Matthew Spangler is an American playwright, director, and professor of performance studies.
Body of work
Matthew Spangler's plays have been produced on London's West End at Wyndham's Theatre and the Playhouse Theatre, off Broadway at 59E59 Theatre in New York, in Karachi and Lahore Pakistan, at the San Jose Repertory Theatre, Arizona Theatre Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Cleveland Play House, San Diego Repertory Theatre, New Repertory Theatre, Theatre Calgary, Citadel Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, the Nottingham Playhouse, Liverpool Playhouse, Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, the Gesher Theatre in Tel Aviv, Western Stage in Salinas, the Brighton Festival, the National Steinbeck Center, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the Avignon Theatre Festival, in addition to other theatres and festivals. He has written fourteen plays, but is best known for his adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner, which received five San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards: Best Original Script, Best Overall Production for a 300+ seat theatre, as well as awards for Lighting Design, Set Design, and Sound Design. His other plays include All the Shah's Men,about the CIA led coup against the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953; Albatross, based on the poem "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and recipient of two Elliot Norton Awards from Boston's theatre critics; Tortilla Curtain based on the book by T.C. Boyle and recipient of an Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award and finalist for the Best New Play by San Diego's Theatre Critics' Circle; The Forgotten Empress, about the Mughal Empress Noor Jahan, which has been presented in Los Angeles, Pakistan, San Jose, and Houston; and Together Tea based on the novel by Marjan Kamali. Other plays include one-person shows of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Finnegans Wake; A Paradise It Seems, an adaptation of John Cheever’s short stories; Mozart!, a musical theatre adaptation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s letters; and stage adaptations of John Steinbeck’s fiction, Ernest Hemingway’s short stories, Thomas Wolfe’s The Lost Boy, and Jasmin Darznik's Masquerade. Some of Spangler’s recent directing credits include an adaptation of T.C. Boyle’s short story “Killing Babies” for Word for Word Performing Arts Company at the Z Space in San Francisco; Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore for San José State University; Judy’s Veramendi’s The Empty Chalices, a play based on the writing of Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini, which he co-directed at the Next Theatre in Evanston, Illinois; and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross for the San Jose Stage Company.
Selected awards
Leslie Irene Coger Award for Distinguished Performance from the National Communication Association; Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award for Tortilla Curtain; San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards: Best Original Script, Best Overall Production - The Kite Runner; Mary MacMurtrie Award for Best Drama for The Kite Runner, Arizona Daily Star; Best Theatre Production for The Kite Runner, Tucson Weekly; Best Theatre Production Liverpool Post Arts Awards; Elliot Norton Awards from Boston's Theatre Critics.
Education
Matthew Spangler holds a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in Performance Studies, an M.Phil. in Theatre from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Author credits
Matthew Spangler's writing has been published in Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, The James Joyce Quarterly, The New Hibernia Review, Theatre Survey, Nineteenth-Century Literature, SIAR: The Journal of the Western Institute of Irish Studies, The South Atlantic Review, The Biographical Dictionary of Southern Writers, The Art of Elizabeth Bishop, and Performing the Crossroads: Critical Essays in Performance Studies and Irish Culture. His book Staging Intercultural Ireland: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives, about immigration and the performing arts in Ireland, is published by Cork University Press. His play The Kite Runner, based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini, is published by Bloomsbury in the UK and Penguin in the US.
Current employment
Matthew Spangler is Professor of Performance Studies at San Jose State University in Northern California.
