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Harry Kollatz Jr. is a writer and theatre stimulator in the City of RIchmond, Virginia. He lives there with artist Amie Oliver and their cat, Miró. Harry is a native of the city.
Who is this Harry Kollatz Jr?
I'm this guy, really. Tall, fortiesh, blondish, baldish, bespectacled, born at RIchmond Memorial Hospital, Januray 3, 1962. I'm a Capricorn. The hospital is closed now, boarded up, I 've joked: They found out a Kollatz came out of that place and closed it up. Took'em 40 years.
I am a bundle of perceptions and experiences bundled up by commercialized contexts and lofty artistic aspirations. Not only am I 40 this year, but the theatre of which I am co-founder, the Firehouse Theatre Project, turns 10 in 2003 and I also have spent a decade with Richmond Magazine where I am, sadly, senior writer and main features scribe. I write extensively about historical topics and current issues.
I was in 1978 an exchange student in Wiesbaden, Germany, where I spent about two months, attended gymnasium and visited Mainz, Frankfurt, took the Rhein cruise, saw the Lorelei rock, SchloB Rheinfels, Heidelberg. We went to a place called, I believe, Regensburg, with a bridge blown up in the partition of East and West. I watched a lady tend her garden on other side. It seemed ridiculous to me, this separation.
The Kollatz family, or at least that part most directly related to me, came to the U.S. in the 1880s. Searching on the Internet has turned up very interesting branches, but especially in Germany, where Heidmarie, Matthias and Udo Kollatz all resemble my family, as if they were distant cousins--which in fact, they are. The Kollatz group of my relation came from a small town--called Kollatz or Collatz in what was Pomerania. I want to visit there, though now it is in Poland and under a different name, Kolacz, I think, and likely not much is there.
In 1993 I co-founded the Firehouse Theatre Project, a non-profit organization conceived to produce theatre wrought in an American voice in an authentic urban space. The company is based in a fire station that served the city for nearly a century. In 1997, my play, "The Persistence of Memory," was produced there, with good reviews and audience attendance.
In 1996 I married artist Amie Oliver. We've traveled together, to Paris, Glasgow, New York, San Francisco. My job at the magazine doesn't allow me to go with her everywhere--this summer she was able to go with her art to Korea.
Amie and I collaboratively created "Venus Rising" about the "life and times" Aphrodite, which toured around the Southeast, her art, a beautiful actress Susannah Anderson, her ingenious husband John DeShazo and our director Kathy Stolzenbach.
I've been struggling to complete another play, "The Titanic Society," without much success, though there was a staged presentation of an early version at the Firehouse in 2000, for which most have forgiven me.
Our lives are filled with art and dramatic people. We aren't wealthy in the material sense and we struggle as all artists do. I am prone to fret and worry. I'm not proud of these characteristics, but, I come by them honestly.
--HEK
 My Homepage
My Theatre
My Daily Bread
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