David Schmader

David Schmader is an American writer known for his solo plays, his writing for the Seattle newsweekly The Stranger, and his annotated screenings of Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls. He is the author of the 2016 book Weed: The User's Guide.

Schmader, a solo performer, has created works under the direction of Dan Savage, Chay Yew, and Matthew Richter, with productions at Seattle's Hugo House literary center and Bumbershoot Arts Festival, San Francisco's Theatre Rhinoceros, New York CIty's Dixon Place, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Outside of full solo productions, Schmader has performed at Seattle's On the Boards and as a guest of the feminist art-and-performance collective Sister Spit.

In 1993, Schmader authored the play Letter to Axl, in which he "uses his autobiographical stories and his obsession with the notoriously homophobic, misogynistic, chemically dependent rock star Axl Rose as a way of examining homophobia, masculinity, and the scary power of the mass media to inspire unrequited love in millions of people."

In his 1999 solo play Straight, Schmader "takes an undercover excursion into the world of sexual reprogramming...that utilizes Christian fundamentalist ideas in attempt to curb homosexual desires." In 2002, Straight was turned into a performance film which screened at film festivals in Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C.

Schmader wrote his third solo play in 2011. A Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem, which Schmader also performed, is "a comedy about unfunny things: children who die, adults who get sick, and the intricate damage religion can inflict on young people."

From 1998 through 2014, Schmader served as a writer and editor at the Seattle alternative newsweekly The Stranger, writing the column "Last Days: The Week in Review." Schmader also wrote investigative essays on the Michael Jackson 2005 criminal trial and the AVN Awards in Las Vegas. With cartoonist Ellen Forney, Schmader created the five-part series "What the Drugs Taught Me," which was reprinted in Forney's 2007 collection I Love Led Zeppelin. Between 2002 and 2004, Schmader curated and hosted Pizzazz!, a citywide talent show produced by The Stranger and presented on opening night of the Bumbershoot Arts Festival. Schmader writes a cannabis column for The Stranger as of August 2016^[update].

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