AFTERLIFE -- GHOSTLY COMEDIES

About the Book

“As playgoers hear the voices in Marilyn Monroe’s head and encounter seven visitors to James Dean, they must rethink their relationships with cultural icons. As they ride through a Louisiana swamp in the middle of a hurricane, they must rethink their own lives and losses. O’Neill can somehow enable her audiences to laugh uproariously while re-examining the lies they have been telling themselves.

Katherine H. Adams,
HUTCHINSON PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH,
LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS

Rosary O’Neill’s third volume of plays certainly provides ample evidence of the playwright’s versatility and artistic fertility. As our resident dramatist, our 112 year-old institution is so proud we have this gifted artist at this period of world history that has never needed more the power of theatre to confront, alert, and awaken.

O. Aldon James
PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ARTS CLUB,
NEW YORK, NY

Rosary’s work has scope: From her Southern Gothic roots, her epic collection of plays about a dysfunctional Louisiana family, to that Boulevard of broken dreams, Hollywood. Finally on to her great insights into the worlds of other great artists of the past, Rosary leaves no stone unturned.

Peter Bloch
DIRECTOR, NEW YORK, NY

About the Author

ROSARY HARTEL O’NEILL is the author of twenty plays, many published by Samuel French, Inc.and produced internationally by invitation of the American embassy in Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Norway,Tibilisi, Georgia, Oslo, Budapest, Hungary, London and Moscow. In 2010-11 she won fellowships to the Norman Mailer institute playwriting and screenwriting and the Ireland Tyrone Guthrie Residency in playwriting. Her play Uncle Victor won a signing at the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in New York in 2011. She was founding artistic director at Southern Rep Theater from 1987 to 2002 and has been playwright-inresidence at the Sorbonne Un., Paris; Tulane Un., New Orleans; Defiance College, Ohio, the Un. of Bonn, Germany and Visiting Scholar at Cornell. Her play Beckett at Greystones Bay a finalist in the Pen and Brush International Play competition, 2010 will be produced at the German Consulate, NYC in 2012.

Other fellowships include the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), five fellowships with Ernest Gaines, Playwrighting Fellowships to Squaw Valley, Dorset Colony House, Au Villar France and Wiepersdorf, Germany, and to the Playwriting Center, Sewanee University. Her acting text, The Actor’s Checklist, is used worldwide and in its 3rd edition with Wadsworth Publishers. Her directing text, The Director as Artist, (Harcourt) is a seminal text in the field.

She was chosen outstanding artist and awarded a Fulbright to Paris for her play Wishing Aces. She was a finalist in the Faulkner Competition for New American Writers; a finalist for outstanding artist for Louisiana 2002. Awarded 7 Fulbrights, she was a Senior Fulbright research specialist in drama to Europe, 2001-2006, and a professor of Drama at Loyola Un., New Orleans 1984 - 2002. Recent awards include: membership in the Actors Studio Playwrights Unit, Columbia University Harlem Writers Project, HB Studios Playwrights Workshop, NYC. She is playwright-in-residence at the National Arts Club, where her recent work has been developed.