David Kranes, 2013. Image by Shawn Rossiter.
David Kranes, the prolific Utah author, playwright, teacher, and longtime director of the Sundance Playwrights Lab, has died at 87. He was a fiercely imaginative writer whose work ranged across fiction, theater, film, opera, and even casino design—an eclectic span that reflected a mind always in motion.
Kranes arrived in Utah in 1967 from New England to teach in the University of Utah’s Creative Writing Program, where he became a formative mentor for generations of writers, including Ron Carlson, Pam Houston, Jeff Metcalf, and Rolf Yngve. Although he spent more than thirty years at the university, the classroom was only one of his stages. Over the course of his career, he wrote approximately 50 plays, eight novels, and three collections of short stories, as well as essays and commentary pieces. His short-story collections included The Legend’s Daughter and Low Time in the Desert: Nevada Stories. His 2001 novel The National Tree was adapted into a 2009 Hallmark Channel film.
A hallmark of Kranes’ writing—and his life—was his fascination with landscapes both literal and psychological. Whether charting the austere beauty of the Mountain West or the neon-saturated hyperreality of Las Vegas, he explored how environments shape desire, loneliness, and reinvention. He was, as Knopf editor Gordon Lish once wrote, a “poet of dread,” who rendered America as Americans know it but rarely articulate.
His curiosity led him far beyond the page. Kranes was a noted expert in casino culture and design, a columnist for Casino Executive Magazine, and an avid blackjack card counter who was occasionally asked by casino staff to step away from the table. He famously described casinos as “filled with compressed drama,” a phrase that could just as easily apply to his own dramatic works. His 1989 Salt Lake Acting Company production 1102, 1103 set its action in neighboring Las Vegas hotel rooms—liminal spaces where chance, identity, and spectacle collide.
As Artistic Director of the Sundance Playwrights Lab for fourteen years, Kranes helped shape a crucible of innovation that nurtured writers such as Don DeLillo, Donald Margulies, and Jim Lehrer. Under his tenure, works like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and The Kentucky Cycle took early steps toward becoming landmark pieces of American theater. Kranes thrived in collaborative environments, believing deeply in process: “The more ways you can impact the work and let the pieces float around in the solution,” he said in a 2013 interview with David Pace, “the more possibility it will reconfigure in powerful ways.”
Kranes’ Salt Lake City home, designed by Ron Molen.
Despite his achievements, Kranes remained modest, even bemused, by moments of mainstream attention—such as when his novel The National Tree was adapted into a Hallmark Channel film. Fame was never his pursuit; inquiry was. His obsessions drifted between architecture, ecology, theology, and phenomenology, each feeding into his expansive sense of storytelling.
David Kranes in his Salt Lake City home, 2013. Image by Shawn Rossiter.
Friends and colleagues often described him as “always in process,” a phrase that suited both his artistic philosophy and his personal restlessness. Even in his eighties he continued drafting new novels, rediscovering old manuscripts, and reimagining past works. He was the sort of writer who believed no story is ever entirely finished, only paused until a new understanding arrives. His last novel, Family Matters, was released shortly before his death, and another, Think of Me As Water, will be published posthumously.
Kranes is survived by his wife, Carol; two sons, Jon and Michael; two grandchildren, Sidney and Ceccelia; and a sister, Nancy. His ashes will be scattered in parts of Idaho, a landscape that shaped and inspired some of his most enduring work.
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Categories: Literary Arts
Thanks to the urging of my splendid colleague, Ann Poore, I attended the release party for David Kranes’ latest book a few weeks past. Kranes is one of the authors 15 Bytes celebrated as having been a major force twenty years ago, when Artists of Utah was starting out, and his books turned out to be as vital now as they were then. At the release of the latest, someone pointed out that with the recent passing of Robert Redford, Kranes became one of the few remaining pillars of the Sundance phenomenon. It was good that he lived to hear his name celebrated as a survivor, however briefly. Along with the eponymous film festival’s departure, this may be another sign of the deflation of Utah arts, once such a paragon of civil activity, but which is losing some of its resources (galleries, etc) and funding. One thing we can do is continue to celebrate another of those paragons, Jann Haworth, who played an indispensable part in the Sundance phenomenon and is still a vital force in our arts today. Maybe now her resumé will be updated and she will get more of the credit she deserves. And we might all read or reread some Kranes.
David Kranes, such a generous and intelligent artist, professor, and a friend to so many. Sounds ridiculous now, but I think it I only began to realize taking his courses in graduate school that bringing one’s quirky personality and experiences to teaching would, or could, make a classroom livelier, a more compelling place to learn . There’s one scene that has stuck with me, memorable in part because it involved the articulate David not talking. He came in to class—either a drama course or one titled Creative Process (with material I still use teaching my own courses at the U)—and plunked himself down, telling us he had gotten stuck in the script he was currently writing. He said “This is where I do that David Kranes thing, you know, okay, I can do THAT….” He got very quiet, seemed like a long time…sure, likely a well-planned dramatic pause….”So I knew I needed to try something different, maybe something that wouldn’t work quite as well.” He proceeded to read the vulnerable new scene aloud.
One of those letters to the Times I should have, but never did get around to writing—Those terrific articles, those tributes to Robert Redford, all failed to mention Sundance Playwrights Lab and David’s contributions to the development of theater. Being invited to be part of the 1990 Lab remains one of the most heady, most memorable, experiences of my painting career.
I last talked to David in 2013 for the profile of him mentioned above in his home in the Avenues. He had just won the 15 Bytes Book Award for “The Legends Daughter: Stories.” He was a remarkable, prodigiously talented man who was completely accessible to others amd had a quiet dignity as he reflected on his auspicious career.
I’m grateful to have known him and remember fondly so many of his plays staged in Salt Lake City and beyond.
I was fortunate to have had lunches with David and his friend Ann Poore, especially when his Performance Art: Stories book was published. He was pretty proud of it. David participated in our 2022 Entrada Institute Writing from the Land Workshop and contributed a chapter for my Final Light book about Utah painter V. Douglas Snow. He will be missed by Utah’s creative community and his many friends and past students.