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Radium Girls

“Radium Girls may speak to our collective capacity for denial. But it also celebrates our individual courage.”

- The Daily Record, Morristown, N.J.

Memoirs of a Forgotten Man

“Memory is a treacherous force in “Memoirs of a Forgotten Man,” D.W. Gregory’s suspenseful and carefully wrought what-if.”

- The Washington Post

Salvation Road

"The overall effect of Salvation Road is not unlike that of a cultish devotion: simultaneously satisfying and terrifying."

- Washington City Paper

Photo Courtesy: Ryan Maxwell Photography

Radium Girls 2

“The best new play in New Jersey professional theatre.”

- The Newark Star Ledger

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FAVORITES

A Thing of Beauty

“Every work of art is a political statement”

Memoirs of a Forgotten Man

Long before fake news was a trending topic, it was called propaganda. And in the Soviet Union, circa 1938, it was the grease that kept Stalin’s machinery of terror in motion.

Radium Girls

The original award-winning drama based on the true story. In 1926, radium was a miracle cure, Madame Curie an international celebrity, and luminous watches the latest rage—until the girls who painted them began to fall ill with a mysterious disease.

Salvation Road

Two guys. One rusted out Honda. Twenty-four hours to separate a girl from her guru. The road to Hell was never more fun.

The Other American

A chance encounter in a Paris cafe catapults an American art student into one of the darkest chapters of the Cold War.

The Yellow Stocking Play

D.W. Gregory, author of Radium Girls and Salvation Road. The music and lyrics are by writing team Steven M. Alper & Sarah Knapp, whose musical version of Mark Harelik’s The Immigrant received two Drama Desk award nominations when it was produced off-Broadway.

“A PLAYWRIGHT WITH A TALENT TO ENLIGHTEN AND PROVOKE”
— The New York Times
WHAT I DO
Playwright Typewriter
As A Dramatist
I write plays that examine American culture—our obsessions with image and privilege, our fundamental sexism, implicit racism, and propensity to violence, and ultimately, our collective optimism. In my work, tragedy and comedy exist side by side because they exist that way in life. The play is funny until it isn’t—and at that point, the larger questions are revealed.
Playwright Books
As A Teaching Artist
As the author of more than a dozen plays for young actors, I’ve been privileged to work as an artist in residence at a series of theatre programs and private and public schools around the country. I am available for short-term residencies, as well as one-day workshops and longer-term residencies.
EVENTS

Intimate Exposures – a New Play With Music by D.W. Gregory

Start date: November 8, 2024
End date: November 17, 2024
Time: 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Location: Reading Theater Project, Reading, Pa.

D.W. Gregory’s Intimate Exposures will premiere Nov. 8  in Reading, Pa. Commissioned by the Reading Theater Project, the play is inspired by the work of Victorian-era photographer William I. Goldman, who quietly turned his lens on the “sporting girls” in the city’s most notorious brothel.

Intimate Exposures is directed by Jody Reppert and  will be performed at the historic WCR Center for the Arts at 141 N. Fifth Street, Reading. It features period songs as well as original music by Chris Heslop.

Photo by W.I. Goldman

Performance dates are Nov. 8, 9, 15, 16, at 7.30 p.m., and Nov. 10 and 15 at 2 p.m. 

Goldman was a popular society photographer who worked in Reading from 1876 to 1921. Sometime in the 1890s, he secretly began to photograph women who worked in Sal Shearer’s “disorderly house” at Eighth and Walnut Streets in Reading. 

His collection remained hidden for a hundred years until art historian Robert Flynn Johnson discovered his photographs at a California flea market and traced them to Reading and Shearer’s establishment with the help of researchers at The Berks History Center. Goldman’s remarkable photographs are featured in Working Girls: An American Brothel 1892, Robert Flynn Johnson, editor.

A Scandal That Never Erupted

Goldman’s photographs  range from straight-on portraits in street clothes, to reproductions of famous art works, to playful riffs on classic subjects, to erotica (more than a few stocking shots in the mix), and to what can only be described as ‘life studies.’ And he took these photographs in an era of extreme social constriction and repression. Had they been discovered in his lifetime, it would have been a major scandal. As it was, he kept the collection a secret. There is no evidence he ever attempted to capitalize on them.

The play imagines how Goldman’s private collection came to be and its impact on him and the women who posed for him.

“It’s really a play about the power of art to transform our lives,” Gregory said. “When Goldman turns his lens on one of these women, he views her in an entirely different way than most men who come in contact with her.  He treats her with dignity and shows her the kind or respect any artist would who stumbles upon an exciting, inspiring subject. And how he looks at her begins to change the way she sees herself.”

More information about the play can be found at readingtheaterproject.org or by calling 484-706-9719. 

 

 

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