Martin Sherman

Martin Gerald Sherman is an American dramatist and screenwriter best known for hisstage plays which have been produced in over 55 countries. He rose to fame in 1979 with the production of his Pulitzer Prizenominated play Bent, which explores the persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust. Bent was a Tony nominee for Best Play in 1980 and won the Dramatists Guilds HullWarriner Award. It has been produced incountries and was adapted first by Sherman for a major motion picture in 1997 and later by independent sources as a ballet in Brazil. Sherman is an openly gay Jew, and many of his works dramatize outsiders, dealing with the discrimination and marginalization of minorities whether gay, female, foreign, disabled, different in religion, class or color. He has lived and worked in London since 1980.

Sherman was an only child, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Russian Jewish immigrants, Julia and Joseph T. Sherman, an attorney. Growing up in Camden, New Jersey, he was first introduced to the theater at age six, when he saw a preBroadway version of Guys and Dolls starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Shermans parents encouraged his passion. In an interview with London Times writer Sheridan Morley in 1983, Sherman recalled, AtI joined the Mae Desmond Childrens Players and went all around Pennsylvania being a tall dwarf in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As a young teen, Sherman despised school, but consoled himself by often taking the bus into Philadelphia to see plays. He also traveled to New York City once a year to visit an aunt who shared his love of theater. I was the only kid in junior high school to have seen Camino Real, he told interviewer Matt Wolf.

Source: Wikipedia