Alex Finlayson

Who is Alex Finlayson?

Alex Finlayson is an American playwright whose sly irreverent plays have found more success on the English stage than in the United States. After winning Finlayson a Mobil Oil International Playwriting Prize, Winding the Ball — a dark comedy about a sniper shooting up the small town where he is also the popular high school football coach—was produced by The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, which also commissioned and produced Finlayson's Misfits and Tobaccoland. All three plays starred American stage and film actress Lisa Eichhorn and were directed by Greg Hersov. Hersov has written that Finlayson creates "vivid and authentic worlds underpinned by a fiercely personal moral vision. She deals with the most private sides of our lives but sees them in terms of the history and culture of her country." Reviewing Tobaccoland, the tragedy of a North Carolina tobacco farmer who refuses to face the end of his family's way of life, Stephen Gallagher says that Finlayson “fuses the epic and the intimate to deliver a play that should propel her into that category of American dramatists once dominated by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.”