Robert D. Hock

Robert D. Hock had his work viewed in New York for the first time with the production of BORAK, his first full-length play. He was born and raised at Valley Forge. Prior to his undergraduate years at Yale University, he was the recipient of an English Speaking Union Fellowship, which permitted him a year of study and travel at the Leys School, a preparatory School for Cambridge University in England. He received his B.A. Degree in French from Yale, after which time he spent two years in the army as a member of the Military Police Corps at Fort Gordon, Georgia. It was after his army career that he returned to the Yale School of Drama. Two of his short plays were produced at the Experimental Theatre of the Yale School of Drama, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts Degree in playwriting under John Gassner, Sterling Professor of Playwriting. Both short plays were produced while he was an undergraduate and both were winners in the Yale Playwriting Contest. The second play, MONKEY IN THE COURTHOUSE, has been translated into French by Jacques Guicharnaud. It received both a French and an English production in New Haven. While at the drama school, Mr. Hock not only continued his writing, but studied acting, directing, and theatre history, as well as scene design under Donald Oenslager. BORAK won for him the grant of Playwright-in-Residence at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Because of this grant, he was able to give the fullest attention and time to the production of BORAK without many of the problems that so often beset those trying to have their first work produced. Before receiving the grant, he had spent a year writing TV commercials for Young and Rubicam, a New York advertising agency. As a member of the resident acting company of the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and the Williamstown Theatre, Williamstown, Massachusetts, he undertook leading roles in such shows as COMPULSION, OUR TOWN (with its author, Thornton Wilder, playing the Stage Manager), THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, THE BOY FRIEND, and many others.