Barbara Field, has had work produced across the United States, Canada and Europe.  She served as playwright-in-residence at the distinguished Guthrie Theater from 1974 to 1981, creating a number of pieces: her translations include Marriage (Gogol), Monsieur de Moliere (Bulgakov), and Pantalgleize (Ghelderode).  Adaptations for the Guthrie from novels include Camille (Dumas) and Playing With Fire, a response to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  An adaptation commissioned by the Seattle Children’s Theater of Great Expectations later played at the Guthrie and traveled the country on an 8-month tour. A revival of Great Expectations recently won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award.  Field’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol has been a part of the Guthrie’s and the Missouri Rep’s seasons for 27 years.  For the Seattle Children’s Theater she adapted The Boxcar Children in 1999.   Her adaptation of Dreams in the Golden Country was recently performed at the Kennedy Center and on a national tour.  Her adaptation of Scaramouche was recently seen at the Washington Shakespear Theatre.

Her original work includes Neutral Countries, first produced at the Actors Theater of Louisville’s Humana Festival in 1983, where it was named Best American Play; Coming of Age for the Indiana Rep; Quality Time for the Pennsylvania Stage Company; Boundary Waters for California’s South Coast Rep (it subsequently won a 1992 DramaLogue Award); and Off the Ice for the Repertory Theater of St. Louis.  Currently, she is working on I Was a Rat! for the Seattle Children’s Theatre.

She has written one original opera libretto, Rosina (with composer Hiram Titus), which was commissioned and produced by the Minnesota Opera, and has subsequently been seen elsewhere around the country.  With Titus she created a musical, The Skinflint, for the Repertory Theater of St. Louis.  She has just completed a new comedy, The Book of Vashti.

Field is a founding member of The Playwrights’ Center, Minneapolis, and is a site reporter for the National Endowment for the Arts.  A book of seven of her plays for the Guthrie Theater, New Classics from the Guthrie Theater was published in 2003 by Smith & Kraus.

Barbara Field’s first anthology: Collected Plays, Volume One will be released later this month and available for purchase at The Playwrights’ Center. Collected Plays includes six of Field’s original works: Materia Medica, Matrix, Neutral Countries, The Education of Paul Bunyan, Boundary Waters, and Off The Ice.

 “There are many virtues to a single-author collection. One is the opportunity to really hear what’s distinctive in a playwright’s voice across a number of plays.” – Michael Bigelow Dixon, Foreward, Collected Plays.
“Off The Ice…a delightful three-ring circus…Field has crafted an imaginative, bawdy, surprise-a-minute play, sprinkled with some brilliant dialogue and driven by the thrilling theme: ‘The whole point of emancipation is you own yourself.’ “– Patricia Corrigan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

 “We walked out of Boundary Waters uplifted and high on the miracle of life. What an intelligent, articulate work… All the way home we talked non-stop, energized by the myriad concepts and dichotomous connections that Barbara Field presented. Critic’s Choice.” – Shirle Gottlieb, Drama-Logue.

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The House of Seven Gables

Adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Description

September 22, 2008
No public presentation

An adaptation of The House of the Seven Gables, which is set in a gloomy New England mansion, haunted from its foundation by fraudulent dealings, accusations of witchcraft, and sudden death. The current resident, the dignified but desperately poor Hepzibah Pyncheon, opens a shop in a side room to support her brother Clifford, who is about to leave prison after serving thirty years for murder. A distant relative, the pretty young Phoebe, turns up and quickly becomes invaluable, charming customers and rousing Clifford from depression. (World premiere slated for Carleton College, Fall of 2008)

September 22, 2008
No public presentation

An adaptation of The House of the Seven Gables, which is set in a gloomy New England mansion, haunted from its foundation by fraudulent dealings, accusations of witchcraft, and sudden death. The current resident, the dignified but desperately poor Hepzibah Pyncheon, opens a shop in a side room to support her brother Clifford, who is about to leave prison after serving thirty years for murder. A distant relative, the pretty young Phoebe, turns up and quickly becomes invaluable, charming customers and rousing Clifford from depression. (World premiere slated for Carleton College, Fall of 2008)

THE DWINDLES

Adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne
Description

A year of free room and board, scintillating conversation and compelling company at a renowned artist’s colony? Sounds too good to be true to Edward MacKenzie, a has been artist whose career once was. He’s looking for inspiration, but what he discovers is a collection of temperamental artists – and a corpse. Along the way, he has a close encounter with his past and his future.

This reading is dedicated to the memory of actor, playwright, and theater professor Charles Nolte. In the early 1970s, Nolte inspired four University of Minnesota students, including Barbara Field, to form a group to read one another’s plays—and the Playwrights’ Center was born. Prior to the reading, friends and admirers of Nolte, including Playwrights’ Center co-founder John Olive, will take time to remember Nolte and his impact on their careers and on the theater community of the Twin Cities over the years.