Bob Devin Jones

Bob Devin Jones (born 1954) is an American playwright, director, and actor. Many of his plays deal with civil rights and social justice issues.

Life

Bob Devin Jones was born in 1954 in Los Angeles, California. He was raised in Southern California. He studied acting at Loyola Marymount University and completed graduate work at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and abroad at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

In 1991, he started writing plays. He spent eight months in Ashmont working with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and then lived in Seattle, Washington for two years. He first visited St. Petersburg in 1997 to direct a Harlem Renaissance rendition of the play Miss Julie. While there, he met his life partner, Jim, and decided to settle in the area.

He also runs his own chocolate chip cookie baking company.

Works

Jones has written more than a dozen plays. He started to develop his first play, titled Uncle Bends: a Home-cooked Negro Narrative, in 1991, at the New Works Festival in Los Angeles. In 1995 it was performed for the first time by the Sacremento Theater Company, and has since been performed in Ireland, New York City, the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, and several other cities across the United States. The play uses food as a metaphor, satirizing stereotypical African American characters like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima. Jones cooks as he acts. It is a commentary on the resiliency of African Americans throughout history, who survived by bending, but not breaking, under adversity. It also deals with the issues of beatings and lynching in the history of the United States.

In 2001, Jones wrote Manhattan Casino, a musical detailing the history of a St. Petersburg music hall that was a center for African American social life and culture for years.

Jones’ plays have been featured one American Stage and LiveArts Peninsula Foundation.

Studio@620

He and friend David Ellis founded a community arts space called The Studio@620 in 2004. “When you pass through the doors of The Studio, look to be entertained, educated, and challenged by art, heritage, history, song, literature, theater, moving pictures, and moving bodies through space.” said Bob Devin of the studio. The goal of the studio is "to be the creative community gathering place where the answer is always 'yes,' and the community in all its iterations is invited and encouraged to come in."

Among events that have been held at the venue are a reading by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a night with historian John Hope Franklin, annual Shakespeare productions, and a display of artwork by the Florida Highwaymen.

as an illegitimate child to Herta Fabjan (née Herta Bernhard, 1904–1950) and the carpenter Alois Zuckerstätter (1905–1940). The next year his mother returned to Austria, where Bernhard spent much of his early childhood with his maternal grandparents in Vienna and Seekirchen am Wallersee north of Salzburg. His mother's subsequent marriage in 1936 occasioned a move to Traunstein in Bavaria. Bernhard's natural father died in Berlin from gas poisoning; Thomas had never met him.

Bernhard's grandfather, the author Johannes Freumbichler, pushed for an artistic education for the boy, including musical instruction. Bernhard went to elementary school in Seekirchen and later attended various schools in Salzburg including the Johanneum which he left in 1947 to start an apprenticeship with a grocer.

Bernhard's Lebensmensch (companion for life), whom he cared for alone in her dying days, was Hedwig Stavianicek (1894–1984), a woman more than thirty-seven years his senior, whom he met in 1950, the year of his mother's death and one year after the death of his beloved grandfather. She was the major support in his life and greatly furthered his literary career. The extent or nature of his relationships with women is obscure. Thomas Bernhard's public persona was asexual.

Thomas Bernhard's House, Video by Christiaan Tonnis, 2006

Suffering throughout his youth from an intractable lung disease (tuberculosis), Bernhard spent the years 1949 to 1951 at the sanatorium Grafenhof, in Sankt Veit im Pongau. He trained as an actor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg (1955–1957) and was always profoundly interested in music: his lung condition, however, made a career as a singer impossible. After that he began work briefly as a journalist, then as a full-time writer.

Bernhard died in 1989 in Gmunden, Upper Austria. His attractive house in Ohlsdorf-Obernathal 2 where he had moved in 1965 is now a museum and centre for the study and performance of Bernhard's work. In his will, which aroused great controversy on publication, Bernhard prohibited any new stagings of his plays and publication of his unpublished work in Austria. His death was announced only after his funeral.

Work

Often criticized in Austria as a Nestbeschmutzer (one who dirties his own nest) for his critical views, Bernhard was highly acclaimed abroad.

His work is most influenced by the feeling of being abandoned (in his childhood and youth) and by his incurable illness, which caused him to see death as the ultimate essence of existence. His work typically features loners' monologues explaining, to a rather silent listener, his views on the state of the world, often with reference to a concrete situation. This is true for his plays as well as for his prose, where the monologues are then reported second hand by the listener.

His main protagonists, often scholars or, as he calls them, Geistesmenschen, denounce everything that matters to the Austrian in tirades against the "stupid populace" that are full of contumely. He also attacks the state (often called "Catholic-National-Socialist"), generally respected institutions such as Vienna's Burgtheater, and much-loved artists. His work also continually deals with the isolation and self-destruction of people striving for an unreachable perfection, since this same perfection would mean stagnancy and therefore death. Anti-Catholic rhetoric is not uncommon.

"Es ist alles lächerlich, wenn man an den Tod denkt" (Everything is ridiculous, when one thinks of Death) was his comment when he received a minor Austrian national award in 1968, which resulted in one of the many public scandals he caused over the years and which became part of his fame. His novel Holzfällen (1984), for instance, could not be published for years due to a defamation claim by a former friend. Many of his plays—above all Heldenplatz (1988)—were met with criticism from many Austrians, who claimed they sullied Austria's reputation. One of the more controversial lines called Austria "a brutal and stupid nation … a mindless, cultureless sewer which spreads its penetrating stench all over Europe." Heldenplatz, as well as the other plays Bernhard wrote in these years, were staged at Vienna's famous Burgtheater by the controversial director Claus Peymann.

Works (in translation)

Novels

• Frost (1963), translated by Michael Hofmann (2006)
• Gargoyles (Verstörung, 1967), translated by Richard and Clara Winston (1970)
• The Lime Works (Das Kalkwerk, 1970), translated by Sophie Wilkins (1973)
• Correction (Korrektur, 1975), translated by Sophie Wilkins (1979)
• Yes (Ja, 1978), translated by Ewald Osers (1991)
• The Cheap-Eaters (Der Billigesser, 1980), translated by Ewald Osers (1990)
• Concrete (Beton, 1982), translated by David McLintock (1984)
• The Loser (Der Untergeher, 1983), translated by Jack Dawson (1991)
• Woodcutters (Holzfällen: Eine Erregung, 1984), translated by Ewald Osers (1985) and as Woodcutters, by David McLintock (1988)
• Old Masters: A Comedy (Alte Meister. Komödie, 1985), translated by Ewald Osers (1989)
• Extinction (Auslöschung, 1986), translated by David McLintock (1995)
• On The Mountain (In Der Höhe, written 1959, published 1989), translated by Russell Stockman (1991)

Novellas

• Amras (1964)
• Playing Watten (Watten, 1964)
• Walking (Gehen, 1971)
  • Collected as Three Novellas (2003), translated by Peter Jansen and Kenneth J. Northcott

Plays

• The Force of Habit (1974)
• Immanuel Kant (1978); a comedy, no known translation to English, first performed on 15 April 1978, directed by Claus Peymann at the Staatstheater Stuttgart.
• The President and Eve of Retirement (1982): Originally published as Der Präsident (1975) and Vor dem Ruhestand. Eine Komödie von deutscher Seele (1979), translated by Gitta Honegger.
• Destination (1981), originally titled Am Ziel.
• Histrionics: Three Plays (1990): Collects A Party for Boris (Ein Fest für Boris, 1968), Ritter, Dene, Voss (1984) and Histrionics (Der Theatermacher, 1984), translated by Peter Jansen and Kenneth Northcott.
• Heldenplatz (1988)
• Over All the Mountain Tops (2004): Originally published as Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh (1981), translated by Michael Mitchell.
• The World-fixer (2005)

References

Specific references:

General references:

• Paul Finkelman, "John Hope Franklin," in Robert Allen Rutland, ed. Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000 University of Missouri Press. (2000) pp 49–67
• Obituary in the Charlotte Observer