Jeffrey Sweet
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Jeffrey Sweet (born May 3, 1950) is an American writer, journalist, songwriter and theatre historian.
Personal life
Sweet's father was James Sweet, a science writer for the University of Chicago who aided Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren in drafting two anti-McCarthy speeches; his mother was violinist Vivian Sweet. He is married to actor-producer-writer, Kristine Niven, a founder of AND Theater Company, a small non-profit company in New York.
Theatre career
Sweet has been a playwright, screenwriter, lyricist, critic, journalist, teacher, theatre historian, and sometime songwriter and director. He was a resident member of Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater, where thirteen of his plays—including Flyovers, Porch, The Action Against Sol Schumann, The Value of Names, Berlin '45, With and Without, Court-Martial at Fort Devens, Class Dismissed, and Bluff have been produced. In recent years he has performed a solo piece, You Only Shoot the Ones You Love (which premiered in the New York Fringe) and authored Kunstler, a play about William Kunstler, which premiered in 2013 at Hudson Stage Theater and subsequently played the New York Fringe in 2014, off-Broadway in 2017 (at 59E59th Street) and had an extended run at Barrington Stage in Pittsfield, MA in the summer of 2017. Kunstler was written for actor Jeff McCarthy.
His involvement with musical theatre includes writing the book to a musical version of
Sweet's plays are often focused on historical-political subjects. The most produced of the former is The Value of Names, a story set against the backdrop of the aftermath of the blacklist. In this play, a young actress finds herself facing the prospect of working with the director who named her father to
Flyovers, which premiered at Victory Gardens in 1998, is a more personal project, and tells the story of a film critic who returns to the small town in Ohio where he grew up and encounters threats he thought he left behind years ago. The original production, directed by Dennis Zacek, starred
Sweet has also written for television, as well as radio adaptations of some of his plays. His work for the soap opera
Sweet serves as a lifetime member of the Council of the