David Kranes, a prolific Utah playwright and author who explored the drama of Western landscapes and Nevada casinos, has died.
Kranes died Tuesday in a Salt Lake City care facility, according to friends, after a long illness. He was 88.
He “was an artistic force,” Cynthia Fleming, executive artistic director of Salt Lake Acting Company, said in a statement Wednesday. “He possessed the rare gift of transforming lived experience into language. Whether you encountered his words on stage, on the page or in the classroom, his command of language was unmistakable and unforgettable.”
According to his longtime friend Gaylan Nielson, the theater director Jon Jory — founder of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Kranes’ classmate at Yale’s drama school — once called Kranes “without a doubt, the best American playwright you haven’t read yet.”
Nielsen noted in a remembrance that Kranes wrote some 50 plays over his career — but he didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a playwright. He also wrote eight novels, three collections of short stories, and the occasional opinion piece for The Salt Lake Tribune. (In a 2017 commentary, Kranes compared President Donald Trump, unfavorably, to the showman P.T. Barnum.)
“In Europe, writers are writers,” Kranes told The Tribune in 2011. “Camus and Sartre wrote philosophy, novels, plays, journals, essays. They were thinkers who crafted their thoughts and feelings into words, and placed those words in what felt to them to be the most appropriate containers. … I’m not sure why most American writers work as specialists, but they do.”
Kranes also was a professor of English at the University of Utah for 34 years, retiring and reaching emeritus status in 2001. And for 14 years, in the 1980s and ‘90s, he worked with Robert Redford as the founding artistic director of the Sundance Institute’s Playwrights Lab.
In 2014, Fleming asked Kranes to create a similar playwrights’ lab at Salt Lake Acting Company, developing other writers’ talents, and “how thrilling it was for this theater when he said yes.”
Kranes and SLAC had a relationship that lasted more than 30 years. SLAC staged eight of Kranes’ plays — a run that started in 1983 with “The Salmon Run” and concluded in 2014 with “A Loss of Appetite.” “This was a place where his own brave artistic development was nurtured and where his work was allowed to flourish,” Fleming said.
(David Daniels | Salt Lake Acting Company) Playwright David Kranes, center, with actors Anne Cullimore Decker and Patrick Tovatt, on the set of Salt Lake Acting Company's 2014 production of Kranes' play "A Loss of Appetite."
Kranes often wrote about the American West, both on the page and for the stage. Two of his short story collections, “The Legend’s Daughter” and “Low Time in the Desert: Nevada Stories,” were filled with his observations on the West.
“His writing is deeply rooted in Western landscapes,” his friend Nielson wrote in a remembrance. “He has a love for Utah and the rugged beauty of the mountains, an obsession with Idaho, and a fixation with Nevada. These environments are characters in his work that allow him to investigate the cultures and people who thrive in them.”
The West, Kranes told the University of Utah’s alumni magazine in 2013, “is inconstant, shifting, changing, new — both discoverable and rediscoverable.”
Another recurring theme in Kranes’ work was the conflict between fathers and sons. The topic drove his 2001 novel “The National Tree,” set around a Sitka spruce chosen to be the Christmas tree outside the White House. That story was the only one of Kranes’ works ever to be adapted for film, a 2009 Hallmark movie starring Andrew McCarthy.
Another fascination of Kranes’, casinos and gambling, was sparked by a chance encounter at the old State Line Casino in West Wendover, Nevada. He told the alumni magazine he was standing behind a man on a winning streak at a blackjack table. The gambler passed Kranes a silver dollar and said, “Here. Good luck, kid.”
“In a casino, the idea of ‘are you a winner or are you a loser?’ gets compressed into a three-minute or five-minute span of time,” Kranes said.
In 1991, Kranes wrote an essay about the spaces in casinos, which earned him a long-running side gig as a casino consultant, a job that took him to gambling places across the United States and to Europe.
Kranes’ last published novel, 2017’s “Abracadabra,” was a mystery set in Las Vegas. Its protagonist, Elko Wells, was a private investigator who heard voices and perceived patterns due to the concussions he suffered in his days as a football player. Elko’s assistants were a network of observant cocktail waitresses, known collectively as the Bloody Marys.
Las Vegas, Kranes told The Tribune in 2017, “just seems a place of the imagination.” Casinos are “confusing connections of boxes and spaces,” all the better to unhinge visitors and separate them from their money.
That compressed feeling was reflected in how Kranes viewed his plays. “I’ve always been hypersensitive to space, especially affective space — the way any given configuration of space makes you feel,” Kranes told the alumni magazine.
In 2011, Kranes criticized playwrights, and the theater companies who produced their works, for making their spaces too small. Drama set in tiny apartments “doesn’t have vertical reach,” he told The Tribune then. “Theater began with people talking to the heavens and spirits of the underworld,” he said, as he welcomed plays, like Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” that opened up the theater space.
David Kranes was born in 1937, in Belmont, Massachusetts, the son of a prominent doctor and a former nurse, and grew up in the Boston area. He once intended to enroll in medical school, to follow his father’s career, but in his senior year at Bowdoin College, he decided he couldn’t go through with it. He shifted to law school at Columbia University, but didn’t like the cutthroat competition of the other students.
“I was trying to read a novel a day and write a sonnet a day, because I’d never get to do that once I graduated and started to practice [law],” Kranes told the alumni magazine. ”All that conspired into a breakdown. And after my head cleared from the breakdown, I saw that I’d best try to do what I loved, which was to write.”
He earned a master’s degree in English from New York University, then enrolled in the drama school at Yale — where his classmates included Jory, the theater director; playwright John Guare and actor Stacy Keach. In 1967, he came to the University of Utah to teach both English and theater.
At the U., Kranes said he learned he loved teaching as much as writing. “It’s very hard to commit to making stuff out of words without feeling a little odd, strange, or outside the mainstream,” Kranes told the alumni magazine, adding that, as a teacher, “you help the younger writers see it’s not necessarily solitary.”
Plans for memorial services had not been announced as of Wednesday. A list of survivors was not immediately available.