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Alan D.
Perkins was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, reared in Mobile, Alabama, and
currently lives in Queens, New York.
Alan holds a degree in Music from the University of Alabama, where he studied French Horn with Greg Leffler (who studied with Philip Farkas) and studied Conducting with Dr. James Ferguson and Kathryn Scott (who both studied with Frederick Fennell). While at Alabama he won the 1982 Alabama Music Teachers Association Solo Competition, and represented the state in the Olympic All-American Marching Band at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Alan began writing plays in 1989, and was a founding member of both Developmental Stages and Theatre on a Limb in New York City, and Maggie's Little Theater in Middle Village, Queens. To date he has completed 18 full-length plays, 8 one-act plays, and has received honors from twenty-four national playwriting competitions. Works of Alan's you may have seen include: productions of Standard Deviation by Theatre Americana in Altadena, California, Beari Productions in Middle Village, New York, and the Stevens Dramatic Society at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey; Theatre on a Limb's Off-off- Broadway production of King of the Mutants at the New Actor's Workshop in New York City; Parkside Player's production of Crap in Forest Hills, New York; Beari Productions presentation of When Hell Freezes Over in Middle Village, New York; The Williams Lake Studio Theatre's production of Type A in British Columbia, Canada; The Dresser, the Duck, the Deity & the Drum Major, four one-acts also produced Off-off-Broadway by Theatre on a Limb at the Mazur theater in New York City; the Joyce Dutka Arts Foundation's premiere reading of F2F at the Irish Arts Center in New York City, directed by Shari Upbin and featuring Mary Testa and Ron Palillo; The Advantage, produced as part of WBAI's "Shelf Life" series; sketch comedy for the troupes Out on a Limb, Bonner & Company Comedy Connection and the cabaret One Desperate Hour; and sketches for The Bozo Show in Chicago.
But if you haven't seen those, you might have seen his one-act play In God's Country, which has received productions in about a dozen venues around the world including Michigan, Oklahoma, Kentucky, British Columbia, Queens and New York City.
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Tevye in Maggie's Little Theater's produciton of "Fiddler on the Roof" |
Alan has found his biggest success with his full-length play Nobody Knows I'm a Dog. The winner of three playwriting awards, including the Queens Festival of New Plays, the Fourth Annual Readers Theatre Competition and Wharf Rat's "Crossing Borders" competition, NKIAD has received over twenty productions all over the world including Reno, Nevada, West Haven, Connecticut, Lakeport, California, Anaheim, California, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Round Rock, Texas, Forest Hills, New York, Hollis Hills, New York, New York, New York, Zanesville, Ohio, Mountain Home, Arkansas, Ontario, Canada, Essex, England, Taipei, Taiwan, Sophia, Bulgaria and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Alan personally produced and directed (and, for a while, acted in) a production of NKIAD which ran for eight months Off-off Broadway at The Red Room in New York City. NKIAD has been published in the anthology Incisions, edited by Marvin Kaye, distributed by the now defunct Stage & Screen Book Club.
And then there are the School Plays. With Miriam P. Denu, Alan has written 9 plays for PS 100 in Queens, New York, and has made them available via this website to schools around the world. Productions of his school plays have popped up in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin (in the United States), as well as in Argentina, Barcelona, Beijing, Canada (Ontario, Quebec & British Columbia), Chile, China, Egypt, England, Greece, Guatemala, India, Mexico, New Zealand, South Australia, Taiwan, Turkey and Venezuela. Nobody knows the exact number and locations of all productions as the demand is so high. (Publishers, please take note!!!)
Alan was seen on stage a number of times in Queens; as a barrister in Witness for the Prosecution, as Inspector Williams in Heaven Can Wait, singing and dancing in their musical revue Broadway Goes to the Movies, as Farther Drobney in Don't Drink the Water, a Bear in Spring is for the Birds, Jim in All Shook Up, Elisha Whitney in Anything Goes, Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Horton in Seussical:The Musical, Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, The Bellhop in Lend Me a Tenor, Benjamin Frankin in 1776 (for which he won his first Josephine Award in 2018) and Santa Claus in numerous Christrmas revues. Additionally, he's sat in the pit orchestras for local productions of The Fantasticks, It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Once Upon a Mattress, big:the Musical, Into the Woods, Oklahoma, Pippin, Sweeney Todd, The Phantom of the Opera, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Man of La Mancha. He is a founding member and producer for Maggie's Little Theater in Middle Village, Queens.
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| Al Soloing with the Doctors Orchestra |
Alan is married to Miriam P. Denu, a recently retired New York City Public School teacher and fine stage actress in her own right. He currently is an unaffiliated E-flat Tenor Horn player, and continues to play French Horn, Tenor Horn and Mellophone in musical organizations and pit bands in and around the New York City area. He has also hosted The MelloCast, a podcast for middle brass players. He presently plays Horn for the Brooklyn Wind Symphony, and previously he has been a member of the Jersey City Brass, the Gramercy Brass Orchestra, the Imperial Brass, the Doctors Orchestral Society, the Brooklyn Camerata, the Queens Symphonic Band, the Mobile Pops Band and the University of Alabama Million Dollar Band. Alan is a proud proponent of the Mellophone and aspires to be its champion. He enjoys working with community theater in Queens, as well as a challenging career as a Network Engineer and Information Technology Manager for a New York City law firm. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, an Eagle Scout, a Sinfonian, a Certified Novell Administrator and a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.