William Hoffman

Playwright, librettist, and educator William M. Hoffman (1939-2017) is best known for his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed play As Is, one of the first theatrical works to focus on the AIDS epidemic. Skillfully mingling humor, indignation, and pathos, As Is tells its central story about a man's personal struggle with AIDS, while also denouncing mainstream society for its silence about, and perceived indifference to, the enormity of the AIDS crisis. The play opened in a New York off-Broadway production in March 1985 (followed a month later by Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, another enraged chronicle of the early years of the AIDS epidemic), and due to its critical and commercial success was transferred to an award-winning Broadway production two months later. Hoffman attended the City College of New York, studying English and Latin. After graduating with honors in 1960, Hoffman went to work for the book publishing company Hill and Wang. As an editor there he helped promote the careers of several prominent gay and lesbian playwrights, including Joe Orton, Robert Patrick, Jane Chambers, Tom Eyen, and Lanford Wilson. Hoffman embarked on writing a series of short, experimental plays. The first of which, Thank You, Miss Victoria (1965), began as a short story, told entirely in dialogue, but Lanford Wilson convinced Hoffman it was really a play. Other early works by Hoffman include, Good Night, I Love You (1966); Saturday Night at the Movies (1966); Spring Play (1967); Three Masked Dances (1967); Incantation (1967); and Uptight (1968). The 1970s were a rewarding, productive period for Hoffman; he received a series of grants and fellowships that allowed him to concentrate further on his writing. Hoffman earned a MacDowell Fellowship in 1971; a Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities grant, a Carnegie Fund grant, and a PEN grant in 1972; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974; and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1975 and 1976. He wrote for television as well. It was not until 1985, however, with the production of As Is, that Hoffman achieved wide critical acclaim and recognition. In 1980, the Metropolitan Opera commissioned a new work from the composer John Corigliano, which was scheduled to debut as part of the company's centennial anniversary in 1983. That work eventually emerged as the highly-praised opera in two acts, The Ghosts of Versailles, with Hoffman as librettists. It did not premiere until 1991.