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Wilson, 70, was a resident playwright at Caffe Cino, the legendary Greenwich Village coffeehouse and theater that helped launch the off-off-Broadway theater movement in the early 1960s, introducing new work by Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, John Guare, Robert Patrick, William Hoffman, Tom Eyen, and Jean-Claude van Itallie. In 1969, Wilson participated in all three nights of the Stonewall riot, the event that launched the gay liberation movement. That same year, Wilson was a founding member of the Circle Repertory Company, one of New York’s most esteemed off-Broadway theaters. In 1974, Wilson co-founded TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), the first professional gay-centered theater company in New York. TOSOS gained attention with its productions of new and revived plays by the likes of Terrence McNally, Lanford Wilson, Martin Sherman, and Joe Orton, as well as Wilson. This year, Wilson received the Career Achievement in Professional Theatre Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, sharing the honor with avant-garde icon Judith Malina, co-founder of the Living Theatre.
