Frank Dwyer

Frank Dwyer is a poet, playwright, actor, theater director, co-translator with the late Nicholas Saunders of Russian plays, and author of young adult biographies of John Adams, Georges-Jacques Danton, King Henry VIII, and King James I. The Affliction of Glory: A Comedy About Tragedy, Frank's play about the great English actress Sarah Siddons, was commissioned by the Getty Center and premiered in a joint production with the Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles). Frank and Nicholas Saunders have translated Anton Chekhov's major plays, including The Wood Demon, The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, and nine of his comic one-acts; Maxim Gorky's The Summer People and Enemies; Mikhail Bulgakov's Zoyka's Apartment; Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector; Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country, and Aleksander Ostrovsky's The Forest (in preparation), their 20th collaboration. Some of their translations have been published by Smith & Kraus and by Samuel French, Inc.

Frank directed the premiere of their co-translation of The Wood Demon at the Mark Taper Forum. As a member of the Repertory Company of Lincoln Center, Frank appeared in Ellis Rabb's production of an earlier translation of Gorky's Enemies. He worked as an actor on Broadway, in the New York Shakespeare Festival, at the Roundabout Theater, the Quaigh Theater, Playwrights' Horizons, the Music-Theatre Group, and CSC. He won an Outlook "Best of the Year" citation for his performance as Falstaff in a version of both parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV at the Odyssey Theatre (LA). He is a frequent lecturer in the Los Angeles area, and has taught acting, dramaturgy for actors, and poetry workshops, as well as courses in play analysis, Shakespeare, Introduction to Theater, and the History of World Theater at the California Institute of the Arts, the University of Redlands, and UCLA, where he taught the theater portion of Robert Winter's popular cluster course, "Inside the Performing Arts."