Michael Louis Wells - Playwright
A winner of The London New Play Festival, two-time finalist for the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Heideman Award, inaugural recipient of a First Light commission from the Albert P. Sloan Foundation and finalist for the Verity Bargate Award at London’s Soho Theatre & Writers Centre, Wells’s plays have seen production, publication, workshops and readings in New York, London, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington, DC and elsewhere.
Wells made his professional debut in New York with Real Real Gone (published by Smith & Kraus), which The Star Ledger observed “heralds a new writer with an acute sense of language and a special ability to dramatise human behaviour” and Variety pronounced as “the best of the bunch -far and away – with language that laces the natural poetics of the street with erudition”.
Other works include The “I” Word: Interns (Faber & Faber), about idealistic Clinton staffers, , cited by Show Business as “ripe with political savvy” and The Village Voice for “handling the Beltway lingo with brains and Shavian brio!” as well as Detail, winner of The London New Play Festival and produced in a new version in New York in June 2006.
A short piece, Two From The Line, has been selected for publication by Smith & Kraus for their “Best Ten Minute Plays – 2008” anthology.
His play, District of Columbia, set in a cooperative house on the eve of the 1988 US Presidential election, was workshopped in March 2007 at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and given a subsequent developmental reading off-West End at The Finborough in November 2007 - both under the direction of Wilson Milam.
Another full-length, Seven Pages Unsigned- was workshopped in New York in August 2007 under the direction of Pamela Berlin and is simultaneously in development with San Francisco’s Magic Theatre under Artistic Director, Chris Smith, where it received a workshop in December 2007 as one of three plays selected for this season’s “New Voices West”, a programme dedicated to new works from emerging American playwrights.
Several other works are currently in development. Wells is a member of New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre (Founding Artistic Director- the late great Curt Dempster), The Dramatists Guild of America and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.