David Benson French, OC (January 18, 1939 – December 5, 2010) was a Canadian playwright, most noted for his "Mercer Plays" series of Leaving Home, Of the Fields, Lately, Salt-Water Moon, 1949 and Soldier's Heart.
[1] French was born in the tiny Newfoundland outport of Coley's Point,[2] the middle child in a family of five boys.
His father, Garfield French, was a carpenter, and during World War II worked for the Eastern Air Command in Canada.
After the war, David's mother, Edith, came to Ontario with the boys to join their father and the family settled in Toronto among a thriving community of Newfoundland immigrants.
Over the next several years he wrote many half-hour dramas, including The Tender Branch, A Ring for Florie, Beckons the Dark River, Sparrow on a Monday Morning, and The Willow Harp.
It was named one of the "100 Most Influential Canadian Books" by the Literary Review of Canada) and one of the "1,000 Essential Plays in the English Language" in the Oxford Dictionary of Theatre.
It was adapted for CBC Television and was produced across Canada and abroad, including a critically acclaimed run in Argentina (in a Spanish translation) and a production on Broadway.
[6] The immensely popular backstage comedy Jitters (1979) has been regularly revived in Canada, and enjoyed a six-month run at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut.
Other works include the memory play That Summer (1999), which opened the Blyth Festival’s 25th Anniversary Season; the mystery-thriller Silver Dagger (1993), a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award; One Crack Out (1975) a pool-hall drama produced in Toronto and off-Broadway, and the comedy The Riddle of the World (1981).
French also undertook translations of Miss Julie (August Strindberg), The Forest (Alexander Ostrovsky), and of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, a version of which was produced on Broadway starring Laura Linney, Ethan Hawke, Jon Voight, and Tyne Daly.