BIOGRAPHY-Ed Shockley,MFA
Award-winning theater artist Ed Shockley served for over 10 years as Artistic Director of the Philadelphia Dramatists Center (PDC) and in more recent years for the American Concert Theatre (ACT). Having started writing at age nine – comic books – he later moved on to poetry, fiction and drama. He is author of more than 50 plays, dozens of these produced, as well as numerous professional articles and educational materials on the arts of playwriting and directing. He has designed and taught theater courses at Temple University, NYU, Nassau Community College and continues to teach play/film writing and World Theatre history at the University of the Arts and Rutgers Camden.
Coincident to Shockley’s many theatrical awards and prizes was the $100,000 W. Alton Jones Foundation grant, which he shared with musical collaborator James McBride, to produce their box office record setting urban opera, Bobos, at Philadelphia’s American Music Theatre Festival. Bobos then won the much-coveted Richard Rogers Award as well as the Stephen Sondheim Award for Outstanding Contributions to American Musical Theatre.
The lanky six-foot eight-inch theater artist was born in South Philadelphia the son of a registered nurse and an ex con. He excelled academically early on and became valedictorian of G.W. Child’s elementary school where he earned a scholarship to St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. High scholastic achievement did not keep him off the basketball courts, and he made first team all-New England and later starting center for Columbia University. He next joined the Creative Arts Team at New York University where he was inducted into the dynamics of “conflict resolution through drama” by arts pioneers Linda Zimmerman and Jim Mirrione.
None of which interfered with his founding two college theater companies and penning Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues, the initial production of which broke box office records at Frank Silvera’s Writers Workshop in New York, then won the 1981 Audelco Award for Best Musical Production and went on to break more records in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago and Seattle.
In his quest to grow professionally and personally, the young playwright has traveled the world – literally -- while studying writing, culture and language, a sojourn that brought him into collaborations with Blues great Little Brother Montgomery, jazz trombonist Bobby Irving and Grammy Award winning composer and best-selling novelist James McBride; thus Bobos.
If man does not live by bread and fame alone, neither has Shockley. A lifelong advocate of education and personal growth inspired him to assist in the design and founding of numerous arts organizations including the Rainbow Company(American Music Theatre Festival), the Philadelphia Young Playwrights Festival, Reality Crew(Venture Theatre), the Philadelphia Dramatists Center, the Seeing Place Festival and the American Concert Theatre speaking often on the need to “re-negotiate” the relationship between artists and society: “In the most practical sense, we are not outside this world observing it as creative artists, we are integral to it,” he has said. “Likewise, there are deep creative capacities in people in other pursuits of life. There is more that binds us together than separates us.”
If anything, Shockley is still driven. In recent years he has simultaneously taught at the University of the Arts and Rutgers University. He has directed the courses of the ACT and the emerging Mosaic Theatre, directly coached aspirant and professional playwrights and directors, directed extensively himself, written a new short film, STONE MANSION, that has won worldwide acclaim and been broadcast nationally by SHOWTIME television. He has mastered the unique martial arts of Aikido and Aiki-weapons and collaborated with famed sensei/dancer Henry Smith(6th Dan) to define a new American stage combat vocabulary. His craft book, NOTES FROM A PRACTICING WRITER, is available through HOPEWELL PUBLICATIONS, and he is functioning as script consultant for the new Fox Film SPIRIT AWAKENING starring GIDEON CROSSING star AKUYOE GRAHAM while simultaneously developing his innovative new stage play, THE ORACLE, which premieres at AFRICAN CONTINUUM THEATRE in D.C. May 2007.
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