John Lazarus (1947- ), playwright, screenwriter, dramaturge, actor, critic, and teacher, was born in Montreal and attended the National Theatre School. His fertile mind has created plays such as "Babel Rap," "Dreaming and Duelling," "The Late Blumer," "David for Queen," and "ICE: Beyond Cool." "Village of Idiots" appeared in the book, "New Canadian Drama--Volume 7, West Coast Comedies," (1999, Borealis) and was adapted for a CBC Radio mini-series and an award-winning National Film Board cartoon.

New Canadian Drama - Volume 7, West Coast Comedies, edited by Alan Filewod. Volume 7 contains three comedies from British Columbia. In Village of Idiots John Lazarus offers an anthology of comic folktales about the famous wise fools of Chelm; Ian Weir´s St. George is a gently ironic study of a naive academic whose life is framed by his devotion to English literature; and in Down for the Count Peter Eliot Weiss resituates Dracula to the eve of the First World War and exposes the sexual repression and desire that feed Bram Stoker´s famous novel. Each of these three plays taps into contemporary angst, synthesizing the strange and the familiar into something that might be seen as a new Canadian sensibility.