David has received playwriting Obie Awards for The Race of The Ark Tattoo and for The Convention of Cartography, both presented in New York by the Foundry Theatre. David’s Deviant Craft, also produced by the Foundry, was performed in the historic Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage and, for three consecutive weeks, was selected as a Village Voice Choice. David’s work has been produced by numerous regional theaters, including Geva Theatre Center, The Empty Space Theatre, McCarter Theatre, People’s Light and Theater Company,
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Park Theatre, Salvage Vanguard, Studio Theatre, A Contemporary Theatre, Mary Worth Theatre and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. His play The Invisible Medium was commissioned by
Frontera@Hyde
Park Theatre and developed at the Sundance Institute Theatre Laboratory. World premieres include Booth at Studio Roanoke, Leftover Future at New City Warehouse in Seattle, The Incubus Archives produced by the Rude Mechanicals and Hyde Park Theatre in Austin, and The Puzzle Locker, commissioned and produced by the University of Rochester International Theatre Program. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat in Scotland and the Château de Lavigny writer’s colony in Switzerland and was the Kerouac Writer in Residence at U Mass Lowell. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa Playwrights’ Workshop.
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Play - A Journal of PlaysVolume 1From"Convention of Cartography"
MIKE: Let’s see…there’s this one poem I’ve been working on for over seventeen years.
pause
It’s a long poem. It’s an epic. They teach you about epics in school?
CURATOR: Yes.
MIKE: There’s the Odyssey. They teach you about the Odyssey?
CURATOR: Yes.
MIKE: Of course, I’m not saying my epic’s as good as the Odyssey. For one thing, it’s not written in Greek.
Convention of Cartography (hanconve)Premiered in1993- Print Books
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Play - A Journal of PlaysVolume 1From"Convention of Cartography"
MIKE: This poem is called “Untitled.”
pause
No, sorry, “Kitchen Window”—I just changed my mind. “Kitchen Window.”
I’m standing
next to your bedroom window
and you don’t even know it.
When you hear a twig snap and look outside
all you see is darkness.
I’m long gone.
When you finally see me, you are really seeing where I was.
There are objects missing
from your
tool shed
You’ll never notice they’re gone.
I took them.
Stuff I have waited—
No. Hang on. Wait a minute.
I want to change that “stuff “ to “amulets.” It’s a better word, “amulets.” Amulets. Am-u-lets. It’s more poetical. By the way, did I tell you I heard from—I forget now. Anyway, I can change these poems at the last minute, right? It’s all right for me to work on them?
CURATOR: I’d rather you wouldn’t.
Convention of Cartography (hanconve)Premiered in1993- Print Books
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Play - A Journal of PlaysVolume 1From"Convention of Cartography"
MIKE: I killed somebody once. On the back of a Greyhound bus.
pause
It was a kindness, mind you. Fella actually paid me to do it. Had me hold him like you would a baby.
pause
Well, anyway, if we’re predestined to have one secret, then I guess that’s mine. Of course, if you went and told somebody that I’d killed a fella, I’d just deny it.
pause
CURATOR: You want to tell me about it?
pause
MIKE: Maybe I’ll give you his hat someday.
Convention of Cartography (hanconve)Premiered in1993- Print Books
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“ . . . playwright David Hancock, director Vicky Boone, and the show's designers have certainly crafted a dreamscape—in which subjects seem to bubble from the darkness of the subconscious, where bizarre images erupt into view, sometimes again and again. The element of chance woven into the script charges the atmosphere with unpredictability and sometimes-unsettling repetition . . . The figures who haunt The Incubus Archives are doomed to circle the same four rooms, spewing their weird, sordid stories to anyone who will listen, while you are free to wander into the night and ponder what is in your control.” —The Austin Chronicle
“Watching W. David Hancock’s elaborate environmental theater piece, Deviant Craft, is like cutting into what looks like an ordinary chocolate cake and discovering that it has 20 layers, each with a different flavor and consistency. Don’t ask what kind of cake it is. Just dig in, chew thoughtfully, and decide for yourself what essence you wish to extract. The play . . . mixes The Tempest, science fiction, Marat/Sade, and The Snake Pit into an intriguing open-ended meditation on art and chicanery, insanity and genius.” —The New York Times
“If, at the end of The Race of the Ark Tattoo, you feel you have to pick tatters of your own identity off the floor so you can try to stitch it back together some day, you have understood this profoundly threatening and vastly entertaining episode in W. David Hancock’s continuing campaign to create theater that puts the audience onstage and the performers inside the viewers’ heads.” —The New York Times
Selected Works
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- Theater (Vol. 29, Number 1)
