PLAYS

Falling Awake
by Matthew Ethan Davis

Sleep At Your Own Risk
by Matthew Ethan Davis

Ticket to Eternity
by Matthew Ethan Davis

Unzipping Intimacy
by Matthew Ethan Davis

Personal Bio: Playwright Life

I was born in Frederick, Maryland, in a year previous to this one. I was raised there in Frederick (where my parents were fighting for the rights of blacks to be able to sit in the front of the theatre and our family quickly became Public Enemy Number One). However, soon, my father Jack Davis, a beautiful abstract artist, got a fellowship to teach anywhere in the world, and so Dad picked India, of course. I adored India. Since I was too young to see all the suffering and this was before Terrorism, all I saw was the beauty and magic, all the celebration. My family choose the summer to drive up the East Coast in an un-air-conditioned car, naturally. During the long ten hour drives my mother (a brilliant writer) told us endless stories about toys that came to life, and we couldn’t hear them enough. Maybe that’s when I became a playwright, I had fully entered the world of the imagination. When it was time to return to America I begged my family to leave me in India, I had joined an Indian Dance Company, and I had the ankle bells and everything. They mumbled some ridiculous thing like leaving a seven year old in another country was not a good idea. I’m still upset about that.

We returned to Frederick and maybe that was where I first learned heartbreak. America looked like a bleak wasteland of mean teachers and no thousands of Gods. But then we moved and I was mostly raised in Abington, PA, a very radical suburb in the middle of no-where. I used to go to school dressed like Janis Joplin and couldn’t figure out why I was always being ridiculed. But then my father saved my life. His college had a play and they needed children and I entered the world of theatre! Although it was very confusing. Every night we stood in a line, our hair died black, waiting for rice, and every night we never got it. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and asked my “mother” why we kept standing in this line when we never got rice and she got all up in arms about not talking on stage in front of an audience or something. A few years later I was in “Six Characters In Search of an Author” and every night I got to be carried on stage dead. I knew my life had finally arrived!

Having kind of flunked out of high school, I waited until, well, years previous to this one, to get my MFA and BFA at NYU Tisch School of the Arts-Dramatic Writing and then another Masters in Deaf Education, of course. Well, I had fallen in love with the beautiful Michael Kaufer and he was Deaf so it seemed like a good idea. My main mentors were really my acting teachers, William Esper and Joanne Baron. The most important “theatre credit” I have is the original production of my play Super Romantic! because I had never heard the sound, felt the feeling, of a theatre erupting into laughter because of what I had written! And I realized that was what I wanted to devote my life to, making people laugh. I did have a promising job at a bowling alley, but eventually theatre won out.

As for my movie/TV credits and awards, well, I realize there’s a page limit here so I won’t mention all and every single one of them.

I do have a wonderful job teaching Introduction to Playwriting and Script Analysis at Marymount Manhattan College and I live for helping people find their visions. I love teaching. And my students are all younger than I am at this current time.

I guess the only other thing I’d want to mention is that I have been blessed with living with a man I adore and who adores me and now, Michael and I are also married. Twenty two years and it’s still thrilling every day.

Professional Bio: Matthew Ethan Davis

Matthew is extremely grateful to be included in this exciting project, after A Midlife’s Dream, was published in Plays and Playwrights, 2001, Martin Denton, Editor. Matthew is the Writer In Residence for “Ticket to Eternity Productions”, which in their first year produced eighteen of his one-act plays and now in its second year, is producing Falling Awake and Sleep At Your Own Risk with several other plays in development. Other productions include: A Little Class (Samuel French Semi-Finalist) at The Long Wharf Theatre One-Act Festival, Gorilla Rep Co. Falling Awake, Salty Tears, The Moon In the Man, Tiberius and Highway 5.9 at Expanded Arts Theatre; Pieces of a Playwright-A Festival of Davis’s one-act plays at Oasis, NY Theatre Group; The Three Minute Hamlet at The Cell Theatre and The Network One-Act Festival.

MFA, BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, MA, Deaf Education from Hunter College. Matthew is an Associate Professor of Playwriting at Marymount Manhattan College. Matthew Thanks Michael for a life of love.

Website: www.MatthewEthanDavis.com

Contact Info: Rochelle at rd@indietheaternow.com

Matthew Ethan Davis on the Indie Theater Blog

Talking with Matthew Ethan Davis: Here Comes the Night
(February 18, 2012)
On Tuesday, February 28, I’ll be moderating a talkback with playwright Matthew Ethan Davis following a staged reading of his play Here Comes the Night. (Details here, at Facebook.) Here Comes the Night is a one-man comedy based on Matthew’s own experiences, as an adult, with sleepwalking. I’m looking forward to seeing the play for [...]