Charles Louis Mee Jr. (born September 15, 1938) is an American playwright, historian and author known for his collage-like style of playwriting, which makes use of radical reconstructions of found texts.
[citation needed] In 1961 Mee began work at American Heritage publishing company and eventually became the editor of the hardback bi-monthly Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts.
He wrote other books on summit diplomacy, international power sharing, and American history, including The End of Order: Versailles 1919 (1980); The Marshall Plan: The Launching of Pax Americana (1987), and The Genius of the People (1987), about the 1787 Constitutional Convention.
Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World (1993) was Mee's final published work of history.
She chose to premiere her father's play, The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem (1988), which received positive reviews from The Village Voice[5] and The New York Times.
In 1992 his Orestes was directed by Robert Woodruff at the University of California, San Diego and by Anne Bogart at the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI).
In the summer of 1992, Tina Landau directed an En Garde Arts production as Orestes 2.0 on an abandoned pier on the Hudson River in Manhattan.
[16] In other plays, Mee explores twentieth-century American history and culture through the points-of-view of contemporary visual artists in: bobrauschenbergamerica (Robert Rauschenberg), Hotel Cassiopeia (Joseph Cornell), soot and spit (the musical) (James Castle), and Under Construction (Jason Rhoades and Norman Rockwell).
As source material, Mee would use Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Molière, Anton Chekhov, René Magritte paintings, Bollywood musicals, and his own writing.
He is the only resident playwright of the theatre ensemble SITI Company, for whom he wrote Orestes, bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia, Under Construction, and soot and spit (the musical).
The production included synchronized swimming, an existential boatman, musical numbers, and a snarky fish, along with stories about segregated pools, and a meditation on pollution.
Sarah Lucie of Show Business Weekly said: The entirety of the play is well executed, featuring a strong ensemble that has absolutely no fear of diving into whatever quirky material is presented to them.
Erin B. Mee does a superb job directing this young group of artists to create a cohesive look at our fascination with the water, entertaining and engaging the audience along the way.
It is an hors d'oeuvre plate of scenes that collectively ... have a message about elitism and the vanity of apathy ... Brief and poignant, Versailles 2015 will linger in your mind long after you see it.
"[21] Courtney Escoyne of Thoughts from a Ballet Nerd wrote: "Versailles 2015 is a meditation upon privilege…It blurred the lines between audience and performer, ignored entirely the idea of a fourth wall, and managed to fit in some wonderfully crafted dialogue.
"[22] Finally, Stephen Kaplan of Theatre Is Easy said: "Delightful and provocative ... Amidst the countless atrocities that confront us every day, at our core we are all struggling to find the naked honesty in our own lives ... Versailles 2015 allows us the time to contemplate this in its characters and in ourselves.
"[27] National Public Radio called Mee the "Public-Domain Playwright" in 2000 and credited him with touching "a raw cultural nerve" by making his work freely available.
[28] Writer Jonathan Lethem credited Mee as one of the inspirations for his "Promiscuous Project" in which he made a selection of his stories available for filmmakers or dramatists to adapt at a dollar apiece.
[29] In an explanation about the (re)making project on his current website, Mee says that his plays are protected by copyright if they are "essentially or substantially performed" as he has composed them.