Introduction

Abstract

Among the theatergoing public, very few of us know what an “author’s agent” does, and most likely, as ticket-buyers we have never met one. For a time, Audrey Wood, who first put “represented by Audrey Wood” in a Broadway playbill, was the American theater’s most famous play agent. Working behind the scenes, the diminutive New Yorker (scarcely five feet tall without her signature hat) encouraged talented writers and guided their careers through business deals with producers, theater managements, film companies, and publishers. She wrote her autobiography, Represented by Audrey Wood, with author and screenwriter Max Wilk, but succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage on the streets of New York City shortly before its publication. Since then, few in the profession remember Audrey Wood with the exception of scholars and critics researching the lives and careers of America’s playwrights in the last century.

The theater is a venture [one hesitates to call it a business] built of equal parts of faith, energy and hard work—all tied together with massive injections of nerve.¹