BIOGRAPHY
Larry Loebell is a Philadelphia playwright, dramaturg, screen writer, and teacher. His most recent play, House, Divided (“satisfyingly complex” – Toby Zinman, Variety) was nominated for a Barrymore Award as Outstanding New Play after its 2008 production at InterAct Theater Company. Other full-length plays include La Tempestad (“excellent and incisive” – Martin Denton, NYTheatre.Com) which premiered at the OHIO THTR in New York in 2005, produced by The Resonance Ensemble, The Ballad of John Wesley Reed ( “a smart new comedy…brisk and accomplished” — Philadelphia City Paper) produced by Theatre Catalyst in Philadelphia also in 2005, and Pride of the Lion (“shows Loebell’s deft hand with dialogue” — Philadelphia Gay News) produced by Theater Catalyst in 2000.
Other full length plays include Girl Science, featured in the First Eco-Drama Festival in Arcata, California in 2004, and The Dostoyevsky Man, a semi-finalist in the Beverly Hills Theater Guild/Julie Harris Playwright Competition. Published full length plays include La Tempestad in the anthology Playing With Canons: Explosive New Works from Literature by America’s Indie Playwrights, NYT Books, and Pride of the Lion published by Playscripts.
Short plays include Angie and Arnie Sanguine, But Who’s Counting, and Just Before the War Between the Plates, and The Lion Eats His Lunch, all published by Playscripts, plus Edward and Ellie Supine, and Emma Goldman Imagines the Millennium. Monologues and scenes from his plays have been published by Applause Books, Smith and Krauss Books, and Playscripts.
Larry has been awarded four Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in playwriting, an EST/Sloan Science Foundation rewrite commission for Girl Science, and was awarded a new play commission for House, Divided from the National Council for Jewish Culture. In addition, the premiere production of House, Divided at InterAct was support by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Pilgrim Project, and the Philadelphia Theater Initiative.
Since 2005, Larry has worked as a free-lance dramaturg, working with Sam Hunter, Tom Coash and Caridad Svitch at Seven Devils Playwrights Conference in Idaho, with Eric Pfeffinger, Shelia Callaghan, Lydia Stryk, Sean Christopher Lewis and Michael Hollinger at PlayPenn New Play Conference in Philadelphia, and with Lila Rose Kaplan at the Lark Playwrights Week. He has done dramaturgical projects for New Paradise Laboratories, Nice People Theater Company, Philadelphia Theater Company, and American Music Theater Festival. From 1998 to 2005 he was the literary manager and dramaturg at InterAct Theater Company where he worked on world premieres by Tom Gibbons, Jamie Pachino, Mary Fengar Gail, and others.
Larry has written several film documentaries on historical subjects, including Let the Doors Be of Iron, a Cine Golden Eagle-winning documentary about Eastern State Penitentiary, narrated by Ed Asner. He has also written and received Emmy recognition for an episode of the animated television series Rugrats. He is the writer of a short play about Thomas Paine, created for the National Thomas Paine Society, which premiered in Thomas Paine’s home town of Thetford, England in 2009. Since 2006 Larry has been writing and updating a live theatrical presentation called Living News which performs for student and public audiences at that National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. He also wrote the dramatic monologues spoken by the signers of the Constitution which National Constitution Center visitors can hear on their iPod tours of the Signers Hall exhibit. He currently teaches playwriting and dramaturgy at Arcadia University in Glenside, PA, and since 1998 he has taught film history as an adjunct Associate Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Larry is a graduate of Central High. He has a BA in English from Temple University, an MA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University, and an MFA in film and Television, also from Temple University. He is a life-long Philadelphia resident. He grew up and continues to live in the northwest section of the city.