His career took a dramatic turn when his 1986 play Principia Scriptoriae premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club.  It was produced shortly after at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).  For the next eleven years, he was the second most produced playwright behind only the Bard himself.  His commissions include:  Misha's Party, Some Americans Abroad, New England, Columbus and the Discovery of Japan, The General From America and Goodnight Children Everywhere. He is currently an honorary associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

He has written a wide variety of works for almost every media and form of entertainment.  His other plays include Between East and West, Life Sentences, The Return of Pinocchio, Rip Van Winkle or the Works, Sensibility and Sense (produced on television by American Playhouse Theatre), The Vienna Notes, and An American Comedy.  His adaptations include Chekhov's The Three Sisters, Dario Fo's The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and most recently Chekhov's The Seagull which premiered in 2001 in New York's Central Park with an all-star cast including Kevin Kline, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, Natalie Portman, John Goodman, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Mr. Nelson wrote the book for the musical Chess and the screenplay for the movie Ethan Frome.  He is also co-writer of the book Making Plays - The Writer-Director Relationship in Theatre Today with his long-time director David Jones.   

He is the recipient of the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Award (1991), A London Time Out award, two Obies, two Giles Cooper Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Rockefeller playwrighting grants, and two National Endowment for the Arts playwrighting fellowships.

His most recent play is Madame Mellville, which starred Macaulay Culkin both in London and New York, it was directed by the playwright himself.  Just previous to that he wrote the book and was co-lyricist for the musical James Joyce's The Dead for which he won a Tony award in 2000.  In that same year his play Goodnight Children Everywhere received the Olivier award - England's equivalent to a Tony.

Dramaturg’s Corner
The Way It Was
By Dave Bremer

While working as the Dramaturg for The General From America, I found some interesting pieces of information about the world of America in the 1770s.  I would like to share some of that with you.

In the 1770s the total population of North America was three and a half million persons (approximately).  Of these, two and a half million lived along the Atlantic coast in the area of 13 colonial states; countries in their own right.  In all the 13 colonial states, there were four locales which could be classified as cities in the European sense; Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, Baltimore, and New York.  The total combined urban population of North America (including Quebec, Montreal, and Halifax) could have comfortably fit in the SuperBowl.  Western Springs is larger than colonial Philadelphia.

 For years, these 13 client countries lived in (mostly) neutral indifference to each other.  There was limited intercolonial cooperation.  There were even occasions of mutual antipathy and mistrust which almost led to some colonial warfare.  These situations quickly cooled due to a mutual fidelity to Parliament and the King of Great Britain.  Colonial Americans were frequently called British Americans or Royal Americans collectively.  While they felt ties of culture, language, law, religion, and economics to the mother country, they thought of their individual colonies as their country; bound by ties of blood, honor, history, mutual experience and affection.

 The common language was English.  Over time, the many regional dialects of Britain comingled in America where they combined, broadened, flattened out, and took on a distinct character which was identifiable even under regional differences as a dialect of its own called “American English.”

 There was no system of intercolonial roads.  There were no bridges over the major rivers.  It was possible to travel, for example, from Boston to New York or Philadelphia over a torturous series of coach roads of uneven quality – when the weather and season permitted.  The most reliable mode of travel was on water, either coastal sailing ship or by river in some cases.

In colonial America, the average height for a male was 5 feet 8 inches, and for a woman, 5 feet.  The average family would have five children of which two would die in infancy or childhood.  The life expectancy was 47.  The average age of a colonial person was 18!  The average age at marriage was 18 for a man and 16 for a woman.

Most Americans lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic coast.  However, on the frontier, a trade culture flourished.  In many cases, it was of mixed racial elements with Native Americans.  The average frontier person and Native American, for that matter, would likely have a working knowledge of English, French, Iroquois [the language of trade in the Native American eastern tribes] some Dutch, a local tribal language, and possibly sign language.

The rate of literacy was quite high for the time, but ownership of books was not.  Although Americans were voracious readers of newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, monographs, broadsides, letters, and leaflets, most Americans could not afford more than a few books.

Most Americans had more than one job or trade; mostly combinations of being farmers, craftsmen, merchants.

The colonies went through a change following the French and Indian wars.  There evolved a convergence.  An “American” or “Continental” awareness had been born.