Korder, Howard 1958(?)-

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KORDER, Howard 1958(?)-

PERSONAL: Born c. 1958, in New York, NY.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Dramatists Play Service, 440 Park Ave. S., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: Playwright. Worked as a story editor on the television series Kate and Allie for the Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. (CBS).

AWARDS, HONORS: "AT&T: Onstage" production grant, c. 1989, for Search and Destroy; Obie Award for playwriting, Village Voice, 1994, for The Lights.

WRITINGS:

PLAYS

Middle Kingdom (one-act play; first produced at the Intar Theater, New York, NY, 1985), published as Middle Kingdom; and, Lip Service: Two Short Plays, S. French (New York, NY), 1986.

Episode 26 (two-act play), S. French (New York, NY), 1985.

Lip Service (first produced at Manhattan Punchline, New York, NY, 1985; adapted by Korder for Home Box Office [HBO], 1988), published as Middle Kingdom; and, Lip Service: Two Short Plays, S. French (New York, NY), 1986.

Fun (one-act play; produced at the Judith Anderson Theater, New York, NY, 1987), published as Fun; and Nobody: Two Short Plays, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1988.

Nobody (one-act play; produced at the Judith Anderson Theater, New York, NY, 1987), published as Fun; and Nobody: Two Short Plays, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1988.

Boys' Life (produced at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, New York, NY, 1988, revived at the PC2 Theater, New York, NY, 2001), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1988.

Wonderful Party! (one-act play), produced at the Judith Anderson Theater, New York, NY, 1989.

Search and Destroy (produced by South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, CA, 1989), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1992.

The Pope's Nose: Short Plays and Sketches, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1991.

The Lights (first produced at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, New York, NY, 1993), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1994.

Night Maneuver (produced at Theatre 6470, Hollywood, CA, 1995), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1995.

The Hollow Lands, first produced by South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, CA, 2000.

TELEVISION PROGRAMS

My Little Assassin (based on a true story), originally produced for Lifetime, 1999.

(With Mary Gallagher) The Passion of Ayn Rand (based on autobiography by Barbara Branden), Showtime, 1999.

ADAPTATIONS: Search and Destroy was adapted as a motion picture, directed by David Salle and starring Griffin Dunne, Christopher Walken, John Turturro, and Illeana Douglas.

SIDELIGHTS: Howard Korder's success as a playwright may be measured by the fact that nearly a dozen of his plays were produced on Broadway or off-Broadway before he was thirty-five years old. Frequently compared to David Mamet, a playwright known for his black comedic take on social issues and hard-hitting, realistic dialogue, Korder also credited Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett as important influences on his choice of subject matter and method in an interview with Los Angeles Times critic Jan Herman. Critics often focus on the humor Korder manages to wring from the dingy or desperate circumstances in which he places his fumbling, often incompetent characters. And though Korder endures comparisons to Mamet and Pinter, he is also credited with showing more sympathy and respect for his female characters than either of his mentors.

Korder's early, one-act plays include Middle Kingdom, which centers on a couple's late night financial discussion in their kitchen, and Wonderful Party!, in which the hostess of a large gathering knows none of her own guests. Two related one-acts, Fun and Nobody, are often performed together and are published together as the volume Fun; and Nobody: Two Short Plays. In the first, two aimless teenagers spend a night in search of a diversion from their redundant existence in small-town America; in the second, the father of one of the boys from Fun is, like Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, a failure whom nobody understands. Although Walter Goodman in the New York Times noted that in these two plays Korder "lets the social critic take over the work of the dramatist," Kevin Kelly enthused that "both [plays] have the crackling energy of real talent," in his review for the Boston Globe. Night Maneuver, another play, centers on two brothers' various schemes to escape the dreary underclass. "Night Maneuver is bleak and fairly unformed," wrote Laurie Winer in a review in the Los Angeles Times, "with shots of humor and seeds of the full-bodied desperate dreamers and ruthless liars who populate the . . . plays Boys' Life and Search and Destroy."

Boys' Life, one of Korder's first widely successful full-length plays, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1988, centers on a year in the life of three young men fresh out of college. In the absence of any more meaningful activity, the three spend the majority of their time in pursuit of women. "The stylized comic writing—staccato, pithy, unerringly attuned to the vernacular—is Mametesque," observed Frank Rich in the New York Times. Though several critics saw Boys' Life as little more than a 1980s reworking of Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1975), "Korder's play can stand on its own," asserted Richard Christiansen, the entertainment editor for the Chicago Tribune. Like others, Christiansen remarked that the characters in Boys' Life engage the audience's sympathy even when they are the object of the playwright's social commentary or the butt of his jokes. "Korder may be relatively new to the theater, but his play-writing voice is already sure and distinct," David Richards wrote in the Washington Post.

Lip Service, which concerns the devolution of an informative morning news show to a light-hearted program that blurs the line between entertainment and news, was adapted by the author for Home Box Office (HBO) following its successful stage run. The play centers on the show's two hosts, one a dignified newscaster whose somber manner and non-sensational delivery insures his demise, and the other an ambitious younger man whose affability and knack for mindless "infotainment" features propels him to success. "It's just brilliantly written and incredibly bitchy," admired David Mamet, who produced the television adaptation, to Neal Gabler of the New York Times. "It's vastly beyond acerbic." Although New York Times television critic John J. O'Connor felt that the adaptation lacked the taut energy of the stage production, he nonetheless concluded: "Like his mentor Mr. Mamet, Mr. Korder has a talent for creating harrowingly vivid characters. . . . He and Mr. Korder and company should definitely poke around further in television land. They do make a welcome difference."

Korder's play, Search and Destroy, is the story of Martin Mirkheim, a man pursuing the American dream. "He is," Korder told Herman, "a man with an idea. This is his delusion. But he is no more delusional than Henry Ford." A failed broker of circus acts, Mirkheim is in debt to the Internal Revenue Service; he therefore abandons his life in Florida to try to break into the movie business. Unfazed by his lack of resources or contacts in the business, Mirkheim travels throughout the country attempting to convince people, through means that are both questionably legal and less so, to help him make a film based on a story written by a New Age self-help guru. "This play deals with the myth of America as a land of infinite possibility," Korder told Herman. "Mirkheim believes the myth. He is a man whose head has been filled with the junk of our culture. He has grown up like a weed and flourished like a weed. His yearnings are universal."

Search and Destroy received mixed reviews in its theatrical run. (In 1995, the play was made into a film produced by Martin Scorsese, directed by David Salle, and starring Griffin Dunne as Mirkheim and Christopher Walken as a shady investor in the movie deal.) Critics noted the eerily empty character of Mirkheim, who, armed with the convenient philosophy of a cult leader, is unstoppably optimistic about his own future prospects, regardless of the reality of his limited abilities. While this is a frightening prospect, "What makes Mr. Korder's vision scarier still is his ability to portray his protagonist's emptiness as symptomatic of a larger, national condition," wrote Frank Rich in the New York Times. Kristina Mannion, a reviewer for Back Stage West, called the play "a blackly humorous tale that allows Korder to cleverly skewer that time-honored cliché: The ends always justify the means."

In The Lights, for which Korder won an Obie Award in 1994, the author leaves aside his signature comedic slant on social issues for what Robert Brustein called in the New Republic an "unfashionably grim study of the metaphysical perils of living in the modern city." Featuring two shopgirls among a large cast of faceless, menacing urban dwellers, The Lights confronted critics with a vision of life in the city as "deeply alien and repellent," according to Brustein. Although the play failed to capture a uniformly positive response, William A. Henry, III, Time magazine's theater critic, called The Lights "spellbinding."

Korder treks through new territory in his play, The Hollow Lands. Unlike many of his earlier plays, which take place in contemporary urban settings, The Hollow Lands, is set in pre-Civil War America. The play follows James Newman, a restless Irish immigrant to the New World, as he follows the American dream in search of freedom and greatness. After leaving behind his wife, Mercy, and his new baby in St. Louis, he eventually makes his way home in search of forgiveness. Steve Oxman, a Variety reviewer, remarked that the play is "Overflowing with metaphors about the New World," and that it "captures the rootlessness, violence and perennial dissatisfaction that underlies the American sensibility." In a review for American Theatre, Irene Oppenheim noted, "what Korder seems to be attempting is a kind of American panorama: Virtually every American archetype parades across Korder's stage." "Korder seems to have invented the very language of his nineteenth century characters—formalized yet colloquial, terse yet grandly poetic," wrote Time reviewer Richard Zoglin. "Few plays are as confidently original as this one, as rich with ideas about the making of America, or as stimulating to watch unfold on the stage."

In addition to his many plays, Korder has also achieved success with his screenplays. Originally released at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999, The Passion of Ayn Rand, which Korder coauthored with Mary Gallagher, later appeared on Showtime. The film, starring Helen Mirren, Eric Stoltz, Julie Delpy, and Peter Fonda, depicts the private life of famous author Ayn Rand. Based on Barbara Branden's autobiography, which covers her years as a student of Rand, the primary focus of the film is the affair between Rand and her student, Nathaniel Branden. Writing in Variety, David Kronke contended "it's an ambitious, visually sumptuous attempt to depict a bizarre element of a controversial personality's life." Also in Variety, Dennis Harvey noted added "The details of a rather thorny personal life . . . are given a warts-and-all baring."

Korder's 1999 film, My Little Assassin, starring Gabrielle Anwar, Joe Mantegna, and Jill Clayburgh, originally produced for Lifetime, is based on the true story of Marita Lorenz, an American woman in Havana working as a translator for Fidel Castro. Marita (Anwar) falls in love with the dictator and becomes pregnant with his child. When she later awakens in a New York hospital, she learns that Fidel (Mantegna) ordered his men to poison her and abort her child, and that she was rescued by the CIA. Her mother, Alice (Clayburgh), an agent in the CIA, then persuades Marita to go to Cuba as Fidel's assassin.

Korder is an award-winning playwright whose works range from black comedies that combine fine-tuned social commentary and humor to historical analyses of the "making of America." Korder has been compared to David Mamet for his use of characteristic dialogue, and Arthur Miller, for his occasionally fierce rendition of life among the underclass. Although at times he has been faulted for allowing his social commentary to overshadow his artistry, Korder is generally considered an important young writer on the off-Broadway theater scene.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Theatre, March, 2000, Irene Oppenheim, review of The Hollow Lands, p. 51.

Back Stage West, November 29, 2001, Kristina Mannion, review of Search and Destroy, p. 11.

Boston Globe, April 18, 1989.

Chicago Tribune, September 13, 1989.

Los Angeles Times, January 9, 1990, pp. F1, F6; February 2, 1995.

New Republic, November 29, 1993, Robert Brustein, theater review of The Lights, pp. 29-30.

New York, November 15, 1993, p. 95.

New York Times, November 19, 1987; March 1, 1988, p. C13; March 24, 1988; October 16, 1988, sec. 2, p. 20; October 17, 1988; December 14, 1990, p. C3; February 27, 1992, p. C18.

Time, November 15, 1993, p. 101; January 31, 2000, Richard Zoglin, "Go West, Young Man: The American Dream takes a sour turn in the bleak but engrossing epic The Hollow Lands," p. 72.

Variety, February 15, 1999, Dennis Harvey, review of The Passion of Ayn Rand, p. 64; May 24, 1999, David Kronke, review of The Passion of Ayn Rand, p. 35; January 24, 2000, Steven Oxman, theater review of The Hollow Lands, p. 69.

Washington Post, March 21, 1988.