Lance Belville
Lance Sherman Belville, playwright, theatre director, and journalist died of congestive heart failure March 14, 2020 in his floating home in Sausalito, California, in the embrace of his wife and artistic partner, Lynn Lohr.
Belville’s more than 50 professionally produced plays have had more than 100 productions in the US, Mexico, Brazil, and most recently, London, including tours to 30 states.
Belville was the founding Playwright-In-Residence and eventually Co-Artistic Director of History Theatre, which under his 15-year tenure, acquired and remodeled its current 500+ seat home.
His play “Scott and Zelda, The Beautiful Fools,” earned a Twin Cities Drama Critics Circle Kudos Award for playwriting and his collaboration with composer Eric Peltoniemi, “Plain Hearts,” won a Kudos Award for the overall production. Belville’s plays also earned History Theatre an Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History.
Besides Peltoniemi, Belville commissioned History Theatre scores from Charlie Maguire, Kim Sherman, Scott Killian, Miriam Gerberg, Jim Miller, John Van Orman, and Dolan Ellis. Belville commissioned History Theatre world premieres from writers John Fenn, David Hawley, Leslie Brodie, Frank McCourt, Lynn Nankivil, John Orlock, Gregory Alan Williams, and many other playwrights and poets.
Belville was born and grew up in Winona, Minnesota, and earned a degree in Cinema from the University of Southern California. Belville’s first career was journalism. He was hired on the eve of the military takeover in Brazil by United Press International and went on to break stories for ABC of the military regime’s torture and repression. He spent almost a year in the Amazon on second contact missions to indigenous tribes.
In 1972, he returned to New York to pursue a career as a playwright and saw five plays produced Off- and Off-Off Broadway and in Boston. Moving to Minnesota in 1977, he was an early resident member of the Playwrights Center, winning a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in playwriting. Belville wrote documentary films, one winning a Silver Medal Award from the New York International Film Festival, with another narrated by Jack Palance.
Since moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1994, his productions have included the opera, “Queen Clara,” two Fringe Festival hits, “Qaddafi’s Cook,” (New York City, San Diego, Hollywood) and “Atlanta Burning, Sherman’s Shadows” (Kansas City, Minnesota, Indianapolis). For Ross Valley Players, Marin, Belville’s “Scott and Zelda, The Beautiful Fools” played to a sold-out run in 2019.
A remounting of “Qaddafi’s Cook” was chosen for a special Latin American Season at the Actors Centre in the West End in London playing at the end of January 2020 and will be part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival in 2021. His newest play, “The Cowboy and The Widow,” will premiere at the Kansas City, Minnesota, and Indianapolis Fringe Festivals in 2021.
In 2005, the Minnesota Historical Society established an archive of Belville’s plays and journalism collected throughout his long career as a writer on three continents.
Support Lance Belville Fund for New Play Development
Thanks to a generous donation from an anonymous funder, History Theatre has established the Lance Belville Fund for New Play Development honoring the memory of History Theatre's founding Playwright-in-Residence and eventual co-artistic director.
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