James Glossman's Flying Crows is the latest in a series of collaborations with Jim Lehrer that began in 1995 with Glossman's adaptation of Lehrer's coming-of-age novel Kick the Can for the stage, followed by the harrowing WWII tale The Special Prisoner (with William Schallert), winner of the Southwestern Festival of New Plays; and his direction of Lehrer's play about White House skullduggery The Will and Bart Show (with casts including Edward Asner, John Astin, Frank Converse, Josef Sommer and Mason Adams). Other plays by Glossman include Behind the Scenes at the Museum (adapted from the Whitbread Award winner by Kate Atkinson, for which he was named Best Director of the Year); Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Faulkner's The Hamlet; O. Henry's Compliments of the Season; F. Scott Fitzgerald's Family in the Wind, Out of Dublin by [James] Joyce; It's Only a Movie, Fragments of the War and Stephen Crane's The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (later adapted for radio and produced by WGBH-Boston for NPR Playhouse). Glossman is also widely known as a director with acclaimed productions of Death of a Salesman (with an African-American Loman family led by Frankie Faison as Willy), Bluff (with John Astin), The Value of Names (with Jack Klugman), Mrs. Warren's Profession (with Paula Prentiss), the world premiere of Sheldon Harnick's Dragons, Boy Meets Girl (with John Astin), All My Sons (with Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss), The Gin Game (with William Schallert) and Circumference of a Squirrel (with Ames Adamson), as well as an award-winning production of Waiting for Godot and a recent workshop staging of Contact With the Enemy, featuring the once-in-a-lifetime pairing of Eli Wallach and Jack Klugman. Glossman has adapted, for Edward Asner, both a stage version of Edwin O'Connor's political classic, The Last Hurrah, and a screenplay of Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard. A graduate of Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., ACT, BADA-Oxford and Yale Drama School, Glossman is a member of The Dramatists Guild, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSDC) and Actors' Equity Association (AEA). He is currently a lecturer in Directing, and Performance of Shakespeare, at Johns Hopkins University.
