The Playwrights Database

• Home

• Playwrights

• Plays
• Characters
• Literary Agents
• Play Publishers
• Theatres
• Gay/Lesbian
• Useful Links
• About Doollee
• Submit Info to Doollee

web doollee.com

STEVEN FECHTER

  
Nationality:    USA
email:    Click here to contact     Website:    Click here

Literary Agent:    n/a

Steven Fechter grew up in Los Angeles and attended college in New York where he received a B.A. in English at SUNY Binghamton. He then moved to New York City to pursue life as a poet. Within a year, however, he wrote his first play. Committed to theatre, Fechter enrolled in Hunter College's Graduate Theatre program then went on to get a PhD in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate School. At Hunter he studied under the experimental stage director Jacques Chwat. In 1986 Fechter began working on a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka's last unfinished novel The Castle. With a grant from the Austrian Institute he was able to fund a workshop production titled The Land-Surveyor. The play premiered at The Westbeth Theatre Center in 1992. In 1986 Fechter met painter/filmmaker Power Boothe at Yaddo. They collaborated on a work commissioned by Dance Theatre Workshop. Titled Wilderness, it combined film, live performance, dance, and music. Fechter wrote the text and was one of the two performers in the premiere (DTW, 1988). In March of 2000 the Actors Studio produced Fechter's play The Woodsman, about the redemption of a convicted child molester. The production had a successful four-week run at the Raw Space on West 42nd Street. Since then The Woodsman has been staged throughout North America and Europe, including a sold-out run in the 2010 German-language production at Theatre Bielefeld, in Bielefeld, Germany. Shortly after the play's Actors Studio production, Fechter began work on a screen version with film director Nicole Kassell. A year later their screenplay won 1st prize in the 2001 Slamdance Screenwriting Competition. Two years later producer Lee Daniels (Monster's Ball) produced and Kassell directed the The Woodsman (2004), starring Kevin Bacon. The film received critical acclaim and for that work Fechter was a Humanitas Prize finalist in screenwriting. The issues raised in The Woodsman continued to interest Fechter. He went on to write As Driven Snow and The Fiend, forming a trilogy of plays dealing with the subject of child sexual abuse. A bigger issue soon engaged Fechter: 9/11. After the tragedy he asked other playwrights he knew to respond. In February 2002 he produced Floating World: Playwrights Give Voice, a Benefit Reading for the victims of 9/11. It was presented at Dixon Place, NYC. Fechter contributed two plays: Ellipsis and Mrs. Clarke's Heart. In 2006, Fechter's play The Last Cigarette had its West Coast premiere at the Lounge Theatre in Los Angeles. It received a Critic's Choice by both the LA Weekly and Backstage-West. In 2007, The Commission premiered at The New York International Fringe Festival. Set during the aftermath of a bloody civil war, the story spins backward in time to reveal how love, betrayal, and the fates of four people are intertwined. The Commission has been translated into German and joined the repertory of Theater Bielefeld in Germany for their 2008-2009 season. In 2008, The Golden Aurora, a modern fable about a man who falls in love with a dog, premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival. Resonance Ensemble commissioned then produced Fechter's play Shakespeare's Slave at the Clurman Theatre on New York's Theatre Row in 2011. The play reveals a dark and critical time in William Shakespeare's life and work. A year later, Thom Fogarty and Other Side Productions produced world premieres of his plays The Artifacts and The Mentee at the Bridge Theatre in New York. The Mentee deals with the long-range aftershocks of a poet's suicide. Fechter teaches film and theatre at John Jay College and screenwriting at the Fashion Institute of Technology. He also writes essays for ScriptShark.com's ScriptWriting Blog commenting on screenwriting and films. He is a proud member of Resonance Ensemble, EST Playwrights Unit, New River Dramatists, and The Dramatists Guild.

Research:    Member of the Dramatists Guild of America (as at 2015)

Buy Plays with Doollee

Each page of doollee.com has links to play/book outlets, either directly to the Publisher, through Stageplays.com and Amazon to the second hand and 1st editions of AbeBooks. These links will automatically take you to the relevant area obviating the need for further search.
AbeBooks.co.uk   AbeBooks.com   Stageplays.com   amazon.com   amazon.co.uk   amazon.ca

---

whether you are a Playwright who wishes to make their entry definitive, an unlisted Playwright or a User with a tale to tell - we want to hear from you.
download WORD submission template

below is a list of Steven Fechter's plays - click on a Play Title for more information

        167 Tongues         Artifacts, The         Commission, The         Ellipsis         Golden Aurora, The         Intimacies         Lancelot         Land Surveyor, The         Last Cigarette, The         Lunch With Jack         Mentee, The         Mission, The         Newspaper Play, The         Retreat, The         Schiele         Shakespeare's Slave         Wilderness         Woodsman, The