BIO
QUINCY LONG is a playwright and librettist. Theater productions: The Joy of Going Somewhere Definite (Mark Taper Forum, LA, also Atlantic Theatre Company, NYC.) The play was optioned by Mel Gibson’s Icon Films. Other productions include People Be Heard (Playwrights Horizons); The Lively Lad (New York Stage and Film, Actors Theatre of Louisville); The Virgin Molly (Atlantic Theatre Company, Berkeley Rep). The Year of the Baby, (Soho Rep); Something About Baseball and Dumb Wedding, (Ensemble Studio Theater Marathons). The Huntsmen, winner of a Sundance Time Warner Storyteller’s Award, was workshopped at the Portland Center Stage’s Just Add Water Festival, and produced by Portland Playhouse. Published by Dramatists Play Service: The Joy of Going Somewhere Definite, People Be Heard, The Johnstown Vindicator, The Lively Lad. Opera productions: Buried Alive, music by Jeff Myers, Fargo-Moorhead Opera and Forth Worth Opera. Current projects include Indian Country, a play, The Embalmer’s Daughter, a one-act opera, and Plum Island, a television series. Quincy is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and the American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program as well as a member of The Tent Theater Company, New Dramatists and Ensemble Studio Theater. Originally from Warren, Ohio, he lives and works in New York City.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
I write comedies, dark comedies, mostly — “Light black” as Clov, from Beckett’s Endgame, would say. I write about things that bother me from my experiences as a troubled youth, a Marine, a prepster, reporter, carpenter, house painter, Yalie, etc. The plays often feature an absurd premise — a debutante wanting a eunuch for her birthday, say, or an invasion of turtles at a Catholic elementary school — but employ a strictly plausible surface. My plays have songs, and my characters, humble or haughty, innocents all, speak a joyfully precise, rhythmic diction.
I don’t set out to write a play in any predetermined way. As an intuitive sort, my goal has always been to write the next play in whatever form it arrives, usually as a dream or a reaction to an experience that has had a profound effect on me. If I have a goal, it would be to create the kind of play that has most influenced me: one that has the acute clarity of dreams and the ability to create harmony between one’s inner and outer realities.
Midwest Porn, an attempt at this sort of play, is the result of a visit to my hometown in Ohio and a dream I had about a boy who shoots a turtle in school. It is of a piece with my larger body of work in that it pairs a sexual preoccupation with a social good. The idea of an amateur pornographer inadvertently saving a floundering Catholic elementary school is the kind of paradox that delights me but arrives only after repeated drafts.
Lately, my writing has taken a slightly different tack. Indian Country, still under construction, is a comedy, but it’s not based on an absurdist premise. The play has to do with a wealthy beach community confronting the fact that the land it occupies was once home to a Native American tribe that now wants the land back. Rikers Island, also in development, follows a runaway slave who ends up in a courtroom presided over by Richard Riker, scion of the slave-trading family that once owned Rikers Island. Both plays spring from historical fact and an awareness of and sensitivity to current tensions around race and ethnicity.