About Spence Porter
I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and, in
the course of a peripatetic childhood, lived in
Minnesota, Georgia, Puerto Rico, Georgia
again, and finally the Bronx, where I went to
the Bronx High School of Science. I attended
Harvard College, where I graduated with
honors in Applied Math and Physics. This
was followed by a year of wandering around
Europe at Harvard’s expense, and then, after
being expelled from the Iowa Writers
Workshop(!), by theater school at Ohio
University, where I got an M.F.A. in
Playwriting. I then returned to the Bronx and
a long lonely period in which nobody seemed
to understand the sort of fusion of dance and
puppetry and masks and music and theater
that I was doing. Nevertheless, I kept writing. I’m really thrilled that, with the arrival of a new young generation of theater artists and
audiences, there’s been a wonderful explosion of interest in my work, both in the United
States and internationally. There have now been sixteen productions of my plays (which
used to be described as “unproducible”), most recently Francesca in Leiden, The
Netherlands, and The Woman from the Sea, which was commissioned by Terry Schreiber and
directed by him in New York City. Feel free to get in touch with me!