13th Annual
California Authors Night
March 4, 2005 7 P.M.

Kurt Gravenhorst	became	Eugene O'Neill
When Kurt Gravenhorst attended a conference at Tao House in 1985 he became inspired to tell O’Neill’s story, focusing on the philosophy, “The stuff of tragedy comes out of your life, not out of your head.” Gravenhorst’s idea stalled during a sixteen-year incubation period. He experienced some of the same tortured feelings as O’Neill. Though he wanted the monologue to run 60-70 minutes, his first draft was over two hours. Cuts became increasingly difficult. His struggle to let go of powerful and important moments conjures up images of O’Neill creating Long Day’s Journey Into Night at Tao House in the hills above Danville. In an interview, Gravenhorst said, “I’m a half-Irish, fallen Catholic, recovering alcoholic writer-actor. I’ve been unwittingly preparing this role for the last 30 years.” He refreshed his performing skills in an acting course at Stanford University and earned roles at the Foothill Studio Theatre and the City Lights Theatre Co. before Into the Wake of the Moon went into production. The result was an acclaimed one man-show. Kurt has performed Into the Wake of the Moon, at several Bay Area venues including Playwrights’ Theatre at Tao House. When not walking the boards, Kurt is a professor of English and Humanities at Foothill College. Following the performance, Mr. Gravenhorst will entertain questions from the audience.		Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (1888-1953), the only Nobel Prize winning playwright from the United States and the architect of modern American theater, lived at Tao House in the hills above Danville from 1937 to 1944. It was at this site that he wrote his final and most successful plays; The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon For the Misbegotten. O'Neill was America's first major playwright and the first to fully explore serious themes as subject matter for the theater. He began to write seriously when living in Greenwich Village and working with the Provincetown Players. His early plays were notable for their crude and colloquial dialogue, a far cry from the expected eloquence of the comedy of manners. Experimenting further with stark realism, O'Neill wrote several plays in which he traced a character's emotional decline into a primitive self. He never enjoyed perfect health: he struggled with alcoholism, nearly died of tuberculosis as a young adult, and in the 1930s began to suffer from Parkinson's disease. His output, however, was remarkable, with such works as The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and The Iceman Cometh (1946). In addition, he won four Pulitzer Prizes and the 1936 Nobel Prize in literature. O'Neill's strongly autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night was first produced in 1956, three years after his death.

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7pm March 4, 2005 at the
Pleasant Hill Community Center
320 Civic Drive Pleasant Hill, CA 94523

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Tickets are $10 (tax deductible contribution)
Net proceeds fund California Writers Club
Mt. Diablo Branch Young Writers Contest
for Contra Costa Middle School students

A Co-Production of California Writers Club Mt. Diablo Branch and Pleasant Hill Recreation & Park District