richard wakefield kotulski

biography

Richard was raised on a small farm in the town of Corbett, Oregon—at the mouth of the Columbia River Gorge. The natural beauty of these surroundings has influenced his life tremendously and has made him pine for the forests and mountains of the West. The son of a poet and a professor of English, he absorbed a love of language early that continues to plague his life to this day.

Richard wrote his first play when he was fifteen years old. James of Finland was about the royal family of the Kingdom of Finland. About six hundred years ago. It wasn't very good. But that didn't matter. He was drunk on the idea of creating new worlds from his imagination; new worlds infused with sometimes hopelessly romantic and sometimes surprisingly frank examinations of life always in tension with one another.

That first effort at playwriting went on to become the first of a trilogy of farces on non-existent European royalty: The March of Prince Eldef and A Transylvanian Story. Each of those wasn't very good either. But they were getting better. So he decided to keep at it.

Richard's more mature works include Intersections, If Two Lie Down Together, The Other America, There Was A Little City, and A Fresh Goodbye. These plays have been developed at Portland Center Stage, Artists Repertory Theatre, the University of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Dramatists Center, the Tillamook Association for the Performing Arts, Reed College, and elsewhere.

Richard's recent plays include: Your Ex-Lover Is Dead, All That Is Lofty & Beautiful, Subsequent Longing, The Old Johnson Place and a trilogy of plays about the post apocalypse heavily influenced by Norse mythology called, respectively, Year of the Wind, Year of the Sword, and Year of the Wolf.

In June 2005 he was commissioned by Portland Center Stage to write a 10-minute play. That play, The History of Portland: Part One, was seen at the 2005 Just Add Water/West Festival.

In addition, Richard has been a featured writer for Stark Raving Theatre's Writer's Nightmare as well as a writer in Artists Repertory Theatre's Spotlight Program. He was the recipient of a Kaspar Locher Fellowship and of funding from the Regional Arts and Culture Council.

Richard founded Portland Theatre Works and served as Artistic Director from 2002-2004. During his tenure at PTW he produced fourteen new play workshops and directed eight. Additionally he directed two World-Premiere productions for PTW: Collage: True Stories From the Inside and the musical One Hour in Eden.

Richard's directing credits include productions of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret and Urinetown: The Musical for the Pennsylvania Players. He also directed the American Premiere of Some Assembly Required by Eugene Stickland.

Richard served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Portland Area Theatre Alliance from 2003-2005 and as Vice-President of the organization from 2004-2005. Richard has also served on the boards of the Creative Coalition of Portland (2005) and the Philadelphia Dramatists Center (2007-present).

Currently, Richard is the Literary Programming Assistant and Casting Director for The Wilma Theater. While at The Wilma, Richard has served as dramaturg for productions of Gina Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw and Roy Smiles' Schmucks. He has been the casting director for The Wilma's productions of Eurydice, Rock 'n' Roll, Schmucks, Scorched, Hysteria, Coming Home, Becky Shaw, Language Rooms, Leaving, Macbeth, The Understudy, In The Next Room, and My Wonderful Day. In 2009 he directed a reading for The Wilma of Glen Berger's O Lovely Glowworm; or Scenes of Great Beauty.

Richard is a member of the InterAct Playwrights Forum, the Philadelphia Dramatists Center, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, the Philadelphia New Play Initiative, and an emeritus member of the Portland Center Stage PlayGroup. He is also a voter for Philadelphia's Barrymore Awards.

Richard is also the founder and principal web developer and designer for Clear Day Design, as well as the creator of the literary database system LiteraryManager.org, and he is in the process of developing a casting database system creatively named CastingManager.org.

At the age of nineteen, Richard received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature and Theatre from Reed College with a Faculty Commendation for Excellence.