Tom Eyen

Tom Eyen (August 14, 1940 – May 26, 1991) was an American playwright, lyricist, television writer and theatre director.

Eyen is best known for works at opposite ends of the theatrical spectrum. Mainstream theatergoers became acquainted with him in 1981, when he partnered with composer Henry Krieger and director Michael Bennett to write the book and lyrics for the hit Broadway musical Dreamgirls, about an African-American female singing trio. Eyen's career started, however, with avant garde plays and musicals that he wrote and directed Off-Off Broadway in the early 1960s. This eventually led to Off-Broadway success in the 1970s, with the controversial nudity-filled performance-art play, The Dirtiest Show in Town and Women Behind Bars, a camp parody of women's prison exploitation films. Eyen died of AIDS-related complications in Palm Beach, Florida at the age of fifty.

Eyen was born in Cambridge, Ohio, the youngest of seven children of Abraham and Julia Eyen, who owned a family-run restaurant. He attended The Ohio State University but left before graduating, in 1960, and moved to New York City to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Having no success with acting, Eyen worked briefly as a press agent and then began writing. He found a home for his unique outlook on contemporary life in the 1960s at the Off-Off-Broadway avant garde theatre scene at Caffe Cino and La MaMa Theatre, where he gave Bette Midler her first professional acting roles in his Miss Nefertiti Regrets and Cinderella Revisited (both in 1965, a children's play by day and an adult show by night). With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he formed his own company, the Theatre of the Eye Repertory Company, in 1964. The company performed together for a decade, and took Eyen's 1967 play about Sarah Bernhardt, "Sarah B. Divine!," to the Spoleto Festival in Italy in 1967. Eyen is considered a principal proponent of the 1960s neo-expressionist Off-Off-Broadway movement. The New York Times noted, "His plays are known for emotionally grotesque material combined with sharp satire."

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