Arlene Hutton is an American playwright, theatre artist and teacher. She is best known for a trio of plays, set during and after the Second World War, known as The Nibroc Trilogy. The initial play of that trilogy, Last Train to Nibroc, was the first play to transfer from FringeNYC to Off-Broadway (the second to do so was the hit musical Urinetown). Other works for which she is known include a one-act dramatic work about the aftermath of a sexual assault, I Dream Before I Take the Stand; a one-act musical drama set among the members of a Shaker community in the 19th century, As It Is in Heaven; and a Holocaust-themed work, Letters to Sala, based on actual documents. She has also created plays for young audiences.
Her work has won many awards. From The Nibroc Trilogy, Last Train to Nibroc received a 2000 New York Drama League Best Play nomination, See Rock City won the In the Spirit of America Award, and Gulf View Drive received L.A. Weekly and Ovation Award nominations, as well as the 2018 Ovation Award for Best Production at the Rubicon Theatre. She is a three-time winner of the Samuel French Short Play Festival, and eight-time finalist for the Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville.
Hutton has received critical acclaim for her plays, which have been compared to the works of Horton Foote, William Inge, Jane Austen and Lanford Wilson, among others. Of her, one journalist wrote, "In an era when playwrights are a vanishing species and Disney dominates Broadway, [Hutton] has fashioned a remarkable place for herself."
Early life, education and playwriting career
Born in Louisiana, Hutton was raised in Sarasota, Florida. Her parents were both college professors with roots in Eastern Kentucky, which is partly the setting of her best-known and most-acclaimed work, The Nibroc Trilogy (Last Train to Nibroc, See Rock City and Gulf View Drive), though her work is not directly autobiographical. Hutton majored in theatre arts at Rollins College, a private liberal arts college in Winter Park, Florida. Her experience at Rollins included acting, directing, and costuming. After graduating from Rollins, she went to Asolo Conservatory at Florida State University (FSU), where she received an MFA in theatre.
In the 1990s, Hutton wrote her first play, I Dream Before I Take the Stand. She has several times described herself as the "accidental playwright," because, according to her, she was only moved to write plays to create better roles for herself than those of the plays in which she'd been appearing. In 1995, she took several one-act plays, including I Dream Before I Take the Stand, to the Edinburgh Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland to be staged. At the festival, her plays were favorably reviewed. When Last Train to Nibroc premiered in New York, it attracted so much attention that it transferred to an off-Broadway venue. Eventually, she gave up acting to concentrate completely on playwriting. She credits Tennessee Williams and Lanford Wilson as among her major inspirations.
Hutton's artist's residencies have included Access Theatre, the Australian National Playwrights Conference, the New Harmony Project, Blue Mountain Center, Greenville Centre Stage's New Play Festival, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and Winterthur. Hutton is an alumna of New Dramatists and a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre, the National Theatre Conference and The Dramatists Guild.
Plays
The Nibroc Trilogy
Background
Last Train to Nibroc, the first part of Hutton's best-known work, The Nibroc Trilogy, was inspired by her learning, from a book about S.J. Perelman, that the legendary writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West, Perelman's brother-in-law, had not only died within a day of one another in 1940, but that their corpses may very well have been shipped back for burial to the East Coast on the same train. The title of the play refers to Corbin, Kentucky – her parents' state of origin – where the real-life annual Nibroc Festival is held ("Nibroc" is Corbin spelled backwards). Despite Hutton's expectation while writing it that the play would not be popular, Last Train to Nibroc turned out to be the playwright's most frequently-produced play, having received about 100 productions to date.