Peter Coy is a Helen Hayes Award-winning playwright and a SUNY Purchase-trained director with more than 40 years of experience working in theatre. Based in Nelson County, Virginia, Coy has directed over 60 productions and written or adapted more than 45 plays.
Coy’s original works often center on issues of the American ethos—tapping into its history and consciousness from the 18th century to the present. He explores familial legacy, hope, and redemption as well as the nuanced impact of historical events on individual lives and relationships. Coy brings a deep appreciation for the power of psychological truth to his work. And from his extensive training in clowning, bouffon, and commedia dell’arte, he adds a vibrant and often intense physical theatricality to his plays and productions.
Coy often finds inspiration in modern and classical music and composers as evidenced by the following three plays, commissioned by Wintergreen Performing Arts: Where Chaos Sleeps, based on the crazed life of renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo; Imaginary Letters: Mozart Remembered, based on the book by Mozart scholar and Julliard School professor Michael White; and a dance/theater adaptation of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, set in Civil War-era Appalachia. In his play, Will’s Bach, Coy uses selections from J. S. Bach's solo violin sonatas and a cello prelude through the course of the play as a window into the mind and temperament of the main character. And in his play Poe & All That Jazz, he juxtaposes the classic jazz love songs of Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer with the overflowing energy of Edgar Allan Poe’s lyrical language to bring Poe to life as never before.
Select productions of Coy’s plays include: A House In The Country (Charter Theatre, Washington, D.C.; Barter Theatre, Abingdon, VA), which won a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play; A Shadow of Honor (commissioned and produced by Wintergreen Performing Arts Festival; Keegan Theatre, D.C.) an examination of post-traumatic stress disorder based on an actual murder case in Nelson County, Virginia where he lives; an opera adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone (St. Clements Church, NYC); and Building A Boat (Charter Theatre, D.C.) In 2008, Coy was awarded a playwriting grant by The Virginia Commission for the Arts for Gabriel, which takes the audience into the troubled times of a slave rebellion in Richmond, Virginia.
Coy has founded several theater companies, most recently The Earl Hamner Theater in Afton, Virginia, which is dedicated to the development and production of new work.
When not engaged in professional theater, Coy works with the advanced theater classes of Nelson County High School, which he has taken to five state championships at the Virginia High School League State One-Act Play Festival. Coy fills his life with Irish music, studying neurobiology, watching constellations, and researching how deviance is determined in a culture. Coy is an ocean sailor and a three-time, all-American lacrosse player and a member of the 1974 USA World Championship lacrosse team. He has four grown children scattered across the country and he lives in New York and Virginia with artist Marion Wilson.