Barbara Garson

Barbara Garson (born July 7, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York City) is an American playwright, author and social activist. Garson is best known for the play MacBird, a notorious 1966 counterculture drama/political parody of Macbeth that sold over half a million copies as a book and had over 90 productions world wide. The play was originally intended for an anti-war teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley. The first published edition was prin... More

Barbara Garson (born July 7, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York City) is an American playwright, author and social activist. Garson is best known for the play MacBird, a notorious 1966 counterculture drama/political parody of Macbeth that sold over half a million copies as a book and had over 90 productions world wide. The play was originally intended for an anti-war teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley. The first published edition was printed on an offset press that Garson had restored the year before in order to print The Free Speech Movement Newsletter which she edited. She was one of 800 arrested with Mario Savio during these early student protests of the 1960s. Garson's self-published edition of MacBird had sold over 200,000 copies by 1967 when the play opened in New York in a production starring Stacey Keach, Bill Devane, Cleavon Little, and Rue McClanahan. While these then unknown actors went on to become fixtures in American theater, movies and television, the author...

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