Biography
Charles Deemer
Charles Deemer teaches screenwriting at
Portland State University. He is a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and
pioneer in hyperdrama. He is the editor of Oregon
Literary Review and the artistic
director of Small Screen Video.
"Having written almost daily for over 40 years, I can say that writing is
not a job or a vocation or a profession--it is an existence. It is a way of being in
the world."
Charles' impact on Northwest literature and theater over the past
twenty-plus years is impressive. As a critic I've followed his work
since the early 1980s, and no playwright has had such an important or
long-lasting effect on this community's cultural life. Charles's work
has always had an intense sense of place, but also the technical skill and
intellectual breadth to give it strong impact far from home, as his
many national and international productions attest. In the 1980s,
when theater budgets were even more paltry than they are now, Deemer
proved that a good playwright working with talented Portland actors
and directors could create brilliant, engaging theater that could
inspire an entire arts scene. With such plays as "Chateau de
Mort" and "Turkeys" he also became a national pioneer in
the field of simultaneous action or hyperdrama, anticipating an
artistic movement that would later sweep such centers as Los Angeles,
Chicago and New York. Many of his plays have also dealt specifically
with matters of local or regional history and the history of radical
politics, from "Ramblin' " to "1934: Blood and
Roses" to "Abigail aud Harvey."
But
mostly it's the broad intellectual range of Deemer's many plays that
distinguish his career. The beautiful, compassionate and very funny
meeting of East and West in "Christmas at the Juniper
Tavern," the personal and artistic struggles of the great French satirist
Moliere in "The Comedian in Spite of Himself," the
hardscrabble humanity of "Waitresses," the
conjunction of sexual politics and nuclear physics in "The
Half-life Conspiracy": Each of these constitutes a high point in
the history of Portland drama. Deemer
has a special talent.
URL-http://cdeemer2007.blogspot.com/
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Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Roxana Purdea
ropur@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press