Alan Brody

  • Professor Emeritus of Theater Arts
Email
brody@mit.edu
Artfully treated photo of Building W97 at MIT.

Alan Brody is an accomplished playwright. His plays have won numerous awards and have had productions at such theaters as the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the Aspen Playwrights Conference, the Berkshire Theater Festival, and Theater Forty in Beverly Hills.

At MIT, Brody taught classes in playwriting, acting, and script analysis. He taught Playwrights-in-Performance each spring which staged original student-written scripts selected from work developed in the then 21M.785 Playwright’s Workshop.

His play Invention for Fathers and Sons was the first winner of the annual Rosenthal Award at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in 1989. It was subsequently produced at the American Jewish Theater in New York City. The Company of Angels was the recipient of the 1990 Eisner Award from the Streisand Center for Jewish Culture in Los Angeles. It had its world premiere at the New Repertory Theater in Massachusetts in the spring of 1993 and has been produced at the T. Schreiber Studio in New York and Theater Emory in Atlanta. Three of his plays Five Scenes From Life, Greytop in Love, and One-on-One were developed at the Missouri Repertory Theater. Greytop in Love was subsequently seen at the Walnut Street Theater, Philadelphia in 1998 starring Kim Hunter.

His most recent play, Operation Epsilon, had an extended run at Central Square Theater in the spring of 2013 under the auspices of the Nora Theater and the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT.  It was nominated for four Elliot Norton awards and four IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) awards. It won all four categories at the IRNEs including Best Play of 2013.

The dramatic oratorio Reckoning Time: A Song of Walt Whitman, which he wrote in collaboration with composer Peter Child, had its world premiere at Jordan Hall with the John Oliver Chorale in March of 1995. Among his credits as a director are Vinie Burrows’ internationally acclaimed one-woman show Sister! Sister! and the world premieres of two operas, T.J. Anderson’s Soldier Boy, Soldier and Ken Guilmartin’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Brody is also the author of two novels, Coming To (1973) and Hey Lenny, Hey Jack (1975).