Eric Overmyer is a playwright and a television writer and producer. He graduated as a theater major from Reed College in 1973. His plays include ON THE VERGE, THE HELIOTROPE BOUQUET, IN A PIG'S VALISE, DON QUIXOTE DE LA JOLLA, NATIVE SPEECH, MI VIDA LOCA, IN PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE, and DARK RAPTURE. Mr Overmyer has written extensively for television, including for Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire and Law & Order, and has been nominated for two Emmy Awards. He received an Edgar Award for the television feature Rear Window. Overmyer was also a co-creator of the HBO series Treme, about musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Beaumarchais was the pen name of Pierre-Augustin Caron, born in 1732 in Paris, the son of a clockmaker. His life was a parallel of the title character from his play THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO. He rose by his wits, became a soldier, businessman, inventor, musician, and diplomat, was a sometime protégé of Louis XVI, a political intriguer, an advocate of social reform and a gunrunner (to the American revolution), in addition to being a memoirist and playwright. He was the author of forgotten tragedies as well as THE BARBER OF SEVILLE. The royal censor forbade THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, and Beaumarchais lobbied for six years before it was produced. Because of his court connections, he was accused of royalist sympathies during the Terror, but escaped the guillotine and died in 1799 of natural causes.

Edmund Josef von Horváth (1901 – 1938) was a German-writing Austro-Hungarian-born playwright and novelist. He preferred the Hungarian version of his first name and published as Ödön von Horváth. Horváth was prolific, publishing twenty-one plays during his brief lifetime, which won him international repute. In 1931 he was awarded the Kleist Prize for his play TALES FROM THE VIENNA WOODS. He died in a freak accident from a falling branch while seeking shelter during a storm.