By Rachelle Hughes
Like many a successful playwright, George Brant first fell in love with theatre as an actor. While his initial career aspirations led him to earn a BFA in acting from Northwestern College and to pursue acting, his earlier life successes foreshadowed his true professional destiny, that of a storyteller.
As a young boy, one of his earliest successes was winning a story competition at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary for his twelve-page Comic Book Kid. Little did he know that someday he would have over twenty-five plays in his portfolio. His real playwriting career began when he continued to audition for plays and despite his high school involvement in theatre and his college degree he was not finding the right parts. So, he decided to write a part for himself resulting in Lovely Letters and its debut on the Chicago theatre scene in 1993*.*
“As an actor, you’re always at the mercy of the people who are going to cast you or not,” he said. “I wasn’t necessarily getting the parts I wanted, so I decided to do something creative on my own. Which led to more and more writing. And self-producing” ( “Park Ridge native George Brant’s ‘Grizzly Mama’ gets Midwest premiere” [Chicago Tribune, https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/park-ridge/ct-skr-go-george-brant-tl-1006-20161004-story.html], October 4, 2016).
After discovering his talent for writing, Brant opened his own Chicago theatre, Zeppo Theatre Company, and began writing, directing, and acting in his own plays, which were mostly satirical retellings and parodies of histories and well-known stories. He quickly became known for his gift for comedy. “Everyone around him found him to be the funniest person they knew, as a human being, a performer, and a writer of brilliant and irreverent parodies,” said Derek Goldman who staged some of Brant’s earlier plays at his Chicago theatre, StreetSigns (“Darkness Meets Light in George Brant’s Plays,”[American Theatre, https://www.americantheatre.org/2013/09/01/darkness-meets-light-in-george-brants-plays/], September 1, 2013).
In 2001 Brant married the promising directing student Laura Kepley who happened to be studying at his alma mater. They moved to Rhode Island, and Brant continued to write while his wife pursued her master’s degree. Brant moved away from acting and directing and focused on playwriting. His playwriting style expanded beyond comedies and parodies to encompass a wide variety of stories and historical events. Often his plays deal with unexpected historical moments in history that are on the fringes of society’s consciousness. In 2005, Brant took a trip to Texas to pursue his own dream of earning an MFA in playwriting from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas–Austin (UT).
During his time at UT Brant worked on what eventually became dubbed as a “major American play” Elephant’s Graveyard, according to American Theatre magazine*.* Brant’s wife Kepley went to UT to direct the play’s world premiere where it went on to win the David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center and the $90,000 Keene Prize for Literature at UT. Elephant’s Graveyard has since been produced in more than 100 venues, including colleges and high schools.
Brant’s playwriting star continued to rise as he took on dark comedies with both humor and feeling. But Brant’s break-through arrived with Grounded, a one-woman show about a drone operator who makes life and death decisions from a military posting during daytime working hours and then goes home to her life as a nurturing mother and wife. The piece won the prestigious Smith Prize in 2012, and caught the attention of The Lion King director Julie Taymor and Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway. Hathaway was cast as the lead in Grounded and with Taymor directing and Hathaway in the lead the play became a hit for New York City’s Public Theater. Grounded has been staged in over 140 productions in nineteen different countries. Such a theatre coup for Brant left him feeling grateful and stunned. Never one to rest on his laurels he continued to write more plays with intriguing titles and atypical subject matter.
“For me, there’s never a point where you can sit back and say, ‘OK, now I’ve made it.’ This is a tough business, and it can be a real roller coaster ride. I try to enjoy it as much as I can. And just keep writing,” Brant said in a Chicago Tribune article where he refers to his Grizzly Mama (2011) play about a mother and daughter who have moved next door to an Alaskan presidential candidate. Apparently, the activist mother has ulterior motives for the move.
George Brant’s other plays include Marie and Rosetta, Into the Breeches!, The Prince of Providence, Tender Age, Dark Room, Good on Paper, The Mourners’ Bench, Salvage, Three Voyages of the Lobotomobile, Any Other Name, Defiant, Miracle: A Tragedy, Ashes, NOK, The Lonesome Hoboes, All Talk, One Hand Clapping, The Royal Historian of Oz, Three Men in a Boat, Borglum! The Mount Rushmore Musical, Tights on a Wire, and Night of the Mime.
Critics have been generous with Brant’s body of work and many of their praises ring with words like “compelling,” “moving,” “poetic,” “clever,” and “hilarious” (http://georgebrant.net/plays.html). It is easy to see why his list of awards continues to grow and his work is produced by such companies as the Public Theater, The Atlantic Theater Company, Trinity Repertory Company, Cleveland Play House, The Alley Theatre, Studio Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory, City Theatre, Gate Theatre of London, Page 73, Traverse Theatre, Dobama Theatre, and the Disney Channel, among others*.*
According to Georgebrant.net there are ten productions of his plays Into the Breeches!, Marie and Rosetta, and Grounded slated to be produced throughout the United States and Canada for the 2020 season. The Utah Shakespeare Festival will present Into the Breeches! as part of its 2020 season—the story of a group of soldier’s wives in the year 1942 who are determined to keep the local theatre open during the war with an all-female version of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V. This historical comedy is just one facet of Brant’s storytelling powers. He surely has many more cleverly titled plays and exciting projects (including a feature film of Grounded starring Anne Hatheway) up his sleeves in the years to come.
