Playwright, Director, Poet Magus Magnus pushes, pulls, transcends and succumbs, incants the chaotic present out of time, and is in it for life. His hybrid poetry book, The Killing Joke (forthcoming from The Mute Canary) – with its delving into Evil Clowns as a subcategory of the Trickster figure – dovetails divinely with how Smile: A Clown’s Ascension gambols towards activation of the Holy Clown archetype. What a perfectly-timed collaboration with Kangalee Arts Ensemble!

Magnus’ work sources poetry and “the poetic” as central both to the extremes of interiority (thought, philosophy) and exteriority (performance, deed). Books include The Re-echoes, Idylls for a Bare Stage, Heraclitean Pride, Verb Sap, and Little Puddles. His theater work has been presented in Washington D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis, New Orleans, and New York: venues include the Kennedy Center Page-to-Stage Festival (for his Smile-relevant, Commedia-celebratory Harlequin, Again!: Or, H,A!), Washington D.C.’s The Shakespeare Company’s Sidney Harman Hall, the Capital Fringe Festival for a “Must-See,” 5-Star, “Best of the Fringe”-rated run of Murder on the Bare Stage, and the atrium of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office building in Alexandria.

Magus Magnus lives in the Washington D.C. metro area with his wife, Dr. Manya Magnus, chair of epidemiology at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. Their grown children (Hero Magnus, daughter and Gryphon Magnus, son) each actively pursue the arts in free-spirited defiance of the crushing era into which they’ve come of age.

Born in L.A. in 1967, Magnus’ privileged upbringing in Southern California did him no favors, but brought him lasting distrust of materialistic veneer and, by his teen years, charges of “malicious mischief” from the Beverly Hills cops. He lives only for love and to drink from the Enchanted Spring.

Magnus is on Substack at  Poetry, Thought, Word Magick 

www.magusmagnus.com