Adriano Shaplin is a New Jersey-based playwright, actor, and artistic director of the Riot Group theatre company. Since its inception in 1997, the company consisting of Shaplin, Stephanie Viola, Drew Friedman, Paul Schnabel and Maria Shaplin has won the prestigious Fringe First award four times at the Edinburgh festival. Well before Shaplin’s 25 th birthday, they achieved even greater international acclaim with a tour of their 2004 piece about the Iraq War, Pugilist Specialist, which alongside some of the other Riot Group plays, has also been translated and performed in several European countries.
Characterized by minimalist and highly presentational staging, The Riot Group works are often noted for their strong ensemble spirit and baroque language, which combines ‘Elizabethan syntax with vernacular profanity’. In terms of its theatrical exploration of politics, the work has also been situated within a Brechtian tradition, and there are textual resonances with Mamet, Albee and Oscar Wilde too.
Shaplin’s apparent refusal to artistically specialise or compartmentalise his professional profile has been seen as a potential challenge to the American theatre system both in terms of the mainstream expectation that a playwright is a free agent, and the non-profit sector’s emphasis on process rather than content.
Shaplin maintains a dialectical interest in methodological experimentation and artistic reinvention on the one hand, coupled with a preservation of his company’s core values on the other. In 2004, he collaborated with the Pig Iron theatre company on an adaptation of Witold Gombrowitz’s novel The Possessed, under the title of Hell Meets Henry Halfway, which received an OBIE award. From 2006 to 2008 Shaplin was the International Playwright in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which culminated with a production of his play The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes. More recently, Shaplin and the Riot Group have begun a collaboration with another Philadelphia-based company New Paradise Laboratories (NPL) and its artistic director Whit MacLaughlin. Duška Radosavljevic
