Award-winning Arkansas playwright Werner Trieschmann dies at 60

John Werner Trieschmann IV, award-winning Arkansas playwright, teacher and journalist, died Dec. 26. He was 60.

Trieschmann suffered from a stroke earlier this month which caused a hemorrhage in his brain.

Trieschmann's plays appeared on the stages of Moving Arts in Los Angeles, Calif.; Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York; the New Theatre in Boston, Mass.; Red Octopus Productions in Little Rock; and other companies, as well as by countless colleges, middle schools and high schools in Arkansas, the United States and abroad, according the the Central Arkansas Library's Encyclopedia of Arkansas.

He also appeared occasionally in other productions as an actor.

In 1994, Trieschmann was the first playwright to receive the Porter Prize in Arkansas. Established in 1984, the Porter Fund Literary Prize is a non-profit organization supporting Arkansas writers and poets. It honors Gladys Kimpel Porter, mother of the late Ben Kimpel, who taught English 31 years at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. The prize, accompanied by $1,000, recognizes writers with Arkansas connections who do not have national reputations.

Trieschmann also was the first-prize winner of the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans New Play Competition for his play "Lawn Dart."

He taught for several years, starting in 2012, at the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Technical College and was a theater intern in the '90s at Ouachita Baptist University.

And he was a frequent freelance writer for High Profile and other features sections in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. His last High Profile was on Stephenie Cooke, executive director of Alzheimer's Arkansas.

"He was a gifted storyteller," Cooke said. "Although very professional, it was his curiosity and sincere interest in listening and learning that was so refreshing. He knew how to bring out honesty, true self-reflection, and thought-provoking details. A true writer."

Trieschman was born Sept. 9, 1964, in Hot Springs, the oldest child of Ann and Dr. John Trieschmann. He was born with Gaucher's disease, an enzyme disorder that causes skeletal abnormalities. He graduated from Lakeside High School in 1982 and received a BA in English in 1986 from Hendrix College in Conway, where he also later was on the faculty.

John Haman, a playwright and teacher who lives in Hot Springs Village, was one of Trieschmann's Hendrix classmates. He said Trieschmann was one of his theater mentors.

"Werner was one, maybe two years ahead of me at Hendrix, and we ran in the same circles," Haman said. "He was heavily into theater, and so was I.

"Werner was the first playwright I ever knew. In college, there was an unofficial production of an autobiographical play he wrote, and it was held, I think, over in the hall named for his family: Trieschmann. ... I remember his dry humor shining through in the play just like it did with his personality. There was a talk-back after and someone mentioned one of his lines. 'I think that was possibly the worst line I have ever written,' he said, monotone, and unforgettable."

Writer and journalist Douglas Blackmon, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his book, "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War," was another of Trieschmann's Hendrix classmates. He wrote a letter to Trieschmann on Nov. 7 that he posted on Facebook on Dec. 6. They were best friends.

"Aside from everything else, Werner, I want to tell you, out loud, something you already partly know: and that is how incredibly I value both your presence in the world and the interest and confidence you seem to have in me," Blackmon wrote.

"Our relationship is so much more than a friendship in my mind. A friendship usually withers down to recollections and a bit of fondness when two people are unable (or too lazy) to stay in steady contact. Our relationship is very different. Even though there are some ways that we see the world differently, I know you live your life and stand for a way of seeing the world that I believe is the only way we really can save ourselves in the future, and you reassure me about myself.

"You and a few other people I also don't talk with often enough are truly the proverbial rocks I rely on, even though those rocks are nowhere near my feet," Blackmon wrote. "All of that sounds a little over the top, perhaps, but it is completely true."

From 1987 to 1988, Trieschmann studied with Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott as he pursued and received an MFA in creative writing/playwriting at Boston University, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.

After returning to Arkansas, he published numerous plays for Playscripts, a New York publishing company.

"Werner Trieschmann believed in me in a way that no other creative authority ever had," said Mackenzie Holtzclaw, currently one of the morning host/producers on Fayetteville TV stations KNWA/FOX24, who studied with Trieschmann at Pulaski Tech and who was part of the cast of the 2014 premiere of Trieschmann's one-act play "Disfarmer" at North Little Rock's Argenta Community Theater (now Argenta Contemporary Theater) as part of the inaugural Acansa Arts Festival.

"When I look back on my academic and professional career, I really can't imagine any of it ever happening without him. I've thought of him so often throughout the years, and each time, it always brought me a smile and a chuckle -- usually over something hilarious he said. His loss is like a massive sting to the heart."

Stage and screen actress Natalie Canerday, who was two classes ahead of Trieschman at Hendrix, said the two of them participated in four "firsts," beginning with a production of "August Snow" that the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation commissioned in 1984 from playwright Reynolds Price that had its premiere at the college. Canerday and Blackmon were part if the cast -- "I was in it as the comic relief," she recalled -- and Trieschmann was the stage manager.

After graduation, Trieschmann was also the winner at least twice of the Hendrix-Murphy's annual alumni playwriting competition, and Canerday participated in a couple of staged readings of Trieschmann's work. She was also a part of the cast of "Disfarmer" in 2014. She and Trieschmann were both part of Red Octopus' August 1993 production of William Shakespeare's "Pericles, Prince of Tyre," staged under the Broadway Bridge in North Little Rock, the troupe's first outdoor Shakespeare adaptation.

"Every time I saw him, he made me smile," she said. "He was a creative, good writer; he could take the most ordinary things and make them interesting."

"I was part of the group that decided to hire Werner at the Democrat-Gazette in 1993," said Eric E. Harrison, who covers classical music, theater and restaurants for the paper and is the paper's former entertainment editor.

"He initially applied for the then-vacant post of TV writer, but although he wrote well he had no journalism background, so we decided to hire him to put together the Weekend section calendar and had him write occasional pieces and reviews to give him some grounding and seasoning. He wrote about music and art and his newspaper career blossomed from there."

He married Martha Castleberry in 1999. The couple has two children.