“I have taken great liberty with historical fact and make no apology for it.” So proclaims David Grimm in the author’s note to one of his earliest and most successful plays, Sheridan, or Schooled in Scandal. As anyone familiar with Grimm’s dramatic work knows, his unrepentantly free approach to history has nothing to do with lazy research. His ability to conjure a panoply of historical periods and long-forgotten theatrical forms — from Renaissance London to 1930s New York, Italian commedia dell’arte to British Restoration comedy — marks a historian’s attention to the social, political, and economic conditions behind each period and form.
More