I am lucky enough to have been part of both the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference and the Music Theatre Conference. In fact, the Playwrights Conference was the first significant break in my career and the Music Theatre Conference was instrumental in launching a whole new phase of my writing life.
What does it mean to have an artistic home? Playwrights create an artistic home with each new production, but that home and that family disband after closing night. Like gypsies, we pack up and move on to our next destination. But a true home is a place that nurtures you, launches you, and allows you to come back every once in a while.
I recently spent a weekend at the O’Neill with composer Mel Marvin. The O’Neill gave us the time and space to come together to work on our musical JOAN OF ARC. Revisiting the O’Neill made me realize that this place, more than any other (except for New Dramatists) is my artistic home. But it’s not just a place, it’s a person who has given me so much and supported so much of my work. And that person is Paulette Haupt, artistic director of the O’Neill Music Theatre Conference.
Paulette invited me to the O’Neill with my first musical, LUCY’S LAPSES (written with the composer Christopher Drobny), a black comedy about a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. LUCY’S LAPSES went on to productions at Playwrights Horizons, NYC and Portland Opera Company, OR. Paulette was our superb conductor in both instances.
A few years later Paulette received a producer’s grant from the NEA and teamed with Boston Lyric Opera to commission MARTIN GUERRE, which I wrote with composer Roger Ames. Following our first workshop at Boston Lyric Opera, Paulette invited us to develop the musical at the O’Neill the following two summers. Because of that priceless time and support, MARTIN GUERRE went on to a spectacular production at Hartford Stage Company.
Most recently, Paulette commissioned Jenny Giering and me to write a thirty-minute, one-woman musical for “Inner Voices.” That musical was ALICE UNWRAPPED, which was the inspiration for my first novel, Alice Bliss.
I am one of many, many artists whom Paulette has nurtured, championed, and supported. I’m guessing that if you asked her, Paulette would say that her reward comes in making it possible for so much wonderful work come to life. I find myself thinking of how I can possibly ever thank her for giving me something as essential as an artistic home. I can only hope that through teaching my students and through mentoring and championing other writers that I am walking in Paulette’s footsteps just a little bit, and passing on, or paying forward, some of what has been so generously given to me.
To learn more about this remarkable, talented, gracious woman, read on. The following is excerpted from the O’Neill Music Theatre Conference Website. To learn more about the O’Neill and its programs, click here: http://www.theoneill.org/
Paulette Haupt: National Music Theatre Conference Artistic Director
Ms. Haupt was a co-founder and has served as Artistic Director for the National Music Theater Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center since 1978. In that capacity, she has selected and guided the development of more than one hundred musicals, including Maury Yeston, Mario Fratti and Arthur Kopit’s Nine, Enid Futterman and Howard Marren’s Portrait of Jennie, Joe Masteroff and Edward Thomas’ Desire Under the Elms, Patrick Cook and Frederick Freyer’s Captains Courageous, John Jiler and Ray Leslee’s Avenue X, Polly Pen’s Christina Alberta’s Father, Brian Crawley and Jeanine Tesori’s Violet, Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party, Stuart Ross and Debra Barsha’s Radiant Baby, Kirsten Child’s The Bubbly Black Girl, Tan Dun’s Marco Polo, Jeff Whitty, Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez’s Avenue Q, Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s The Nightingale, and Quiara Alegria Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights.
Ms. Haupt was an associate producer for Polly Pen’s Goblin Market off-Broadway, and has commissioned, developed and produced new works for OPERA America, The National Alliance for Musical Theater and Columbia Artists Management.
Since 2001, Ms. Haupt has commissioned, developed and produced new works with her New York Company Premieres, including several works by Richard Rodgers Award recipients. In 2008, Premieres presented three original commissioned works by Ellen Fitzhugh and Michael John LaChiusa (Tres Ninas), Laura Harrington and Jenny Giering (Alice Unwrapped), and Michele Lowe and Scott Davenport Richards (A Thousand Words Come to Mind). Inner Voices: Solo Musicals premiered at the Zipper Theater in May 2008 to critical and audience acclaim. Following the success of the initial Inner Voices series, the second season in April of 2010 included commissioned works by Cheri Steinkellner and Georgia Stitt (Mosaic), and David Simpatico and Josh Schmidt (Whida Peru: Resurrection Tangle), presented at 59 East 59th Street Theaters. In the fall of 2012, Premieres will present its third season of Inner Voices with works by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nilo Cruz and composer Jim Bauer, monologist Martin Moran and composer Joseph Thalken, and award-winning novelist/playwright Victor Lodato and composer Polly Pen.
Following her San Francisco Opera debut in Carmen, for more than three decades, Ms. Haupt was a music director and conductor of operas and musicals worldwide, including Man of La Mancha, Sweeney Todd, Kiss Me, Kate, Savage Land at The Kennedy Center, Once Upon a Mattress on an extensive tour of India and Sri Lanka, The Music Man in Beijing, China, Christina Alberta’s Father at The Vineyard Theatre, and Lucy’s Lapses at Playwright’s Horizons.
In 2002, Ms. Haupt was the associate conductor for the Grammy nominated recording of Joe Masteroff and Edward Thomas’ Desire Under the Elms, and recently conducted Irving Berlin’s White Christmas at the Buell Theater with the Denver Center Theater Company.
As a pianist, she has appeared worldwide in concerts with many musical theater and opera singers, and was the only “Plaidette” ever to perform in Stuart Ross’s Forever Plaid in New York.
Ms. Haupt has just completed her third year as a Tony Award® Nominator.
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