Kaufman, Lynne

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KAUFMAN, Lynne

PERSONAL:

Born in the Bronx, NY; married; husband's name, Steve (a physician), 1957; children: Dan, Jen. Education: Hunter College, B.A.; Columbia University, graduate degree.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Susan Gurman Agency, 865 West End Ave., #15A, New York, NY 10025.

CAREER:

Playwright and author. University of California, Berkeley Extension, staff member for thirty years, became director of travel study programs.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Will Glickman Playwriting Award and Best New Play Award, Bay Area Critics' Circle/ San Francisco Chronicle, both for The Couch; New American Plays Award, Kennedy Center/National Endowment for the Arts, for Speaking in Tongues; Best New Play in California Award, Theaterworks, for Our Lady of the Desert.

WRITINGS:

PLAYS

The Couch (first produced in San Francisco, CA, at the Magic Theatre, 1985), Dramatist's Play Service, 1998.

Roshi, first produced in San Francisco, CA, 1987.

Speaking in Tongues, first produced in San Francisco, CA, at the Magic Theatre, 1989.

Our Lady of the Desert, first produced at Theatre-works (California), 1991.

Shooting Simone (first produced in Louisville, KY, at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, 1993), Dramatic Publishing, 1994.

Fifty/Fifty, first produced by the Theatre Artists of Marin (California), 1994.

Fakes, first produced at the Florida Studio Theatre, 1997.

The Last Game Show, first produced in Washington, DC, at Horizons Theatre, 2000.

The Next Marilyn, first produced at the Florida Studio Theatre, 2003.

Daisy in the Dreamtime, first produced in New York, NY, at the Abingdon Theatre, 2003.

Picasso, first produced in San Francisco, CA, 2003.

OTHER

Slow Hands (novel), Mira Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Wild Women's Weekend (novel), Mira Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and McCall's.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lynne Kaufman wrote short stories for more than ten years before concentrating on plays for nearly two decades. While at a 1980s conference on Jungian psychology, she was intrigued with the relationship between Jung, his wife, Emma, and his mistress, a young patient named Toni Laufer. The three traveled together, and the two women ran the Jung Society. Based upon this history, Kaufman wrote "Phallic Symbols," which drama critic Martin Esslin recommended for production at the Magic Theater, but with a title change: it became The Couch.

Bernard Weiner reviewed the play in the San Francisco Chronicle, noting that Kaufman "takes a whack at no less than Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The two genius psychoanalysts—the elderly Freud with his childhood-sex reductionism, the philandering forty-year-old Jung with his search for the godhead—are shown behaving like two eccentric and silly boys squabbling over possession of a prize marble." The critic added, "But what makes the play sing is the comedy to be mined in romantic and psychoanalytic disputes, not the important philosophical distinctions between Freud and Jung."

Kaufman followed The Couch with Roshi, a play about the changing lives of a group of graduating law students, including Sam, who chooses a Zen life over his girlfriend and a law career but who ultimately fails as leader of the religious community. San Francisco Chronicle critic Steven Winn wrote that "at one obvious level, Roshi can be read as a kind of parable about the dangers and corruptions of religious power—of any power once placed in the hands of a hubristic leader." Winn noted, however, that "it's not clear why Sam feels so drawn to the Zen life in the first place and whether it's mistaken ideology or mere opportunism that leads him to his misdeeds."

Speaking in Tongues, Kaufman's next play, finds Lucia, the daughter of James Joyce, attempting to seduce her father's assistant, Patrick Gregory. Los Angeles Times critic John Godfrey wrote that on one level the play "begs comparison to Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. Both plays deal with a protagonist woman struggling with her untapped sexuality, and in both plays, the protagonist's trauma leads to a complete mental breakdown."

The love affair of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre is the subject of the playwright's Shooting Simone. The couple were together for nearly their entire lives, but never married, in part because of his involvement with other women. In Kaufman's play, she focuses on the dynamic that develops when Beauvoir's country cousin, Olga, shows up in Paris. Sartre is smitten, but it is Beauvoir whom Olga seeks out. The play then fast forwards to 1980 and a journalist named Kate, who confronts de Beauvoir about her life as Kate prepares to shoot a documentary about her heroine.

More recent plays by Kaufman include Fakes and The Last Game Show. The former is set in Holland, during the years between 1937 and 1947, and is based on a true story. Hans Van Meegeren is a painter whose work has been dismissed by the critic Bredius. In order to exact his revenge, Van Meegeren, aided by his lover, the art dealer Caroline Haller, concocts a scheme to embarrass Bredius. Van Meegeren paints a fake Vermeer that Bredius declares a masterpiece. But Van Meegeren's ego comes into play, and he continues painting forgeries, which end up in the collection of Hermann Goering, Hitler's minister of culture. The Last Game Show is set in purgatory. The premise is that the winner of a game show will gain entry to heaven, while the loser goes to hell. The contestants are Martin Heidegger, father of existential phenomenology, and Hannah Arendt, author of Origins of Totalitarianism. Washington Post contributor Nelson Pressley noted that "Alex and Luna, the show's hosts … ironically grill the philosophers with the same holier-than-thou attitude that Heidegger and Arendt sometimes used in their careers.… And the game's ruthless either/or format—winner/loser, truth/lie—is terrific at weeding out equivocations and moral inconsistencies."

In Kaufman's debut novel, Slow Hands, two sisters inherit one million dollars from their mother, who has attached the condition that they open a business together. After pondering where to put the money, Sara and Coralee open a bordello for women in a beautiful Victorian house in Berkeley, a spa-like retreat where four young male Zen students satisfy the needs of the female clients. A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote that the establishment "caters to the unloved, unhappy, and merely horny as a lot of high-minded rationalization of this implausible enterprise is bandied about and politically correct motivation is duly provided." Dave Ford, who interviewed Kaufman for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote that the author "rails against a youth-obsessed American culture that leaves women in middle age, and beyond, feeling invisible. 'I see so many women of a certain age who don't have a partner, or who do, but that sense of womanliness, of sensuality, of being admired and being touched goes away,' she says. 'And there's such a loss.' Slow Hands addresses that loss."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2003, review of Slow Hands, p. 704.

Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1991, John Godfrey, review of Speaking in Tongues, p. 1; June 11, 1993, Jan Breslauer, review of Speaking in Tongues, p. 23.

St. Petersburg Times, March 18, 1994, Susan Eastman, review of Shooting Simone, p. 23; May 13, 1997, John Fleming, review of Fakes, p. 2B.

San Francisco Chronicle, February 3, 1985, Ruthe Stein, "The Couch: Playwright Analyzes Jung's Menage a Trois," p. 22; February 8, 1985, Bernard Weiner, review of The Couch, p. 72; January 29, 1987, Steven Winn, review of Roshi, p. 58; June 17, 2003, Dave Ford, "She Takes Sensuality Seriously: Picasso Playwright Advocates for Senses," p. D2.

Sarasota Herald Tribune, April 18, 1997, Jay Handelman, review of Fakes, p. 3B.

Washington Post, March 8, 2000, Nelson Pressley, review of The Last Game Show, p. C9.

Washington Times, May 21, 1996, Nelson Pressley, review of Shooting Simone, p. C11.