Ethan Mordden
Encyclopedia
Ethan Mordden is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

.

Biography

Mordden was raised in Pennsylvania, in Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, and on Long Island
Long Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...

, and is a graduate of Friends Academy in Locust Valley, New York, and the University of Pennsylvania. He at first sought a career in show business, working as music director on off-Broadway and in regional theatre, and enrolling in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop
BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop
The BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop is a workshop in New York for musical theatre composers, lyricists and librettists.-History:The BMI Workshop was founded in 1961 by Lehman Engel and the performing rights organization BMI ....

 run by Lehman Engel
Lehman Engel
Lehman Engel was an American composer and conductor of Broadway musicals, television and film.-Work in theatre, television and films:...

. As both composer and lyricist, Mordden wrote musicals based on William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

's Measure For Measure
Measure for Measure
Measure for Measure is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604. It was classified as comedy, but its mood defies those expectations. As a result and for a variety of reasons, some critics have labelled it as one of Shakespeare's problem plays...

and on Max Beerbohm
Max Beerbohm
Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist best known today for his 1911 novel Zuleika Dobson.-Early life:...

's Zuleika Dobson
Zuleika Dobson
Zuleika Dobson, full title Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story, is a 1911 novel by Max Beerbohm, a satire of undergraduate life at Oxford. It was his only novel, but was nonetheless very successful...

, but he ended up earning his living as a writer of English prose. In the 1970s, he was assistant editor to Dorothy Woolfolk
Dorothy Woolfolk
Dorothy A. Woolfolk née Dorothy Roubicek was a pioneering woman in the American comic book industry. The first female editor at DC Comics, one of the two largest companies in the field, she is credited with helping to create the fictional metal kryptonite in the Superman mythos.-Early life and...

 on such DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...

 as The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love.

Works and themes

His stories, novels, essays, and non-fiction books cover a wide range of topics including the American musical theater, opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

, film, and, especially in his fiction, the emergence and development of contemporary American gay culture
Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures
Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures are subcultures and communities composed of persons who have shared experiences, background, or interests due to a common sexual or gender identity. Among the first to argue that members of sexual minorities can constitute cultural minorities as well as...

 as manifested in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. He has also written for The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

,
including fiction, Critic At Large pieces on Cole Porter
Cole Porter
Cole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, he defied the wishes of his domineering grandfather and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn towards musical theatre...

, Judy Garland
Judy Garland
Judy Garland was an American actress and singer. Through a career that spanned 45 of her 47 years and for her renowned contralto voice, she attained international stardom as an actress in musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist and on the concert stage...

, and the musical Show Boat
Show Boat
Show Boat is a musical in two acts with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. It was originally produced in New York in 1927 and in London in 1928, and was based on the 1926 novel of the same name by Edna Ferber. The plot chronicles the lives of those living and working...

, and reviews of a biography of the Barrymores
Barrymore family
The Barrymore family is an American acting family.The Barrymores are also the inspiration of a Broadway and West End play called The Royal Family....

 and Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...

's graphic novel Maus
Maus
Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman, is a biography of the author's father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. It alternates between descriptions of Vladek's life in Poland before and during the Second World War and Vladek's later life in the Rego Park neighborhood of...

.


His best known fictional works are the inter-related series of stories known collectively as the "Buddies" cycle. In book form, these began with 1985's I've a Feeling We're not in Kansas Anymore. The fifth in the series, 2005's How's Your Romance?, is subtitled Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle. Together, the stories chronicle the times, loves, and losses of a close-knit group of friends, men who cope with the challenges of growing up and growing older. In this circle of best friends, teasing putdowns become performance art, but none of the friends ever attacks any other friend's sensitive spots. Mordden thus breaks away from the gay model proposed by Mart Crowley
Mart Crowley
Mart Crowley is an American playwright.Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi. After graduating from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. in 1957, Crowley headed west to Hollywood, where he worked for a number of television production companies before meeting Natalie Wood on...

's play The Boys in the Band
The Boys in the Band
The Boys in the Band is a 1970 American drama film directed by William Friedkin. The screenplay by Mart Crowley is based on his Off Broadway play of the same title, Crowley penned a sequel to the play years later entitled The Men From The Boys...

, in which supposed best friends assault one another relentlessly in a style that has bedeviled gay art ever since, for instance in the television series Queer as Folk. Mordden's ideal of gay friendship presents men who genuinely like themselves and one another. They are unique in gay lit in that they respect the limits of privacy. This explains their devotion to one another: this "family" is a safe place.

In 1995, Mordden produced an epic novel, How Long Has This Been Going On?, following the lives of a diverse group of men and women from 1949 to 1991. All but one of the principal characters are gay or lesbian. Mordden's own favorite among his works of fiction is The Venice Adriana of 1998, which uses the life and art of the opera soprano Maria Callas
Maria Callas
Maria Callas was an American-born Greek soprano and one of the most renowned opera singers of the 20th century. She combined an impressive bel canto technique, a wide-ranging voice and great dramatic gifts...

 to question whether we are trapped by fate or free to invent a destiny. In a Nabokovian game meant for opera lovers, the novel's plot and characters reflect the plot and characters of Francesco Cilea
Francesco Cilea
Francesco Cilea was an Italian composer. Today he is particularly known for his operas L'arlesiana and Adriana Lecouvreur.-Biography:...

's opera Adriana Lecouvreur
Adriana Lecouvreur
Adriana Lecouvreur is an opera in four acts by Francesco Cilea to an Italian libretto by Arturo Colautti, based on the play by Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé...

. Mordden's least well-known work is A Bad Man Is Easy To Find, published in 1989 under the pseudonym of M. J. Verlaine. Though the book aligns with the "Buddies" cycle in its structure of inter-related short stories, it is entirely about the lives of women, and has only one minor gay character. In 2008, Mordden published The Jewcatcher, a surrealistic novel set in Berlin from the end of the Weimar Republic to the last day of the European war. The many principal characters are a combination of Mordden's inventions and such real-life figures as Adolf Hitler, Marlene Dietrich, Raoul Wallenberg, Claus von Stauffenberg, and President Hindenburg.

Mordden's non-fiction includes seven volumes detailing the history of the Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...

 musical from the 1920s through the 1990s, guides to orchestral music and operatic recordings, a cultural history of the American 1920s, and examinations of the phenomenon of the operatic diva
Diva
A diva is a celebrated female singer. The term is used to describe a woman of outstanding talent in the world of opera, and, by extension, in theatre, cinema and popular music. The meaning of diva is closely related to that of "prima donna"....

 and of the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein
Rodgers and Hammerstein
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were a well-known American songwriting duo, usually referred to as Rodgers and Hammerstein. They created a string of popular Broadway musicals in the 1940s and 1950s during what is considered the golden age of the medium...

. He has written a number of books on film, including analyses of the influence of Hollywood studios and of the role of female film stars. In all his non-fiction, Mordden has been a pioneer among writers who bring their personal experience and even their personalities into discussion.

The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

spoke of Mordden as being among a group of "ruminators on popular culture" animated by "the gun-moll gesticulations of Pauline Kael, for whom responsiveness was everything."

External links

  • Jorden, James, "Gay Sensibility: Talking to Ethan Mordden", parterre box
    Parterre box
    Parterre box is an ezine devoted to opera, about which it cultivates a campy, critical, strongly opinionated attitude with explicit gay overtones. parterre box was founded by the New Yorker James Jorden in the mid 1990s during a period of under-employment as an opera director...

    . Retrieved October 20, 2006.
  • Biography
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