ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
Moisés Kaufman is a playwright and director who writes introspective and moment driven plays often rooted in issues regarding sexuality and struggle. In 1991 he became the cofounder of the Tectonic Theater Project, company that examines the structure and language of theatre as well as being dedicated to addressing contemporary social issues.
Kaufman states, "We live in a cultural moment when we are savvy enough that telling great stories is not enough, we have to address how those stories are constructed, created, and told. How we make the story is part of the story itself' (9 Dec. 2002)
Kaufman was born on November 21, 1963 in Caracas, to Orthodox Jewish parents and was of Ukrainian and Romanian descent. He attended a Jewish religious school as a child and was exposed to broader culture and society due to his family trips to New York City. A Caracas theatre festival he attended as a young teenager brought him exposure to the avant-garde plays of such artists as Peter Brook, Tadeusz Kantor, Pina Bausch, and Jerzy Grotowski, whom he regards to as his early influences. While attending Metropolitan University (class of 1985) in Caracas to work towards a B.A. in business administration, Kaufman joined a touring experimental theatre group as an actor. In 1987 he moved to New York City, where he studied theatre directing at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, meanwhile directing a variety of plays. It was at NYU that he honed his ideas about the purpose and most-effective means of presenting theatrical performances. Four years later Kaufman, together with his partner, Jeffrey LaHoste, established Tectonic Theater Project.
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“I think the most important thing for Tectonic is this binary focus that we have. Whenever we do a play, we have two interests in mind: form and content. This is something that happens not only in our theoretical meanderings but in our work. Whenever we're in rehearsal, we deal with both of those issues and pose questions about both. We do exercises that explore subject matter, and we do exercises that explore form. [. . .] The way we think about it in Tectonic is that we want form and content to copulate. We want the offspring of that copulation to be the play. We think about it in binary because we like to devote time to each one individually. And that is a theoretical as well as a pragmatic way of working.”
(11 Nov. 2002)
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Kaufman’s writing debut was Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (performed 1997–98, published 1997) and it showcased his concerns as a writer-director. He was especially interested in what he termed “watershed historical moments,” events that reveal the foundations of society’s beliefs. A powerful and moving play that used actual trial testimony, Gross Indecency won an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding Off-Broadway play.
Kaufman and his troupe then began work on The Laramie Project . The Laramie Project was performed 2000, published 2001, and made into a television movie in 2002.The Laramie Project is a documentary-styled play that analyzes the death of Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student who was brutally beaten and left to die because of his sexual identity. Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater traveled from New York to the town of Laramie, Wyoming - just four weeks after the death of Matthew Shepard. There they interviewed dozens of townspeople, friends, and family to collect a wide array of different perspectives. The dialogue and monologues in which The Laramie Project is constructed of are taken from interviews, news reports, courtroom transcripts, and journal entries from their trip. The play held particular interest with Kaufman, a part of the LGBTQ community, and it proved popular throughout the world.
In 2003 Kaufman directed a one-man show, Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife: Studies for a Play about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf which was performed in 2003-2004 and revolves around the story of a gay transvestite who survived life in Nazi Germany and Soviet East Berlin. It was critically acclaimed and resulted in a Tony Award nomination for Kaufman. In the next several years Kaufman directed a variety of plays, including Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He also directed his own play 33 Variations which was first performed in 2007 and received another Tony nomination. In 2009 Kaufman and other Tectonic members arranged for 150 simultaneous readings in theatres across the globe of a sequel, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. He also directed Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo performed in 2011starring Robin Williams as the title character; and a 2012–13 revival of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress, a play based on Henry James’s novel Washington Square; and a revival of Torch Song (2018–19), which was written by Harvey Fierstein. In 2016 Kaufman received the National Medal of Arts.
