Vincent Delaney’s plays have been produced, commissioned and developed at the Guthrie, Humana Festival, Premiere Stages, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Florida Stage, InterAct, the Magic, Woolly Mammoth, Source Theatre Festival, Pittsburgh Public, New Harmony, PlayLabs, the Lark, andLAByrinth, among others. His awards include McKnight and Bush fellowships, a Jerome Commission, the Heideman, and Core Membership at the Playwrights Center. Ampersand won the Reva Shiner Award from the Bloomington Playwrights Project. The Sequence, commissioned by the Guthrie, has been produced around the country and in the UK, Canada and Japan. 99 Layoffs premiered at RadialTheatre Project and ACT Theatre, and was produced at Orange Tea Theatre in Amsterdam. The script was a nominee for the Steinberg Award. Foreclosure was developed at Seattle Rep, Shakespeare and Company, and Florida Studio Theatre. Vincent is published by Applause Books, Smith and Kraus, Samuel French, Heineman, Dramatics Magazine, Theatre Forum, and Playscripts.com.

In 2004 I received a grant to spend a month in Germany, interviewing elderly former soldiers who’d been prisoners of war in the US during World War II.  I was astonished at the range of personalities I encountered: some of them had been barely teenagers when they were conscripted by Hitler, and had never seen action before they were captured. Others had been (and perhaps still were) ardent Nazis. I found the interviews sometimes chilling, sometimes uplifting.  Above all, I learned how diverse these young soldiers had been–a diversity that we never seem to grant our enemies, when we depict them.

The stories they told were full of humor and contradiction and worry.  They were also amazing.  Everything in the play is historical, including the hard-to-believe drag production of Moliere’s Miser (I have pictures!).