Craig Clinton papers

After attending Antioch College in Ohio for three years, Clinton moved to California to earn his B.A. in English from San Francisco State College in 1967, and an M.A. in English two years later with a thesis on Tennessee Williams. He attended the Yale School of Drama from 1969 to 1970 as a William Morris Agency Fellow, and completed his Ph.D. dissertation in drama at Carnegie-Mellon University on the playwright, John Arden, in 1972 as an N.D.E.A. Fellow.

Clinton immediately took up a teaching job at the Cape Playhouse School of Theatre in Cape Cod, Massachusetts for 1973 and 1974, then moving to Ohio to teach through 1978 at Hiram College as an Assistant Professor and Head of Theatre. In 1978, he moved to Oregon to start teaching at Reed College, retiring as Professor and Director of Theatre in 2010. At Reed, his teaching covered playwriting, directing, and theatre history. He retired as an emeritus professor.

Clinton’s playwriting career started while in college with several productions of short plays in New York City in the early ‘70s. His full-length drama Situation Comedy was presented at Carnegie-Mellon University while a graduate student there in 1971. Later, while teaching at Hiram College, he wrote and produced a full-length historical drama with period music, Holy Madness: the Story of Charles Guiteau, about the assassin of President Garfield based on the transcript of the trial. While at Reed, Clinton directed more than two dozen plays and had several Portland productions of his own dramas, including Slide, and also Swap. These two plays were staged together as Porno In the ‘Burbs in both Southbury, Connecticut, and New York City in 1984 and 1985. He continued to write scripts for plays through 2015 with Fleaz.

Clinton has also written many academic articles including critical studies of playwrights and two full-length biographical studies of turn-of-the-twentieth-century American stage stars, Mrs. Leslie Carter (2006) and Cora Urquhart Potter (2010). Craig Clinton and his wife, Elizabeth Burden live in Portland.

[Biographical sketch based on Clinton’s résumé and his “Brief Playwriting (and other) Bio.”]