BIOGRAPHY

Steven Fechter grew up in Los Angeles and attended college in New York where he received a B.A. in English at SUNY Binghamton. He then moved to New York City to pursue life as a poet. Within a year, however, he wrote his first play. Committed to theatre, Fechter enrolled in Hunter College’s Graduate Theatre program where he received his M.A. He went on to get a PhD in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate School. At Hunter he studied under the experimental stage director Jacques Chwat. The Hunter Playwrights program would produce two of Fechter plays: Schiele (1982), about the life of artist Egon Schiele and The Retreat (1984), a satire of the Reagan presidency.

In 1986 Fechter began working on a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s last unfinished novel The Castle. With a grant from the Austrian Institute he was able to fund a workshop production titled The Land-Surveyor. The play premiered at The Westbeth Theatre Center in 1992.

Fechter’s involvement in film began in 1986 when he met painter/filmmaker Power Boothe at Yaddo. They collaborated on a work commissioned by Dance Theatre Workshop. Titled Wilderness, it combined film, live performance, dance, and music. Fechter wrote the text and was one of the two performers in the premiere (DTW, 1988). 

In March of 2000 the Actors Studio produced Fechter’s play The Woodsman, about the redemption of a convicted child molester. The production had a successful four-week run at the Raw Space on West 42nd Street. Since then The Woodsman has been staged in Vancouver (Pacific Theatre, 2008), London (Old Red Lion Theatre, 2009), and in March 2010 it made its German premiere in a German-language production at Theatre Bielefeld, in Bielefeld, Germany. Shortly after the play's Actors Studio production,  Fechter began work on a screen version with film director Nicole Kassell. A year later their screenplay won 1st prize in the 2001 Slamdance Screenwriting Competition. Two years later producer Lee Daniels (Monster’s Ball) produced and Kassell directed the The Woodsman (2004), starring Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. The film received critical acclaim in the U.S. and abroad.  Fechter’s latest screenplay is Kid Kindness, a crime drama set in Texas.

The issues raised by the play and film The Woodsman continued to interest Fechter. He went on to write As Driven Snow and The Fiend, which together form a trilogy of plays dealing with the subject of child sexual abuse.

During work on The Woodsman screenplay, a bigger issue engaged Fechter: 9/11. Soon after the tragedy, he asked other playwrights he knew to respond. In February 2002 he produced Floating World: Playwrights Give Voice, a Benefit Reading for the victims of 9/11. It was presented at Dixon Place, NYC. Fechter contributed two plays: Ellipsis and Mrs. Clarke’s Heart.

In 2006, Fechter’s play The Last Cigarette had its West Coast premiere at the Lounge Theatre in Los Angeles. It received a Critic’s Choice by both the LA Weekly and Backstage-West. The year 2007 produced two world premieres for Fechter. First, The Workshop Theatre Company premiered The Mentee, which deals with the long-range aftershocks of a poet’s suicide. Later that year, The Commission premiered at The New York International Fringe Festival. Set during the aftermath of a bloody civil war, the story spins backward in time to reveal how love, betrayal, and the fates of four people are intertwined. The Commission has been translated into German and joined the repertory of Theater Bielefeld in Germany for their 2008-2009 season.

In December of 2007, Fechter was invited to the U.K. to co-lead a workshop of his play The Fiend at London's Central School of Speech and Drama. A year later The Golden Aurora, a modern fable about a man who falls in love with a dog, premiered at the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival. In spring 2011, Resonance Ensemble will produce Fechter's commissioned play Shakespeare's Slave on New York's Theatre Row. Set in 1596, the play reveals a dark and critical time in William Shakespeare's life. Fechter is a member of EST Playwrights Unit, New River Dramatists, and the Dramatists Guild. 

Since the beginning of 2010, Fechter has been an invited contributor to ScriptShark.com's ScriptWriting Blog (owned by The New York Times). If you would like to read his articles on screenwriting go to www.scriptshark.com/script-journal?C40. A selection of his titles include:

"Our Greatest Screenwriter Ever: William Shakespeare"
"More Dark Comedies, Please"
"Endings are Just the Beginning: Writing a Great Movie Ending"