Biography
Frank Dwyer is a poet, playwright, director, actor, and translator. His play, The Affliction of Glory: A Comedy About Tragedy, was commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum and premiered at the Getty Center in a joint production with the Mark Taper Forum. With his collaborator, the late Nicholas Saunders, Mr. Dwyer has translated 20 Russian plays, including the five major works and most of the comic one-acts of Chekhov, as well as plays by Gogol, Ostrovsky, Turgenev, Gorky, and Bulgakov. Mr. Dwyer directed the Saunders-Dwyer premiere of Anton Chekhov's The Wood Demon at the Mark Taper Forum, in Los Angeles. Chekhov X 4, an evening of Chekhov one-acts premiered by the Antaeus Company, won Saunders and Dwyer the 2004 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Translation. Their version of Bulgakov's Zoya's Apartment was produced on Broadway at Circle in the Square, and an earlier version of The Cherry Orchard was recorded and broadcast on public radio across the United States by LA Theatre Works.
As an actor, Mr. Dwyer was a member of the company of the Repertory Theater at Lincoln Center (1972-73). He appeared on Broadway in the 25th-anniversary revival of A Streetcar Named Desire and in productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Roundabout Theater, Playwrights Horizons, CSC Repertory Theater, and the Quaigh Theater (NYC), where he played the title role in Mrozek's Vatzlav. At CSC, Mr. Dwyer directed and played The Player in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. A Founding Member of the Antaeus Company (LA), Mr. Dwyer and his wife Mary Stark appeared together in the Taper-Antaeus production of Feydeau's A Fly in the Ointment, translated by Lillian Groag. For Robert Winter's Summerfest series at the Getty, with Neal Stuhlberg conducting, Mr. Dwyer narrated Poulenc's Babar. He wrote and performed texts for tone poems by Dvorak ("The Lady of Noon") and Franck ("The Thrill of the Chase") with Stuhlberg and the UCLA Philharmonia. Mr. Dwyer directed Much Ado About Nothing for the Ojai Shakespeare Festival. His performance as Falstaff, in an adaptation of both parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV produced at the Odyssey Theater (LA), won Mr. Dwyer a Santa Monica Outlook "Best of the Year" citation. In his 12 years as Literary Manager and then Guest Artist at the Mark Taper Forum, Mr. Dwyer worked frequently as an actor, director, and dramaturg.
Mr. Dwyer has had poems published in many literary journals and magazines, including American Poetry Review, The New England Review, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Centennial Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Salmagundi. His poem, "Bible Story," won a major prize in the prestigious Arvon Foundation competition (London). He has written four young adult biographies -- John Adams; Henry VIII, James I, and Danton -- all published by Chelsea House (NYC). He lectures widely in Los Angeles for such organizations as the Center Theatre Group, the Getty Museum, the Huntington Library, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Opera, the Clark Library, the Jane Austen Society, the Friends of English (UCLA), and the Pasadena Senior Curriculum. He has taught theater courses at the California Institute of the Arts, the University of Redlands, and UCLA. He is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.
