For nearly four decades, W. David Hancock has been inventing theatrical works that radically challenge formal and narrative dramatic conventions. His genre-bending plays, often mixing visual arts, site-specific installations, and solo performance, collapse the distinction between artifice and reality. As the critic Elinor Fuchs writes, in Hancock’s work, “…we encounter mystery and authenticity at another level entirely.”

A two-time OBIE Award-winning playwright, numerous theatres have staged Hancock’s celebrations of longing, including Clubbed Thumb, Rude Mechs, The Abbey (Dublin), Théâtre des Carmes (Avignon), and, most notably, the Foundry Theatre, where he was the most-produced playwright in their twenty-five-year run. Hancock’s plays with the Foundry have included The Convention of Cartography (1994), Deviant Craft (1995), The Race of the Ark Tattoo (1998), and Master (2017), created in collaboration with artist Wardell Milan. Writing about his selection of Master as a top 10 production of the year, NY Times critic Jesse Greene noted that the work “addressed and exemplified the question of cultural appropriation that everyone else only talked about.”

Recent projects include Cathexis (co-written with Nick Millet), an interactive, robot-facilitated judicial event created in collaboration with Compagnie Elapse and partners in Holland, Belgium, Serbia, and Bosnia and co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union and a TCG Global Connections grant. A French language version of The Race of the Ark Tattoo, rendered by Elapse, toured Europe and was installed in the Christian Bernst Gallery of art brut in Paris. As 2021 Stieren Fellowship guest artists at Trinity University, Hancock and playwright Kristin Newbom developed Silent Retreat (aka Fart Bucket: a Retrospective) with students.

A Pushcart Prize nominee, Hancock’s fictions have appeared in many journals, including The Massachusetts Review, Hunger Mountain Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, TDR, Horror Sleaze Trash, and Misery Tourism. In addition, his articles on the metaphysics of playwriting have been published by Routledge Press and American Theatre, where in his latest essay, Thing Theory: a Taxonomy of Object, the playwright argues for a more inclusive, neurodivergent dramaturgy.

Hancock has taught playwriting at Brown University, the University of New Mexico, Cal Arts, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Iowa and, as Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Resident, U Mass—Lowell. His awards include a Whiting Writers’ Award, The Hodder Fellowship, a McKnight Playwriting Fellow, and the Cal Arts/Alpert Award in Theatre.

The playwright would like to thank Fisher, Sunder, and Kristen for reviving his flea market with kindness and care. He dedicates these performances to Mikéah Ernest Jennings.