Richard France is an American playwright, author, and film and drama critic. He is a recognized authority on the stage work of American filmmaker Orson Welles. His publication, The Theatre of Orson Welles, which received a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Award in 1979, has been called "a landmark study and has been translated into Japanese. His 1990 companion volume, Orson Welles on Shakespeare has been praised by Welles critics and biographers.
While never attending college at the undergraduate level, France was admitted to the Yale School of Drama as a Special Fellow in Playwriting (1964–66). From there, he went on to earn an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing (1970) and a Ph.D. in Theatre History/Dramatic Literature (1973) from Carnegie-Mellon University.
While serving as a psychiatric aide in New York (1958–59), France met Czechoslovakian playwright Mirko Tuma, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp Terezin. Tuma, who had not previously written in English, suggested that they collaborate on a play, with France's native fluency complementing Tuma's playwriting skills. The Walk (later retitled Don't You Know It's Raining?) received four Broadway options between 1960 and 1971 and premiered at the Dallas Theatre Center, in cooperation with the Rockefeller-funded Office for Advanced Drama Research in 1970.
In the spring of 1960 France left New York City for San Francisco. He would remain there for four years, writing fourteen plays whose central characters, "eccentric outsiders … locked in open conflict with the established order, which eventually destroys them," would reappear in his later work. His one-act play, The Image of Elmo Doyle, premiered at the Yale School of Drama in October 1964. In 1965 France received writing grants from the Shubert and Golden foundations, then left Yale to become resident playwright at the University of Pittsburgh. He also received grants from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.
His docudrama, Station J, received the support of the late Senator Daniel K. Inouye, enabling France to obtain previously withheld government documents. It was inspired by France's childhood years in Japan and his experiences in San Francisco in the early 1960s. The play, which would earn France a Silver PEN Award for Playwriting and his second NEA Creative Writing Prize, takes the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War as a jumping-off point for a nuanced exploration of the nature of democracy and its often problematic on-the-ground implementation.
Perhaps France's most popular play, measured by number of performances, is one of the three he wrote for children, and a marked departure from his oeuvre: The Magic Shop, which by 1980 had been performed internationally by over 150 theater groups.
In 2006, his play, Obediently Yours, Orson Welles, premiered at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris, France, and has since been translated into several languages.
