WARREN KLIEWER’s published works include plays, essays, short stories, and four volumes of poetry. Born (1931) and raised a Mennonite in Mountain Lake, Minnesota, he became a teacher, director, actor, producer—and, in 1980, founder of The East Lynne Company, uniquely dedicated to reviving American plays and literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He served as producing artistic director of the New Jersey-based ELC until his death in 1998, directing most of the troupe’s first 46 productions.

 

A graduate of the universities of Minnesota (BA; MFA, playwriting) and Kansas (MA, English), Warren taught theatre, literature, and writing at Bethany College, KS; Earlham College, IN, and Wichita State University, KS. In 1969, he left academia for the innovative National Humanities Series, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. There, as resident director, he worked with scholars and performers to transform 35 original manuscripts into viable, probing dramatic productions which traveled to culturally isolated communities in 42 states.

 

Kliewer was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Dramatists Guild, Stage Directors and Choreographers Society,  Actors' Equity Association, and Screen Actors Guild. He garnered many writing honors—including the Mennonite/s Writing Conference's 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award. He was selected for membership in New York City’s prestigious New Dramatists—which premiered among others, his plays The Berserkers and The Booth Brothers. Five of his scripts, including The Booth Brothers, are featured in Acting Up: Anthology of North American Mennonite Playwrights, published by Gelassenheit Publications. You'll find his full bibliography here.

​​

The tension between Kliewer's background and his writing is evident in all his works, particularly in his poems, published often in Mennonite Life, and especially in his collection of short stories, The Violators, set in Waldheim, a small German town in Manitoba. Though neither the church nor the community is identified as Mennonite, Mennonite readers soon recognized that they were based on the author's knowledge of and experience within the Mennonite world.

​

Kliewer discovered the magic of theatre at age six—in Peter and the Wolf, a puppet show staged at Balzer’s Lumber Yard, in Mountain Lake. His life was formed by the traditions of his Mennonite upbringing, his joy in performance, and his fervent commitment to the life of the mind. Death thwarted his completion of A Family of Actors, a lively history of American actors and acting.