Plays
About
Gilman was the first American playwright to win an Evening Standard Award. She serves on the advisory board for Chicago Dramatists.[2] She has received the 2008 Harper Lee Award.[3]
Her most widely known works are Spinning Into Butter, a play that addresses political correctness and racial identity, and Boy Gets Girl, which was included in Time Magazine’s List of the Best Plays and Musicals of the Decade.[4]
A production of her adaptation of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter[5] was the occasion of a protest by actors who felt only a deaf person should play a deaf person on stage.[6][7] She currently teaches at Texas Tech University‘s School of Theatre and Dance[8] as Head of Playwriting.
When asked about her influences, she remarked that “I’m a big fan of Wallace Shawn. He’s incredibly smart and the only writer who writes about intellectuals in a complicated and even contradictory way. He’s really funny, too. I also like Donald Margulies, Kenneth Lonergan, and Conor McPherson…Caryl Churchill, Kia Corthron, and a Chicago playwright, Jamie Pachino.”[9]