Jack L. B. Gohn
Writer, Critic & Playwright
Jack L. B. Gohn
Writer, Critic & Playwright
Though I practiced law for over a third of a century,
I have been a writer from childhood.
And even with a full-time practice, I never really stopped publishing in various papers, magazines and journals. I was bound to reach a point eventually of deciding I wanted to be a writer and nothing else. This website features three things I do now that the point has been reached. I review theater, write plays, and for a decade and a half, wrote a column commenting on law and policy. Common to all these pursuits is a commitment to fact and principles. You can’t run a society or write a play (or about one) well without candor, consistency, and a sense of humaneness and decency. Embodied in these pages is the history of my efforts in each of these pursuits.
Plays by Jack Gohn
I largely write about lawyers, but these are not conventional lawyer dramas. There’s a story of how legal careers begin, another about how they (and others) end. There’s a ghost story. There’s a thriller that does not include a single courtroom scene. And, moving away from my former profession, there’s a play about God – maybe told from God’s perspective, maybe not. And there will be more.
Theater Reviews & Commentary
Most Recent Post
Profoundly Moving CHESTER BAILEY at Contemporary American Theater Festival
Dougherty unspools the stories of Chester and Dr. Cotton, his treating physician, with novelistic skill. The feeling of truly being in the World War II period never lifts. The stories reel us in: Chester’s of the way he deals with his injury, and Cotton’s of hospital life in wartime, with its politics, scandals, and sexual misbehavior. This show is the whole package: a polished, intriguing, thematically-consistent but otherwise dissimilar pair of stories well-told, leaving one profoundly moved.
Theater Reviews & Commentary
Most Recent Post
Profoundly Moving CHESTER BAILEY at Contemporary American Theater Festival
Dougherty unspools the stories of Chester and Dr. Cotton, his treating physician, with novelistic skill. The feeling of truly being in the World War II period never lifts. The stories reel us in: Chester’s of the way he deals with his injury, and Cotton’s of hospital life in wartime, with its politics, scandals, and sexual misbehavior. This show is the whole package: a polished, intriguing, thematically-consistent but otherwise dissimilar pair of stories well-told, leaving one profoundly moved.