The Trustus Collection

In this collection of six plays written by Jon Tuttle and performed at Columbia, SC's cutting edge Trutus Theatre over a 14 year period of time we trace not just the evolution of a playwright, but that of a theatre and a culture, as well. In his introduction, Thorne Compton writes that "In Jon Tuttle's world life is a confusing pile of colorful chips from a kaleidoscope that has long been smashed," and that "the fact that life is absurd and usually ends badly does not make it any less valuable ..." From The Hammerstone, which won the Trustus Playwright's Festival in 1994 before it went on to be performed in 17 states, to 2018's evocative Boy About Ten, Tuttle allows us to peek into the miracles and mundaneness of his characters, many of whose lack of adherence to normalcy is the most normal thing about them.

Jon Tuttle is Professor of English, Director of University Honors, the Nellie Cooke Sparrow Writer-in-Residence, a J. Loren Mason Distinguished Professor, and an FMU Trustees Distinguished Scholar at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina.

Jon Tuttle is Professor of English, Director of University Honors, the Nellie Cooke Sparrow Writer-in-Residence, a J. Lorin Mason Distinguished Professor, and an FMU Trustees Research Scholar at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC. He has won the South Carolina Theater Association's Founders Award, a Porter-Fleming Award and Puschart Prize nomination for fiction, and fellowships from the South Carolina Academy of Authors and Florence Regional Arts Alliance, on whose boards he has served. His other plays include A Fish Story (Samuel French, Inc., 2008), Terminal Café (Dramatists Play Service, 1996), and one-act plays The White Problem (Playscripts Inc., 2006), Sonata for Armadillos (Playscripts Inc., 2002) and One Another (with Cindy Turner, Smith & Kraus, 2018). He also edited David Kranes: Selected Plays (Level 4, 2011) and is currently editing South Carolina Onstage, a collection of plays by South Carolina playwrights from the post-colonial period to the present. He and his wife Cheryl Roberts Tuttle have three children, Staci, Jill and Josh, and two grandsons, Noah and Sullivan.