Ellen McLaughlin – författare

Full Length, Drama Characters: 5 female Unit set. Maxine, a search and rescue pilot, returns in midwinter to her childhood home in the Adirondacks. There she conducts a search for a girl who, while on a field trip in the mountains, was abducted by a stranger in a black pick up truck. The search lasts for three days. Each night Maxine must face the girl's distraught mother, Dessa, and her own grandmother, Zofia, a reclusive Polish refugee. In sleep, Maxine is prey to nightmares and fragmented memories of a mother who abandoned her in childhood and was lost to insanity. Cherry Jones starred Off Broadway in this powerful consideration of the notions of loss, motherhood and the vexed yearning for release. "Emotionally powerful ...and intensely satisfying." Seattle Times.

The heroic story of Pericles adapted for new audiences by Ellen McLaughlin.Shakespeare’s romance Pericles follows Pericles, the Prince of Tyre, on a series of adventures across the Mediterranean Sea. Navigating one heroic challenge after another, Pericles strives to be reunited with his wife and child. Ellen McLaughlin’s translation of Pericles illuminates Shakespeare’s text, untangling syntax and bringing forth the poetry of the verse. An encounter between the contemporary and the iconic, this translation brings the play to life as audiences would have experienced it in Shakespeare’s time.This translation of Pericles was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

From The Persians"Defeat is impossibleDefeat is unthinkableWe have always been the favorites of fate.Fortune has cupped usIn her golden palms.It has only been a matterOf choosing our desire. Which fruitTo pick from the nodding tree."This chilling passage is from Ellen McLaughlin’s new adaptation of The Persians by Aeschylus, the earliest surviving play in Western literature, an elegy for a fallen civi-lization and a warning to its new conqueror. As Margo Jefferson wrote in the New York Times, "The play is a true classic: we see the present and the future right there, inside the past. And when writers give us a `new version’ (a translation or adaptation) of a classic, they both serve and use it. They serve the playwright’s gifts by refusing to simplify. But they can’t just imitate. Every age has its own rhythms and drives. The classic must make us feel the new acutely. Ellen McLaughlin serves and uses The Persians with true power and grace."Also included in this volume: Iphigenia and Other Daughters (from Euripides and Sophocles); The Trojan Women (Euripides); Helen (Euripides); and Lysistrata (Aristophanes), all powerfully realized and as relevant today as when they were first performed.Ellen McLaughlin’s plays include Days and Nights Within, A Narrow Bed, Infinity’s House and Tongue of a Bird, which have been widely produced. She is a past finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and was the co-winner of the Great American Play Contest. Also an accomplished actor, Ms. McLaughlin is most known for having originated the part of the Angel in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, appearing in every U.S. production through its Broadway run.