Wertenbaker, Timberlake (1951-…), is an American-born British playwright who often uses historical and mythical events as settings for her dramas. Her plays often feature strong female characters. Wertenbaker is best known for Our Country’s Good (1988), which was based on the Australian author Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker. The play was set among the first male and female convicts to be transported to Australia in the late 1700’s. The central character in The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985) is the daughter of a socially ambitious English merchant in the 1700’s. The Love of the Nightingale (1988) is based on a Greek myth.
Lael Louisiana Timberlake Wertenbaker was born in the United States and raised in the Basque region of France. She taught French in Greece before settling in London in 1970. Wertenbaker became Arts Council Writer in Residence for the Shared Experience Theatre Company in 1983 and was the Writer in Residence at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1984 and 1985. She won the Most Promising Playwright Award in 1985 for The Grace of Mary Traverse. Her other plays include Abel’s Sister (1983), Three Birds Alighting On A Field (1992), and Break of Day (1995). She translated plays by the French dramatists Jean Anouilh and Pierre Marivaux and the ancient Greek playwrights Sophocles and Euripides. Wertenbaker translated Sophocles’ trilogy The Thebans, a major production by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, in 1991.
