Woodbury, Heather 1964-

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Woodbury, Heather 1964-

PERSONAL:

Born 1964 in CA; married.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Fomenting ARTS Unlimited, Inc., 1166 Glendale, PMB 14, Los Angeles, CA 90026. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Performance artist, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Founder and director of the performance space Café Bustelo in New York, NY, 1987-89. Playwright-in-residence at Joseph Papp Public Theater, 2001-02; instructor of performance workshops in Los Angeles, Boston, and Portland, OR. Has worked as a go-go dancer, barmaid, and waitress.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Best Solo Performance of the Year, Los Angeles Weekly, 1998, for What Ever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts; NEA/TCG Playwrights fellow, 2001; Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays grant, 2001; OBIE Award, 2006, for Tale of 2 Cities: An American Joyride on Multiple Tracks; Spalding Gray Award, 2006; Los Angeles artist's fellow, 2006; Durfee Foundation grant, 2007.

WRITINGS:

(With Larry Fessenden) Hollow Venus: Diary of a Go-Go Dancer (screenplay), 1989.

What Ever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts (one-woman play), first produced in New York, NY, 1996.

Tale of 2 Cities: An American Joyride on Multiple Tracks (play; first produced at the Public Theater in New York, NY, 2001), Semiotext(e) (Los Angeles, CA), 2006.

What Ever: A Living Novel, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2003.

Last Days of Desmond "Nani" Reese: A Stripper's History of the World (one-woman play), first produced in Los Angeles, CA, 2007.

Excerpts from What Ever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts have been published in the Paris Review and anthologized in Extreme Exposure: Solo Performance Text of the 20th Century, edited by Jo Bonney, Theater Communications Group, 2000. Writer and performer of many short performance pieces, including Eos, Daughter of Dawn, first performed in Atlanta, GA, and Anostalgic, first performed in Los Angeles, CA.

ADAPTATIONS:

What Ever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts has been adapted as a radio play for Public Radio International and broadcast on This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass.

SIDELIGHTS:

Heather Woodbury has been a performance artist since the early 1980s, when she became a fixture in Manhattan's East Village shortly after her arrival from the West Coast at the age of seventeen. She later re-transplanted herself to Los Angeles, but undertakes frequent sojourns across the United States and Great Britain to perform, teach, and search for inspiration. She credits eavesdropping as a valuable creative tool and tells aspiring performers that actors are writers and vice versa.

Woodbury's first publication, What Ever: A Living Novel, brings to the printed page her long-running, eight-hour, one-woman performance piece What Ever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts. It is comprised of monologues by over a dozen varied characters, including a patrician eighty-year-old woman in love with her memories of Paris during the Jazz Age; spaced-out California raver Clove, who is on a vision quest for ecstasy, and Skeeter, the road-tripping raver in love with her; the amiable spirit of deceased rock icon Kurt Cobain; and a whore named Bushie. Since the play originated in 1994, its reputation (along with Woodbury's) has evolved to legendary proportions among those in the world of performance art. An early review of the play by Robert Simonson in Back Stage suggested that Woodbury has "a rubber mouth, and she wraps it around as disparate a batch of social dropouts as you'll find in 1990s America." An unabridged version of the ever-lengthening show was broadcast on This American Life, the popular National Public Radio show hosted by Ira Glass.

Critics appreciated the same aspects of the book as they did the play, often comparing Woodbury to Charles Dickens for the broad range of characters she creates and how she conveys their uniqueness to an audience. "It would be a mistake, however, to come to What Ever in search of a one-woman Great Expectations, or even a post-grunge Pickwick Papers," wrote Pamela Renner in American Theatre. "Woodbury's plotting is loose and fast, often cartoonish in feel—more an heir of the oral tradition's riffs and rants than the literary novelist's carefully modulated art," Renner concluded. Although a writer for Kirkus Reviews felt the verbal regionalisms of the characters did not translate well to the page, Jim Dwyer, writing in the Library Journal, noted that Woodbury's phonetic dialogue reveals "how language defines us and shapes our experiences," and called What Ever "a postmodern Tempest." Karen Jenkins Holt, reviewing the novel for Booklist, felt some ambivalence about the printed version of Woodbury's creation, acknowledging her "astute ear" but noting that it can be "distracting." Ultimately, Holt called What Ever "a snapshot of the American psyche that is at once intimate and sprawling."

Woodbury's next creation, Tale of 2 Cities: An American Joyride on Multiple Tracks, was created during her tenure as the playwright-in-residence of the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York and contains a similar panoply of characters, although this time she shares the stage with several other actors. Baseball figures prominently in the plot as a framing device for the theme of urban renewal, as Woodbury—no stranger to the bicoastal life—compares and contrasts the rise and fall of Brooklyn and Los Angeles, beginning with the Dodgers' relocation in 1957 and continuing up through the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001. Spinning the story is DJ Shadow, performing in his dead grandmother's Echo Park apartment.

The piece received praise similar to What Ever, drawing comparisons in terms of theme and scale to the work of John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck; it was published as a novel in 2006. Sam Roberts, writing of Tale of 2 Cities in the New York Times, called the script "jagged, even jarring, but also endearingly realistic and funnily loopy." Furthermore, he wrote that Woodbury "considers baseball a metaphor for life," a point with which Woodbury readily concurred, telling Roberts that "it's the stage on which America acts out its passions and exorcises its demons."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Theatre, October, 2003, Pamela Renner, review of What Ever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts, p. 99.

Back Stage, October 18, 1996, Robert Simonson, review of What Ever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts, p. 48.

Back Stage West, March 19, 1998, Brad Schreiber, review of What Ever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts, p. 10; December 7, 2000, Michael Green, "The Lost Christmas Episode and Violet in Shades of Blue," p. 19.

Booklist, September 15, 2003, Karen Jenkins Holt, review of What Ever: A Living Novel, p. 213.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2003, review of What Ever: A Living Novel, p. 883.

Library Journal, August, 2003, Jim Dwyer, review of What Ever: A Living Novel, p. 137.

New York Times, August 31, 2003, Jason Zinoman, review of What Ever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts; October 18, 2006, Sam Roberts review of Tale of 2 Cities: An American Joyride on Multiple Tracks.

Theatre Journal, December, 2004, Jennifer Schlueter, review of What Ever: A Living Novel, p. 730.