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,
Frontera@Hyde
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.
“ . . . 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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- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)
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- Print Books
- Theater (Vol. 29, Number 1)
