"I write from the 1970s. I write from before contact lenses and cable television....I write from a long line of step-fathers, genius-cowards who taught me about Proust while driving to the town dump, and then disappeared from my life....I write from the last of the blue-collar intellectuals, merchant marines turned actors....I write from Ishmaels too frightened to go to sea....I write from Cape Cod, where I was raised....I write from an aristocratic poverty, of selling off the family silver to pay the mortgage....I write from the paradox of food stamps and D.A.R. plaques on the wall....I write from waking up every day in the here and now­in this desolate forsaken time­with nothing else to do but write plays. I write from folly. And on really good days, I write from Thelma & Louise, with Thelma standing on the cliff, watching me go over by myself."

At the edge of the museum, the game show, the treasure hunt and the documentary impulse in current fiction, David Hancock's plays inhabit a borderland that's been called "post-performance art." Amplifying the aesthetic of naturalism to the extreme by immersing the audience in familiar yet unsettling, highly detailed environments, Hancock deploys Cagean principles meant to challenge the physics of his own inventions. Choice and intimacy in the social theatrical space give spectators the feeling they have stumbled upon a lost world. His latest work-in-progress, The Sisters of Eve, an interactive event about a New England town that has disappeared, is, in part, an inquiry into how traditional narrative governs the sense of the erotic.

"Pretend there is a fire. Decide (after people and pets) what you would save first. Put that thing in an old suitcase. Decide what you would save next and put that in the suitcase. When the suitcase is full, host a "mystery" dinner party. Invite people you trust–but who don't know many intimate details about your life. After dessert, drag out the suitcase. Explain to your guests that your twin brother/sister disappeared recently, leaving this suitcase behind. Sit silently as your dinner guests try to figure out where your twin went, based upon those relics you couldn't live without."

Born 1962, New York City Lives in St. Peter, Minnesota 1990 M.F.A., The University of Iowa Playwrights' Workshop 1984 B.A., Bucknell University

	2000	Ordering Seconds, (commissioned by Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre), workshop production, November 1-11, Austin Texas
	1998	The Race of the Ark Tattoo, The Foundry Theatre; Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre
	1996	Deviant Craft, The Foundry Theatre; Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre; Cal State Fullerton
	1995	The Convention of Cartography, The Foundry Theatre; People's Light & Theatre Company

	1999-00	McKnight Advancement Grant
	1999	OBIE Award for playwriting, The Race of the Ark Tattoo
	1998	Whiting Writers' Award
	1997-8	The Hodder Fellowship, Princeton University
	1996-7	McKnight Playwriting Fellowship
	1995	OBIE Award for playwriting, The Convention of Cartography

	1999	The Ghost Canister, a one-act play, McCarter Theatre
	1999	The Sisters of Eve, with Nan Hanway, The Foundry Theatre
	1998	Ordering Seconds, Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre

	1999	"The Immaterial Theatre," an essay, American Theatre, September
	1998	The Race of the Ark Tattoo, Theater 29:1, Fall, Duke University Press