Playwright Robert Schenkkan Returns to the Scene of His Pulitzer

LA Downtown News, December 3, 2005
by Kristin Friedrich

“Robert Schenkkan was driving in his hometown Seattle last year when inspiration struck. The Pacific Ocean was on his left, the Olympic Mountains to his right, and the weather was conspiratorially pleasant.

“It was a sunny day,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright said last week. “We get a lot of sunny days. We just don’t tell people because we don’t want anybody moving up there.”

That’s when the odd title for his new play hit: Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates. It gets odder, Schenkkan explained during a break from rehearsals for the play, which has its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum Dec. 11. The touchstone for the piece wasn’t the famed explorers, but rather the war in Iraq….”