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March 28, 2007

Alumnus Richard Byrne ’86 Earns Prestigious Theatrical Honor

Journalist and Playwright Wins Inaugural Prague Post Playwriting Festival

CONTACT:
Mike Lurie

Office: 410-455-6380
Cellphone: 443-695-0262
mlurie@umbc.edu

March 28, 2007


BALTIMORE – University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) alumnus Richard Byrne, English ‘86, a playwright and prominent journalist, is the winner of the inaugural Prague Post Playwriting Festival for his one-act play Burn Your Bookes.

A work about poetry and medieval chemistry, Burn Your Bookes received a full production at the Divadlo Minor Theater in Prague this month. The prize of 20,000 Czech crowns (U.S. $900) was awarded on the festival’s closing night.

Byrne established himself as a journalist while earning an M.F.A. in poetry and playwrighting from Washington University in St. Louis. His first play, Untangling Ava, won the inaugural A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival at that institution in May 1989.

Byrne, based in Washington, D.C., is the senior editor for research and books at the Chronicle of Higher Education and the American editor of the Belgrade publishing house Alexandria Press. He has been published in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, American Prospect and on TIME magazine’s Web site. In 1999, he was awarded a Pew Fellowship in International Reporting to study media in postwar Bosnia.

Burn Your Bookes is set in Prague in the Renaissance court of Emperor Rudolph II. Two alchemical pretenders are under sentence of death by starvation when they engage in a desperate battle of deception with the noted English alchemist Edward Kelley. The noted international director and translator Julek Neumann directed the work. “It was an honor to have Julek Neumann as the director of my play,” Byrne says. “He did a tremendous job.”

During his recent month-long stay in Prague, Byrne completed a longer version of a play about alchemy and poetry based on the life of Kelley and his step-daughter, the Neo-Latin poet Elizabeth Jane Weston.

Also while in Prague, Byrne was interviewed by the English language service of the republic’s national radio system, Czech Radio. The interview can be heard at http://www.radio.cz/en/article/89112.

For details on the playwrighting contest, see http://www.praguepost.com/events/playcontest.

Posted by mlurie at March 28, 2007 10:09 AM