Douglas Post papers

Douglas Post is a playwright, lyricist, and composer and a founding member of the Playwrights Ensemble at the Tony Award-winning Victory Gardens Theater from 1995 to 2012. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Trinity University in San Antonio, where he studied Speech, Drama, and English. Post has taught playwriting at Northwestern University, DePaul University, and Victory Gardens Theater, among others. Post has received the L. Arnold Weissberger Playwriting Award, the Midwestern Playwrights Festival Award, the Cunningham Commission Award, the Blue Ink Playwriting Award and three Playwriting Fellowship Awards from the Illinois Arts Council, and has been nominated for a Joseph Jefferson Award and an Emmy Award. The Wind In The Willows was Post’s adaptation of the Kenneth Grahame classic story, which according to a 2004 article (Box 1) was intended to be staged as an adult musical. In 1985, the show opened at the Organic Lab Theater in Chicago to positive reviews and a sold out four-week run. Post said of the experience that he was thankful for the opportunity to muck about, to make mistakes, to experiment in the Organic Lab where nothing, and everything, was at stake and where the process was infinitely more important than the product. Since then, The Wind In The Willows has been performed at over 150 theaters throughout the U.S. states and debuted at the International School Manila, Philippines in 2015. Post’s other plays include Bloodshot, Cynical Weathers, Drowning Sorrows, Earth and Sky and Murder in Green Meadows, as well as musicals including God and Country and The Real Life Story of Johnny de Facto. He has also written screenplays for Warner Bros. and NBC as well as several radio adaptions of his works.