I just heard that Tom Ormeny has died. It was about two years ago now, when I was slowly beginning to turn back to writing for the theater, that I got a life-changing phone call from him and his wife and producing partner Maria Gobetti to tell me they wanted to produce the world premiere of my play A TERMINAL EVENT at their Victory Theatre in Burbank. Through Covid thick and thin it was almost a year before we were done with the production, and by then Tom was ill and had in fact been unable to play the role he’d acted so brilliantly in the rehearsal room. At the time things did not seem as grim, and I assured him not to worry, there was a great part for him in my brand-new play and I also had a short film I wanted him to do. Alas I now have three scripts he will never perform in. He was a real presence in that rehearsal room, so warm and funny and hardworking. At the closing night party for TERMINAL EVENT he specifically took me aside and thanked me for the honesty with which he felt my play and its characters confronted mortality. I’ll never forget him.
Richard Willett
Richard Willett is the author of the plays Triptych, Random Harvest, The Flid Show, and Tiny Bubbles, presented off-off-Broadway and across the country. Honors include an Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship. His play 9/10 premiered off-off-Broadway in September 2024 and won four Broadway World Awards including Best Play; Grief at High Tide (first prize, Capital Rep Next Act! New Play Summit) premiered at Vivid Stage in Summit, NJ, in October 2024; and A Terminal Event (Julie Harris Award winner and Woodward/Newman finalist) premiered in 2022 at the Victory Theatre in Burbank, with Stage Raw naming it one of the best L.A. plays that year. Richard is developing a one-woman show about Ingrid Bergman with actress Annemette Andersen and director Henning Hegland, premiering in 2025 in Iceland. He was a finalist last year for the Dramatists Guild National Fellows Program and as an optioned, working screenwriter has twice been in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Top 50 and a finalist for the Sundance Labs. He was also a finalist for the Cynosure Diversity Screenwriting Awards, the Stage 32 Diverse Voices Springboard, and won the Lonely Seal Film Festival award for the best script with a disabled lead. His novel A Friend of Dorothy’s, set during the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City in the late 1980s, was in June 2025.