Thomas Babe

Thomas Babe (March 13, 1941 – December 6, 2000) was an American playwright and Broadway performer born in Buffalo, New York, the son of Thomas James and Ruth Ina (née Lossie) Babe. He had two sisters, Mimi and Karen. Babe became one of Joseph Papp's most prolific resident playwrights at the New York Shakespeare Festival, with seven of his plays receiving their premieres at the Public Theater.

Babe's academic path preceded his theatrical career. He earned degrees at Harvard University, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and at Yale University Law School. In 1963 he attended the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, and that same year his earliest known play, The Pageant of Awkward Shadows, was staged at Harvard College Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite beginning to write at a young age, he did not pursue theater professionally until after completing his formal education.

His work at the Public Theater in New York City formed the core of his career. Kid Champion, which premiered there in 1974 and starred Christopher Walken as a former rock star, marked his first major success at the institution. Papp subsequently produced a series of Babe's plays through the 1970s and 1980s, among them Rebel Women, a drama set during the Civil War; Taken in Marriage, featuring Meryl Streep, Colleen Dewhurst, Kathleen Quinlan, Elizabeth Wilson, and Dixie Carter; and Buried Inside Extra, a newspaper drama starring Hal Holbrook and Sandy Dennis. A Prayer for My Daughter, a psychologically intense interrogation drama set in a police station, premiered at the Public Theater in 1978 with Alan Rosenberg and Laurence Luckinbill in the cast and Robert Allan Ackerman directing.

Recurring concerns in Babe's writing included the mythology surrounding the American hero figure, strained family relationships with a particular focus on fathers and daughters, and broader questions of freedom, loyalty, and individual rights. His 1985 play Planet Fires, which premiered at the Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, New York for the opening of that theater's new facility, exemplified these preoccupations. Set near Rochester at the close of the Civil War, the play centered on a newly freed slave and a Union deserter who encounter the spirits of Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow identified it as one of Babe's most striking works since A Prayer for My Daughter.

Babe's Broadway credits include an appearance in 1980 with Twyla Tharp Dance. That same year, his play When We Were Very Young was staged at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City, and Salt Lake City Skyline premiered at the Public Theater. His writing extended beyond the stage to include screenplays for Warner Bros., radio plays for National Public Radio and WNYC, television work on Ryan's Hope and Another World, and opera librettos, among them Tesla, a multimedia opera composed by Carson Kievman, and The Cursed Daunsers, with music by Alfred Guzzetti.

In 1967 Babe married Susan Bramhall, and the couple had a daughter, Charissa, before later divorcing. In his later years he lived in Darien, Connecticut with his companion Neal Bell, a playwright. Babe died of lung cancer on December 6, 2000, at a hospice in Stamford, Connecticut, at the age of 59. He was survived by his mother, his sisters, and his daughter, Charissa Pacella.