage, Shakespeare's Two Noble Kinsmen for the New York Shakespeare Festival,
Brecht's Good Person of Szechuan for Long Wharf Theater, Barry's Peter Pan for
Great Lakes Theatre Festival, and ChekhovÕs The Cherry Orchard for Yale
Repertory Theatre. Her
entertainment-industry inspired version of Chekhov's Seagull was produced in
Los Angeles, Boston and New York, and a version filmed for public television. She has re-made Moliere's Tartuffe in a Kansas farm town, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in Mississippi, Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound on the shuttered grounds of the mother plant of Bethlehem Steel and Pirandello's The Man With a Flower in His Mouth in a modern American shopping mall. Her "don't ask,
don't tell" version of Twelfth Night was remounted as part of the World
Shakespeare Conference. She has
been nominated for Emmy, GLAAD and Ovation awards, and received a Garland Award
for For Here or To Go, her updating of Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle, at the Mark Taper Forum. Pasadena
Playhouse will produce her Southern-California based adaptation of As You Like
It in the spring of 2006.
A member of the
Dramatists and Writers Guilds, she has served on advisory or peer panels for
organizations such as The Ford Foundation, Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest
Foundation, the Mark Taper Forum's Other Voices Projects, and Arts Midwest. She
has guest lectured at many universities and organizations, including Harvard,
Stanford, and the BAM/CUNY Shakespeare Conference, and taught courses at the
University of Southern California and CalState LA in playwriting and
community-based theater. She has
developed hour-long television pilots for CBS and F/X, and her script work has
been seen on Judging Amy. She is currently
writing a book about the history and methodology of the Cornerstone Theater
Company with fellow co-founder and outgoing artistic director Bill Rauch.
Alison lives in
Los Angeles with her husband and two children.