Robert Lawson (screenwriter)


Robert Lawson is an American playwright, director, composer, screenwriter and visual artist currently living in France. Projects in process include an untitled limited series created with Jonathan Glatzer for RiffRaff Films and New Republic Pictures; a feature screenplay based on Walker Percy's Lancelot for Goodman Pictures; Dream/State, a limited YA TV series based on The Promises of Dr. Sigmundus by Brian Keaney for Goodman Pictures. His film, What Goes Up, co-written with Glatzer and starring Steve Coogan, Olivia Thirlby, Hilary Duff, Molly Shannon and Josh Peck, was released in 2009. The film was distributed by Sony Pictures, with a DVD release on Sony Home Entertainment.
Lawson is the author and composer of dozens of theater works, a number of which are published by Playscripts, Inc. and are regularly produced across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Among these are Hiroshima : crucible of light which has been produced in Singapore, London, Vancouver and Australia. NYC premiere was in 2009 by the Untitled Theater Co. 61 at Walkerspace. Texts have also appeared in American Writing, Poems & Plays and The Northern New England Review. He is the recipient of a Meet the Composer grant for his work on Leonardo’s Tank produced by Andy’s Summer Playhouse for which he was artistic director 1995-2007. His 2017 collection of short stories, , is available through Amazon, and was a finalist in the Gorsky Press, Molly Ivors Prize for Fiction. A feature based on the stories, under the title Laws of Nature, has been in development with, Andrew Geller - producer, to star Sam Huntington.

Notable previous work includes

  • Co-author of Tyler’s Gap, a television project produced by Touchstone/ABC & Fox Television - Rob Bowman, director; David Duchovney, Executive Producer.
  • Play commission entitled Empires Fall concerning the fall of Communism and the relationship between George H. W. Bush & Mikhail Gorbachev.The Ruins of Nicholas Raithe — developed with Sam Huntington and James Roday as a television series from an original story by Lawson.The Great God Sokolov — written with, an adaptation of her play "To Moscow". Developed with Ashworth Productions.

Directing premieres include

  • Quantum Janis a new musical by, staged reading at ; subsequent staging at the York Theater
  • The Death of Don Juan at Franklin Pierce University, and in 2011 conceiving & co-directing the New York premiere at Theater for the New City, as well as a screening of the video rendition of his production at the ‘Op on Screen Festival’.
  • Other notable works premiered at Franklin Pierce University include script, score, direction & set designs for :
  • * Hamlet: 7 rooms, a radical deconstruction created in collaboration with his wife, choreographer & visual artist
  • * Vanishing Point, utilizing a score of electronic dance music
  • * Echo Chamber, concerning the massacre at Utøya Island in Norway
  • * Terrible Destiny, inspired by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood
  • * The Architect of NoPlace, a music/theater project about silent films
  • * The Transit of Mercury Across the Face of the Sun, also in collaboration with S. Bomer, which was restaged at the Region 1 American College Theater Festival, and runner up for the National KC/ACTF Festival
  • * …but the rain is full of ghosts was presented at the Kennedy Center as part of the National ACTF Festival
His series of multi-media installations - The Chapels Project - began in 2002 with an art/science installation based on the Camera Obscura that ran for two years, and was followed up in 2004 with Recently Discovered : use unknown, a Wunderkammer environment of real and imagined artifacts. In 2014, the third chapel, Memorial was installed at Franklin Pierce University, then subsequently at the Fitchburg Art Museum and then again in Keene, NH at the . A fourth chapel - Our Lady of the Sorrows - is in process. In the summer of 2017, his Devotional Book for the Church of Entomology was on exhibit at the Fitchburg Art Museum.
The Chronicle of Higher Education published a on him and his work in 2010, as did the Austrian periodical Freigeist - a publication of the Donau Universität in Krems, Austria, where he conducted an ongoing series of workshops in Narrative Strategies, Framing & Abstraction using digital media for the School of Telecommunications, Information and Media. He was on faculty at the New Hampshire Institute of the Arts until the demise of that program in 2019.
INTERNATIONAL
Since 2010, Lawson has created new multi-media performance works as part of his Site Project initiative including The Interpretation of Dreams staged in Athens, Greece; Everyone Knows Who Bombed the Bank staged at the Hellenic American Union ; and Artifacts, staged at Monash University and the abandoned Calamai Textile Mill.
He is married to artist . His two splendid sons and live in Denver and Berlin respectively.