James Magruder – författare

Things look bad for Rick Lahrem, a high school sophomore in a cookie-cutter Chicago suburb in 1976. His mother's second husband is a licensed psychologist who eats like an ape, his stepsister is a stoner slut, and his father is engaged to a Southern belle. Rick's only solace is his growing collection of original Broadway-cast LPs, bought on the sly at Wax Trax. After he brings two girls in speech class to tears by reading a story aloud, Rick is coaxed onto the interscholastic forensics team to perform an eight-minute dramatic interpretation of The Boys in the Band, the controversial sixties play about homosexuality. Unexpectedly successful at this oddball event, Rick begins winning tournaments and making friends with his teammates. Rick also discovers the joys of sex - with a speech coach from a rival school - just as his mother, reacting to a deteriorating home environment, makes an unnerving commitment to Christ. The newly confident Rick assumes this too shall pass - until the combined forces of family, sex, and faith threaten to undo him at the state meet in Peoria. James Magruder's ""Sugarless"" offers a ruefully entertaining take on the simultaneous struggles of coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming-to-Jesus.

In this entertaining book, a playwright and theater critic presents up-to-date and witty translations of three classic comedies of French theater: Alain-René Lesage’s satire Turcaret, Pierre Marivaux’s love comedy The Triumph of Love, and Eugène Labiche’s farce Eating Crow. James Magruder’s translations capture the humor and imagination of the original texts and significantly extend the English-language repertory of French comedies.  Magruder’s enlightening introduction sets each play within the context of its author’s oeuvre and the theatrical culture of its time. Turcaret, written in the eighteenth century, is the tale of a high-stakes entrepreneur who, along with every other character, is irredeemably craven and genially amoral. This play of sexual intrigue, greed, and bad manners, says Magruder, was revolutionary in the history of drama for its lack of a moral cynosure. A second eighteenth-century play, The Triumph of Love, makes self-reflection and self-consciousness both the substance and obstacles of the action, as it focuses on the tireless efforts of Princess Léonide to woo Agis and his guardians. Eating Crow, written in the nineteenth century and never before translated into English, is a hilarious story of excesses that takes aim at stockbrokers, skinflints, dowagers, dandies, and paralegals, among others.

An insider’s spirited history of Yale Repertory Theatre  In this serious and entertaining chronicle of the first fifty years of Yale Repertory Theatre, award-winning dramaturg James Magruder shows how dozens of theater artists have played their parts in the evolution of a sterling American institution. Each of its four chapters is dedicated to one of the Yale Rep’s artistic directors to date: Robert Brustein, Lloyd Richards, Stan Wojewodski Jr., and James Bundy. Numerous sidebars—dedicated to the spaces used by the theater, the playwrights produced most often, casting, the prop shop, the costume shop, artist housing, and other topics—enliven the lavishly illustrated four-color text. This fascinating insider account, full of indelible descriptions of crucial moments in the Rep’s history, is based in part on interviews with some of America’s most respected actors about their experiences at the Rep, including Paul Giamatti, James Earl Jones, Frances McDormand, Meryl Streep, Courtney B. Vance, Dianne Wiest, and Henry Winkler—among many others.  More than just a valentine to an important American theater, The Play’s the Thing is a story about institution-building and the force of personality; about the tug-of-war between vision and realpolitik; and about the continuous negotiation between educational needs and artistic demands.

James Magruder’s collection of linked stories follows two gay cousins, Tom and Elliott, from adolescence in the 1970s to adulthood in the early ’90s. With a rueful blend of comedy and tenderness, Magruder depicts their attempts to navigate the closet and the office and the lessons they learn about libidinous co-workers, résumé boosting, Italian suffixes, and frozen condoms. As Tom and Elliot search for trusting relationships while the AIDS crisis deepens, their paths diverge, leading Tom to a new sense of what matters most. Magruder is especially adept at rendering the moments that reveal unwritten codes of behaviour to his characters who have no way of learning them except through painful experience. Loss is sudden, the fallout portrayed with a powerful economy. In Tom and Elliott, readers come to recognise themselves, driven by the same absurd desires and unconscious impulses, subjected to the same fates.