Marc Acito

Marc Acito is an American playwright, novelist, and humorist.

Before becoming a playwright, Acito was a novelist and journalist. His comic novel How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater won the Oregon Book Awards’ 2005 Ken Kesey Award for Best Novel, and was voted a 2005 "Teens Top Ten for favorite young adult book" of the American Library Association. In April 2008, Acito published Attack of the Theater People, a sequel to How I Paid for College.

He is also the writer of the syndicated humor column "The Gospel According to Marc", which ran for four years in nineteen gay publications. His humorous essays have appeared in many publications including The New York Times and Portland Monthly magazine; as well as on NPR's All Things Considered.

In 2012, Acito won the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play for Birds of a Feather, a comedy inspired by Roy and Silo, the same-sex male penguins in Central Park who raised a chick, and Pale Male and Lola, the red-tailed hawks that nested on the ledge of a Fifth Avenue cooperative.

Acito wrote the libretto for the musical Allegiance, which won the 2012 Craig Noel Award for Outstanding New Musical after a record breaking run at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater. Allegiance - A New Musical Inspired By A True Story opened on Broadway in 2015 and starred George Takei and Lea Salonga.

In 2012, Acito also turned his novel How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater into a "one-man monologue with songs" that premiered at the Hub Theater in Fairfax, VA.

In 2014, his musical adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View was presented in Seattle at the 5th Avenue Theater. In 2015, Acito wrote the concert adaptation of Lerner & Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon for New York City Center’s Encores! series.