His publication, The Theatre of Orson Welles,[1] which received a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Award in 1979,[2] has been called "a landmark study"[3] and has been translated into Japanese.
France dropped out of high school in 1955 in Kaiserslauten and returned to the United States, where he began working at odd jobs, including apprentice trophy maker, radio announcer, and encyclopedia salesman.
While serving as a psychiatric aide in New York (1958–59), France met Czechoslovakian playwright Mirko Tuma, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp Terezin.
received four Broadway options between 1960 and 1971 and premiered at the Dallas Theatre Center, in cooperation with the Rockefeller-funded Office for Advanced Drama Research,[8] in August 1970.
He would remain there for four years, writing fourteen plays whose central characters, "eccentric outsiders … locked in open conflict with the established order, which eventually destroys them", would reappear in his later work.
His docudrama, Station J, received the support of the late Senator Daniel K. Inouye, enabling France to obtain previously withheld government documents.
The play, which would earn France a Silver PEN Award for Playwriting[11][12] and his second NEA Creative Writing Prize, takes the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War as a jumping-off point for a nuanced exploration of the nature of democracy and its often problematic on-the-ground implementation.
Also in 2010, a second French-language production opened at the Atelier Théâtre Jean Vilar in Louvain-la-Neuve[17] (where it played as Moi, Orson Welles et Don Quichotte, in a translation written by its star, Armand Delcampe).
From 1969-73, France was a film and drama critic for Newsroom on WQED-TV, the PBS affiliate in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, also becoming producer for the station's Jewel Walker's Mime Circus in 1972.