Robert Schenkkan
Encyclopedia
Robert Frederic Schenkkan, Jr. (born 19 March 1953) is an American playwright
, screenwriter
, and actor, perhaps most recognizable as the character of Lieutenant Commander Dexter Remmick in Star Trek: The Next Generation
. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
in 1992 for his work The Kentucky Cycle
.
, to Jean McKenzie and Robert Frederic Schenkkan, a public television executive. He grew up in Austin, Texas
. As a Plan II Honors student he received a B.A.in Drama, magna cum laude from the University of Texas, Austin (Phi Beta Kappa and Friars' Society), and an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts from Cornell University
. For many years, he lived in New York City
and then Los Angeles, California
, working both as a writer and an actor in film, television, and theatre
. Since 1990 he has focused exclusively on his writing.
in February, 2005. The play is unrelated to the Stephen Vincent Benét
short story By the Waters of Babylon
or its subsequent adaptation. Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates premiered at the Mark Taper Forum
in Los Angeles in December 2005. The Marriage of Miss Hollywood and King Neptune premiered at the University of Texas at Austin in November 2005. And The Devil and Daniel Webster premiered at the Seattle Children’s Theatre in February 2006.
The Handler, a play dealing with a snake handling
church, premiered at the Actors Express Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia
. Heaven On Earth won the Julie Harris
/Beverly Hills Theatre Guild Award, participated in the Eugene O'Neill Playwright's Conference, and premiered off-Broadway
at the WPA Theatre. Final Passages premiered at the Studio Arena theatre. And Tachinoki premiered at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in Los Angeles and was designated a Critic's Choice by the LA Weekly
. His other play for young audiences, The Dream Thief, had its premier at Milwaukee's First Stage.
Schenkkan has written numerous one-act plays which are collected together and published by Dramatists Play Service
as Conversations With the Spanish Lady. Among them is The Survivalist which premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville
's Humana festival, went on to the EST Marathon in NYC, Canada's DuMaurier Festival, and the Edinburgh Festival
where it won the "Best of the Fringe" award.
The Kentucky Cycle
was the result of several years of development, starting in New York City at New Dramatists and the Ensemble Studio Theatre. The two part epic was later workshopped at the Mark Taper Forum, EST-LA, the Long Wharf Theatre
, and the Sundance Institute
. The complete "cycle" was awarded the largest grant ever given by the Fund for New American Plays and had its world premier in 1991 at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle (Liz Huddle, producer) where it set box office records. In 1992, it was the centerpiece of the Mark Taper forum's 25th Anniversary Season. There it was awarded the Pulitzer prize for Drama, the first time in the history of the award that a play was so honored which had not first been presented in NYC. It also won both the PEN Centre West and the LA Drama Critics Circle Awards for Best Play. In 1993 it appeared at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
and opened on Broadway
in November of that year where it was nominated for a Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle awards.
Schenkkan's film work includes: The Quiet American
, directed by Phillip Noyce
and starring Michael Caine
(Oscar nomination). For television he wrote the miniseries, The Andromeda Strain
(A&E, 2009), four episodes of The Pacific
(HBO, 2010), Spartacus
(USA Network
, 2006) and Crazy Horse (TNT). In 2005, he was hired by Sony Pictures to develop a script based on Marvel Comics
' Killraven
. Schenkkan was also named as the writer for the adaptation of the comic book Incognito
published by the Marvel imprint
Icon Comics
.
Schenkkan is the recipient of grants from New York State, the California Arts Council
, and the Vogelstein and the Arthur foundations. He is a New Dramatists alumnus and a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the National Theatre Conference.
As an actor, Schenkkan has appeared in numerous roles, including the 1989 film Out Cold
, he also starred in the 1990 cult drama teen film Pump Up the Volume
, in which he played David Deaver, the high school guidance counselor.
, who wrote the memoir, The Year of Yes, currently published in nine languages. She is also the creator of The Upstart Crow Project. Schenkkan is the uncle of The O.C.
actor Benjamin McKenzie
.
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
, screenwriter
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...
, and actor, perhaps most recognizable as the character of Lieutenant Commander Dexter Remmick in Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: The Next Generation is an American science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry as part of the Star Trek franchise. Roddenberry, Rick Berman, and Michael Piller served as executive producers at different times throughout the production...
. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Pulitzer Prize for Drama
The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was first awarded in 1918.From 1918 to 2006, the Drama Prize was unlike the majority of the other Pulitzer Prizes: during these years, the eligibility period for the drama prize ran from March 2 to March 1, to reflect the Broadway 'season' rather than the calendar year...
in 1992 for his work The Kentucky Cycle
The Kentucky Cycle
The Kentucky Cycle is a series of nine one-act plays by Robert Schenkkan that explores American mythology, particularly the mythology of the West, through the intertwined histories of three fictional families struggling over a portion of land in the Cumberland Plateau...
.
Early years
Schenkkan was born in Chapel Hill, North CarolinaChapel Hill, North Carolina
Chapel Hill is a town in Orange County, North Carolina, United States and the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UNC Health Care...
, to Jean McKenzie and Robert Frederic Schenkkan, a public television executive. He grew up in Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
. As a Plan II Honors student he received a B.A.in Drama, magna cum laude from the University of Texas, Austin (Phi Beta Kappa and Friars' Society), and an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts from Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
. For many years, he lived in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
and then Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
, working both as a writer and an actor in film, television, and theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
. Since 1990 he has focused exclusively on his writing.
Career
Schenkkan is the author of ten full-length plays. By the Waters of Babylon premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare FestivalOregon Shakespeare Festival
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a regional repertory theatre in Ashland, Oregon, United States. The festival annually produces eleven plays on three stages during a season that lasts from February to October...
in February, 2005. The play is unrelated to the Stephen Vincent Benét
Stephen Vincent Benét
Stephen Vincent Benét was an American author, poet, short story writer, and novelist. Benét is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body , for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and "By...
short story By the Waters of Babylon
By the Waters of Babylon
"By the Waters of Babylon" is a post-apocalyptic short story by Stephen Vincent Benét first published July 31, 1937, in The Saturday Evening Post as "The Place of the Gods"...
or its subsequent adaptation. Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates premiered at the Mark Taper Forum
Mark Taper Forum
The Mark Taper Forum is a 739 seat thrust stage at the Los Angeles Music Center built by Welton Becket and Associates on the Bunker Hill section of downtown Los Angeles...
in Los Angeles in December 2005. The Marriage of Miss Hollywood and King Neptune premiered at the University of Texas at Austin in November 2005. And The Devil and Daniel Webster premiered at the Seattle Children’s Theatre in February 2006.
The Handler, a play dealing with a snake handling
Snake handling
Snake handling or serpent handling is a religious ritual in a small number of Pentecostal churches in the U.S., usually characterized as rural and Holiness. The practice began in the early 20th century in Appalachia, spreading to mostly coal mining towns. The practice plays only a small part of...
church, premiered at the Actors Express Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia. According to the 2010 census, Atlanta's population is 420,003. Atlanta is the cultural and economic center of the Atlanta metropolitan area, which is home to 5,268,860 people and is the ninth largest metropolitan area in...
. Heaven On Earth won the Julie Harris
Julie Harris
Julia Ann "Julie" Harris is an American stage, screen, and television actress. She has won five Tony Awards, three Emmy Awards and a Grammy Award, and was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1994, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts. She is a member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame...
/Beverly Hills Theatre Guild Award, participated in the Eugene O'Neill Playwright's Conference, and premiered off-Broadway
Off-Broadway
Off-Broadway theater is a term for a professional venue in New York City with a seating capacity between 100 and 499, and for a specific production of a play, musical or revue that appears in such a venue, and which adheres to related trade union and other contracts...
at the WPA Theatre. Final Passages premiered at the Studio Arena theatre. And Tachinoki premiered at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in Los Angeles and was designated a Critic's Choice by the LA Weekly
LA Weekly
LA Weekly is a free weekly tabloid-sized "alternative weekly" in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 1978 by Editor/Publisher Jay Levin and a board of directors that included actor-producer Michael Douglas...
. His other play for young audiences, The Dream Thief, had its premier at Milwaukee's First Stage.
Schenkkan has written numerous one-act plays which are collected together and published by Dramatists Play Service
Dramatists Play Service
Established in 1936 by members of the Dramatists Guild and the Society for Authors' Representatives, Dramatists Play Service, Inc. is a theatrical publishing and licensing house...
as Conversations With the Spanish Lady. Among them is The Survivalist which premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville
Actors Theatre of Louisville
Actors Theatre of Louisville is a performing arts theater located in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. It was founded in 1964 by Louisville native Ewel Cornett, local producer Richard Block and actor Ken Jenkins of Scrubs fame, and was designated the "State Theater of Kentucky" in 1974. It is run as a...
's Humana festival, went on to the EST Marathon in NYC, Canada's DuMaurier Festival, and the Edinburgh Festival
Edinburgh Festival
The Edinburgh Festival is a collective term for many arts and cultural festivals that take place in Edinburgh, Scotland each summer, mostly in August...
where it won the "Best of the Fringe" award.
The Kentucky Cycle
The Kentucky Cycle
The Kentucky Cycle is a series of nine one-act plays by Robert Schenkkan that explores American mythology, particularly the mythology of the West, through the intertwined histories of three fictional families struggling over a portion of land in the Cumberland Plateau...
was the result of several years of development, starting in New York City at New Dramatists and the Ensemble Studio Theatre. The two part epic was later workshopped at the Mark Taper Forum, EST-LA, the Long Wharf Theatre
Long Wharf Theatre
Long Wharf Theatre is a nonprofit institution in New Haven, Connecticut, a pioneer in the not-for-profit regional theatre movement, the originator of several prominent plays, and a venue where many internationally known actors have appeared....
, and the Sundance Institute
Sundance Institute
Sundance Institute is a non-profit organization founded by Robert Redford in 1981 that actively advances the work of filmmakers and storytellers worldwide...
. The complete "cycle" was awarded the largest grant ever given by the Fund for New American Plays and had its world premier in 1991 at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle (Liz Huddle, producer) where it set box office records. In 1992, it was the centerpiece of the Mark Taper forum's 25th Anniversary Season. There it was awarded the Pulitzer prize for Drama, the first time in the history of the award that a play was so honored which had not first been presented in NYC. It also won both the PEN Centre West and the LA Drama Critics Circle Awards for Best Play. In 1993 it appeared at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
and opened on Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
in November of that year where it was nominated for a Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle awards.
Schenkkan's film work includes: The Quiet American
The Quiet American (2002 film)
The Quiet American is a 2002 film adaptation of Graham Greene's bestselling novel of the same name. It was directed by Phillip Noyce and starred Michael Caine, George Henry Hsu, Brendan Fraser, and Do Thi Hai Yen....
, directed by Phillip Noyce
Phillip Noyce
Phillip Noyce is an Australian film director.-Life and career:Noyce was born in Griffith, New South Wales, attended Barker College, Sydney, and began making short films at the age of 18, starting with Better to Reign in Hell, using his friends as the cast...
and starring Michael Caine
Michael Caine
Sir Michael Caine, CBE is an English actor. He won Academy Awards for best supporting actor in both Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules ....
(Oscar nomination). For television he wrote the miniseries, The Andromeda Strain
The Andromeda Strain
The Andromeda Strain , by Michael Crichton, is a techno-thriller novel documenting the efforts of a team of scientists investigating a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism that rapidly and fatally clots human blood, while in other people inducing insanity...
(A&E, 2009), four episodes of The Pacific
The Pacific (miniseries)
The Pacific is a 2010 television series produced by HBO, Seven Network Australia, Sky Movies, Playtone and DreamWorks that premiered in the United States on March 14, 2010....
(HBO, 2010), Spartacus
Spartacus
Spartacus was a famous leader of the slaves in the Third Servile War, a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic. Little is known about Spartacus beyond the events of the war, and surviving historical accounts are sometimes contradictory and may not always be reliable...
(USA Network
USA Network
USA Network is an American cable television channel launched in 1971. Once a minor player in basic cable, the network has steadily gained popularity because of breakout hits like Monk, Psych, Burn Notice, Royal Pains, Covert Affairs, White Collar, Monday Night RAW, Suits, and reruns of the various...
, 2006) and Crazy Horse (TNT). In 2005, he was hired by Sony Pictures to develop a script based on Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics
Marvel Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American company that publishes comic books and related media...
' Killraven
Killraven
Killraven is a fictional freedom fighter in several post-apocalyptic alternate futures of the Marvel Comics universe. He first appeared in Amazing Adventures #18 , created by co-plotters Roy Thomas and Neal Adams, scripter Gerry Conway, and penciller Adams...
. Schenkkan was also named as the writer for the adaptation of the comic book Incognito
Incognito (comics)
Incognito is a six-issue comic book limited series written by Ed Brubaker with art by Sean Phillips, It was published by the Icon Comics imprint of Marvel Comics.A second six issue miniseries, Incognito: Bad Influences, was released in late 2010....
published by the Marvel imprint
Imprint
In the publishing industry, an imprint can mean several different things:* As a piece of bibliographic information about a book, it refers to the name and address of the book's publisher and its date of publication as given at the foot or on the verso of its title page.* It can mean a trade name...
Icon Comics
Icon Comics
Icon Comics is an imprint of Marvel Comics for creator-owned titles, designed to keep select "A-list" creators producing for Marvel rather than seeing them take creator-owned work to other publishers.-History:...
.
Schenkkan is the recipient of grants from New York State, the California Arts Council
California Arts Council
The California Arts Council is a state agency based in Sacramento. Its eleven council members are appointed by the Governor and the state Legislature...
, and the Vogelstein and the Arthur foundations. He is a New Dramatists alumnus and a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the National Theatre Conference.
As an actor, Schenkkan has appeared in numerous roles, including the 1989 film Out Cold
Out Cold (1989 film)
Out Cold is a 1989 'murder comedy', directed by Malcolm Mowbray ,, and stars Teri Garr, Randy Quaid and John Lithgow....
, he also starred in the 1990 cult drama teen film Pump Up the Volume
Pump Up the Volume (film)
Pump Up the Volume is a 1990 comedy-drama film written and directed by Allan Moyle and starring Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis.- Plot summary :...
, in which he played David Deaver, the high school guidance counselor.
Personal life
Schenkkan is married to Maria Dahvana HeadleyMaria Dahvana Headley
Maria Dahvana Headley is an American writer.She graduated from Vallivue High School in Caldwell, Idaho, in 1995, and attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing Program from 1996-2000....
, who wrote the memoir, The Year of Yes, currently published in nine languages. She is also the creator of The Upstart Crow Project. Schenkkan is the uncle of The O.C.
The O.C.
The O.C. is an American teen drama television series that originally aired on the Fox television network in the United States from August 5, 2003, to February 21, 2007, running a total of four seasons...
actor Benjamin McKenzie
Benjamin McKenzie
Benjamin McKenzie Schenkkan , better known as Benjamin McKenzie, is an American actor and producer. He is best known for playing Ryan Atwood in the television series The O.C. and for playing Ben Sherman in Southland. He appeared in the films Junebug and 88 Minutes which earned him a Sarasota Film...
.