PLAYWRIGHT BIO

Doris Baizley (playwright) was born in Portland Maine, raised in Philadelphia, and lives in Los Angeles where she teaches at Loyola Marymount University. She is a founding member of LA Theaterworks (originally Artists in Prison). She was resident playwright at the Mark Taper Forum’s company for young audiences and dramaturg for its Other Voices Program for theater artists with disabilities. Her plays have been developed and produced at the Mark Taper Forum, ACT Seattle, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, History Theater, The Salt Lake Acting Company and internationally at the Semafor Theater in Prague and the Icon Theater in Taipei. Her most recent work is community-based theater and documentary story editing.

ORIGIN STORY

In fifth grade I invented playwriting. (You write down the character’s name, then you write down the words they say). The play was the story of Sir Walter Raleigh. He puts his cloak over a puddle for Queen Elizabeth I to cross and she knights him. But the next king doesn’t like him. He orders Sir Walter’s head (a goateed basketball) to be cut off. The ax falls. The head rolls into the audience. A huge hit! The play was so popular in our classroom it was moved to the auditorium. It had everything, romance, history - and irony. I never wanted to do anything else.

GROUPS, TROUPES, ENSEMBLES AND COMPANIES

Playwriting isn’t a solitary activity for me. I started out working in groups, with groups, about groups. Lee Worley a founder of the Open Theater formed an ensemble to perform my first play at the Washington Square Methodist Church with months of rehearsal and everyone playing every role. Then with the Theater of Man in San Francisco we wrote and performed collectively. In a rehearsal room at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles I wrote two plays a year to tour the schools with a seven member company directed by John Dennis meeting six days a week for physical work, improv, and theater games to inspire my research and writing. At the Taper a few years later I got to work with Victoria Ann Lewis in the Other Voices Project to dramaturg, research, and edit a collective play by writers and theater artists with disabilities. With Susan Loewenberg, Bonnie Banfield, Barbara Ling and Judith Blahnik we developed a theater workshop in California prisons and expanded it to become a company: L.A. Theaterworks. The work I did in all of these groups goes into the community based and documentary work I do and teach now.