Welcome to BobPotter.org

Bob Potter was born in New York City in the depths of the Depression (definitely a demographic advantage) and raised in Hollywood, where his father, the director H.C. Potter made twenty feature films. After graduating from Pomona College in 1956 he served in Army Intelligence (his favorite oxymoron).

Bob is the author of 27 plays produced at various university and professional theatres in the United States, Canada and England.  From 1972 to 2001 he directed the playwriting program at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he was a Professor of Dramatic Art.

Original Plays & Stage Adaptations

This website, currently under construction, will eventually include complete texts of all of Bob Potter’s original plays and stage adaptations written since 1969, together with ancillary material (reviews, programs, photos and sound recordings) from as many productions as possible.

Poems in Transit

Poems in Transit: 1957-2004, with accompanying photos and comments, follows Bob Potter's trail from Beat Generation San Francisco to the present.  Poems in Transit is not your usual book of poetry. Simultaneously a narrative, a collection of photographs and a gathering of poems, it begins in the present, at the author's 70th birthday, and proceeds backward by decades.

Medieval Theatre

As a graduate student Bob encountered medieval theatre and became a lifelong devotee. During a Fulbright year in Bristol, England in 1963-64 he studied with Bertram Joseph and Glynne Wickham and directed the first modern revival of John Bale's King Johan, the first English History Play. Returning to California, he completed his doctoral dissertation on the English Morality Play and commenced work as a publishing scholar, critic and translator in this field. A highlight of this work was his participation and presentation of papers at the triennial Colloquia of the Société Internationale pour l'Étude du Théâtre Médiéval (SITM) in Viterbo, Italy (1983), Perpignan, France (1986), Lancaster, England (1989), Girona, Spain (1992), Toronto, Canada (1995), Odense, Denmark (1998), Groningen, Netherlands (2001), Elche, Spain (2004) and Lille, France (2007).