Critically acclaimed playwright Matthew Maguire plays, musicals, and operas, including The Tower; The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo; Throwin’ Bones; Phaedra; Chaos; Backstage West; The Seven Deadly Elements; Eye Figure Fiction; Untitled (The Dark Ages Flat Out); The American Mysteries; Propaganda; Fun City; Visions of Don Juan; and The Window Man, a musical with Bruce Barthol and Greg Pliska. He is currently working on the full-length version of Luscious Music, and a new musical, Laughing Pictures, with composer Daniel Levy. His plays have been published by Sun & Moon Press, Performing Arts Journal, TheatreForum, and Back Stage Books. His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, a Hammerstein Fellowship, a McKnight Fellowship, a Meet the Composer commission for the libretto of The Tower, several grants from the Jerome Foundation and the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and New York State Council for the Arts and National Endowment for the Arts commissions.
As an actor, Maguire won a 1998 OBIE award for his performance in Mac Wellman’s one-man play, I Don’t Know Who He Was and I Don’t Know What He Said. About his solo Babel Stories at Primary Stages The Village Voice wrote: “Maguire is a magician. Look for Zen ease and apocalyptic explosiveness.” The Voice listed Creation Production Company’s presentation of Samuel Beckett’s Embers, in which Maguire played Henry, as one of the highlights of the 2000-2001 season, and wrote that Maguire “eloquently embodied this stranded soul.” He performed a solo version of his most recent work, Luscious Music, at the Architecture Museum of Basel. His text for the solo version of Luscious Music is published by TheatreForum. In January 2003, he performed in Michael John Garcés’s Customs at Intar.
His directing credits include the creation with Philip Glass and Molissa Fenley of A Descent Into the Maelström for Australia's Adelaide Festival. Among his other directing projects are The Imaginary Invalid for the Long Beach Opera, Manhattan Theatre Club's Downtown Uptown Festival, three plays by Jeffrey Jones, and the Bang on a Can Festival’s Van Gogh Video Opera.
Critics from coast to coast have heralded Maguire’s plays. The playwight’s The Tower, a work about a woman fighting for her life on an operating table dreaming she is secretly rebuilding the Tower of Babel, received its West Coast premiere in 2004 in a production by The Son of Semele. It was “Critics Pick” in the LA Weekly. Jeff Favre of Backstage West said “Maguire’s words are the driving force, and the profound nature of this layered work will not soon be forgotten by anyone who experiences it.”
Maguire wrote with composer Michael Gordon the science fiction opera Chaos. The New York Times described it as an “opera that romanticizes science as successfully as any work since Einstein on the Beach,” and whose “patterns add up brilliantly.”
His work Phaedra is his response to Racine’s classic. “Mr. Maguire,” wrote Ben Brantley in The New York Times, “has the smart idea of extending the sexual interests of the characters to explore desire as a verb in eternal, fruitless search of an object.” Tom Sellar of Yale Theater wrote, “Maguire writes with a highly stylized sense of this realm. The dialogue alternates between television-like flatness--the sordid banalities of the rich and evil--and dream languages with soaring heights of myth and eroticism: Dynasty meets Marguerite Duras.”
Maguire’s Throwin’ Bones began as a video installation at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels with acclaimed architects Diller + Scofidio. It went on to win an America Award for outstanding play.
The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo, written by Maguire, was produced at La Mama, the Walker Art Center, and the Anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge where it won multiple Bessie Awards. It was part of the Diller & Scofidio 2004 retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Mike Steele in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune called it “one of the densest, richest, most provocatively beautiful theatre events in my memory.” The New York Times called it “a deftly imaginative exploration of memory...” with scenes that “are so vivid to behold that one feels the shards of a dispersed past trying to reassemble themselves.”