William Considine was born in McKeesport, PA. He attended college and law school on work-study, loans and scholarships. He graduated “With Great Distinction” from Stanford and cum laude from Harvard Law School. He was first encouraged to write poems by Diane Middlebrook and first studied writing poems with Elizabeth Bishop. He studied playwriting in the Playwrights Workshop of the New York Shakespeare Festival, led by Ed Bullins at the Public Theater. He served as a lecturer in law, an administrative law judge, an arbitrator, and for many years in senior positions in a New York City government agency and in a public service organization for dispute resolution. He writes poems and plays. His earlier books include a chapbook of poems, Strange Coherence, and a volume of verse plays, The Furies (both from The Operating System), a poetry chapbook, The Other Myrtle (Finishing Line Press), and a book of poetry, Continent of Fire (Kelsay Books). His full-length family drama Moral Support ran at Medicine Show Theatre, NYC to critical praise and was published by Finishing Line Press in 2025. His full-length verse play The Mysteries, based on a foundational story in Plutarch’s Life of Solon, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2025. Residents of New York City for many years, he and his wife Careen Shannon now live in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. They have two daughters and two grandchildren.
Kristina Marie Darling: Tell us about your verse play, THE MYSTERIES, which just launched from Spuyten Duyvil. What are three things you’d like the reader to know before they delve into the work itself?
William Considine: Three things I’d like the reader to know from the beginning are:
- The play is set near the beginning of recorded history, but the story resonates with contemporary issues and concerns. It is based on a story in Plutarch’s Life of Solon. Athens is a city under the control of oligarchs, politically and economically. It has experienced a very recent war. Enslavement for unpaid debt puts many citizens in economic peril. Solon’s path to power is built on disrupting the women’s communal rites, based on his false claims.
- This story has long been with me. It is about a man known to history as the Lawgiver of Athens. He was a sea trader and poet, and he rose to power in considerable part through his poetry. My first experience with telling a story about Solon occurred in 1964. A poem entitled “My First Oration” in my book Continent of Fire (Kelsay Books, 2022) relates that experience:
My First Oration
Sophomore year of high school, I took Speech,
a class taught – led – by Miss Malseed
in a room with a stage, called the Odeon.
Sophomore boys near year end – and yes,
only boys – could give a memorized
oration with gestures and movement
to the Optimist Club,
a small fellowship group of businessmen,
in a room in a restaurant after dinner.
I chose democracy as my theme.
From the encyclopedia my parents bought
from a door-to-door salesman, I chose
Solon the Lawgiver of Athens, and
Hiawatha, sage of the Iroquois Nation,
as independent founders of democracies.
The logic of my argument from two men
out of all history now eludes me.
Feedback was that perhaps Solon was remote
and did not engage the men’s interest.
From this, I learned nothing, worked over
many years on a verse play about Solon
playing the mad poet to take power
by disrupting the women’s mysteries –
my work while democracy shattered in lies.
Hiawatha’s been done, but in name only,
a stolen name, not the real man.
But who knows – I might still have time
for a new draft, this time an oration
of epic ethnic appropriation.
- The play emerged slowly over years with the help of friends in key institutions, including a Poets Theater Festival at St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery, NYC in 1988, in which my short play about Solon, Prologue: Prehistory, was staged. That play was much later published in my book The Furies (The Operating System, 2017). A performance of a draft of the first scene of The Mysteries was staged at LaMama Theater, NYC in 1990, again under the auspices of The Poetry Project. A reading of a complete draft of the play at Medicine Show Theater, NYC in 2015 helped guide my revisions. A rehearsed reading at Polaris North theater artists’ cooperative in NYC in 2019 helped me provide the final draft. The friends I speak of gratefully include Michael Lazarin, Bob Holman, Elinor Nauen, Elae Moss Benedetto, Chris Brandt, and Rose-Marie Brandwein. I was also working full-time and writing poems and making videos in those years.
KMD: In today’s postmodern cultural moment, we tend to forget that poets are also storytellers. I admire your undeniable command of narrative, but also, the beauty of the language found here. How did you approach balancing lyric intensity with dramatic tension?
WC: I found that balance primarily through readings by actors over the years, which showed me when the lyricism was slowing the narrative drive or veering off track. The readings helped me internalize finding the right balance as I proceeded and revised.
KMD: Were there specific literary traditions (Greek, modernist, or otherwise) that shaped the rhythms and diction of this compelling verse play?
WMC: I know no Greek. The literary traditions that shaped the rhythms and diction came from modernist poetry, Shakespearean drama, and translations into English of ancient Greek dramas.
KMD: The play draws on Life of Solon but expands it imaginatively. What liberties did you feel most compelled to take—and why?
WMC: Perhaps my biggest liberty was conflating the women’s mysteries with the Eleusinian mysteries. I felt justified because even less is known about the women’s mysteries and what we are told of the Eleusinian rituals includes symbolic aspects of women’s life experience. Solon is said to have built a wall to protect the site of the Eleusinian mysteries, which I considered may have been his political reminder to all of his historic “protection” of the women at their mysteries (“protection” from the attack on them that he had secretly arranged).
I also had to fill in gaps in the few surviving lines that are said to be from Solon’s daring public performance, which he gave potentially under penalty of death, of his comic poem to incite renewed war with Megara. For that, I drew on parallels to our own time. I was glad to include some lines central to the story that were said to be Solon’s own words.
KMD: The Eleusinian Mysteries are famously secretive and historically obscure. How did you approach dramatizing something that is, by nature, unknowable?
WMC: To dramatize the women’s mysteries, I drew on the model of choral portions of ancient Greek dramas. The choral aspects in my play signify unity and celebration among the women. Along with the mythic celebration aspects of the rites, I added the possibility that the secret rites provided an opportunity for women to discuss their needs, status and responsibilities in the community, as expressed by individual speakers who sometimes disagreed.
KMD: What are you currently working on? What can readers look forward to?
WMC: In late February, I presented a short play of mine, “Aunt Peg the Computer,” in five performances before a total audience of over four hundred people in a theater festival in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The direction and acting were great. A video of that will be available soon.
I’m putting together a book of my produced short plays, with the working title, Aunt Peg the Computer and Other Plays. As that title indicates, not everything is set in antiquity! One of the pieces, though, “Odyssey’s End,” is based on a brief statement by Plutarch as to the Judgement of Neoptolemus, who banished Odysseus for his killing of the suitors. An excerpt from “Odyssey’s End” was published in the journal Classical Outlook in 2025.
I also am close to having completed a new book of poems, with the working title Open and Concealed. I‘ve been fortunate to participate recently in workshops led by esteemed poets Jennifer Clement and Paul Muldoon. I learned a lot from feedback from them and from my colleagues in the workshops.
And I should confess that I have been writing another full-length verse play set in archaic Greece. It is my version of the story of Andromache, Neoptolemus and Hermione. Its focus is on slavery and the aftermath of war. Its working title is The Oracle, to complete a trilogy with The Furies and The Mysteries.