Robert Lawson is an American playwright, director, composer, screenwriter and visual artist currently living in France. [1] [2] [3] Projects in process (2024) 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.[4] [5] [6] The film was distributed by Sony Pictures, with a DVD release on Sony Home Entertainment.[7]
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 (NH) for which he was artistic director 1995-2007. His 2017 collection of short stories, Geometric Cemetery, 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 1stAvenue Machine (NYC, LA, London), Andrew Geller - producer, to star Sam Huntington.
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 (NH), 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 (ghost/embers) was installed at Franklin Pierce University, then subsequently at the Fitchburg Art Museum (MA, 2015) and then again in Keene, NH at the Thorne-Sagendorph Gallery. 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 profile 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 MFA program in Writing for Stage & Screen until the demise of that program in 2019.
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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 (Athens); and Artifacts, staged at Monash University and the abandoned Calamai Textile Mill (Prato, Italy).
He is married to artist Sally Bomer. His two splendid sons August and Finley live in Denver and Berlin respectively.