On April 24, 1959, Judge Saul Streit, Presiding Justice of the New York Supreme Court, signed the incorporation documents establishing what was then called the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSDC) as a national independent labor union.
On April 24, 2024, SDC launched a year-long celebration of the 65th anniversary of its founding with “65 for the 65th,” a social media campaign that has been gathered into the book you now hold in your hands. An anniversary is an opportunity: to reflect on where we’ve come from and to imagine where we want to go next, to remember our origin story and commemorate our collective struggles and hard-won triumphs. And to commemorate our 65th anniversary, SDC highlighted 65 directors and choreographers whose work transformed the American theatre.
In the spring of 2024, SDC sent out a survey to the Membership asking, “Who are the SDC Members whose work as a director or choreographer has most inspired the field or your own artistic path?” Seventy Members responded within the first 24 hours. By the time the survey closed, 516 directors and choreographers were nominated. After a long process—during which nominated directors and choreographers were rigorously considered by a cross-section of SDC Members, with seven rounds of voting—the final list was selected.
This was an exhilarating and challenging process; we could have made this list 100 different ways and not come close to capturing the breadth and depth of the talent and inspiring work of our Membership over the past 65 years. In fact, we had so many names we wanted to include that we ended up adding a special “Founder’s Circle” to highlight three people without whom the Union would not exist: Shepard Traube, Agnes de Mille, and Bob Fosse.
The lives and legacies of the directors and choreographers featured in this book are a testament to the strength and influence of our Union community. We are glad to have this opportunity to recognize these artists—our visionary leaders,
colleagues, friends—and to introduce them to those who may not yet know their impact. We hope this project will inspire readers to learn more about the remarkable directors and choreographers on this list whose work you may not be familiar with, or to reflect on your personal lists of influential mentors and friends.
Together, we are custodians of our little piece of the timeline of the Union, entrusted with ensuring that SDC endures and moves ever forward. As the American theatre continues to experience existential challenges, the story of SDC’s founding and the achievements of our Membership over the years remind us that, with strength and solidarity, growth and advancement are possible even amidst uncertainty.
We are inspired and heartened by our Membership’s dedication, artistry, and continuing commitment to standing together to protect and empower directors and choreographers throughout the field. Happy 65th Anniversary—here’s to the next 65!
In Solidarity,
Evan Yionoulis Executive Board President
FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
The context within which we do our work is everchanging. Even so, it’s critical to understand a particular moment in time. As we wrap up this celebration of our 65th anniversary, I move between the need to stay focused on the work at hand, and the imperative that we keep our heads up, tracking the many rapid changes and anticipating the future—continually asking what is needed, what is possible, and what we can learn from our history that can help us navigate this precarious moment.
Shortly after I arrived at SDC in 2008, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of this mighty and incomparable Union of leaders. Even as a looming recession weighed heavily on our shoulders, we dug in and began what would become the most extraordinary period of growth SDC experienced since its founding. The context within which we were growing didn’t immediately lend itself to success: the recession of 2009, which brought with it a 20 percent reduction in employment in the nonprofit sector; the seemingly insurmountable challenge of responding with urgency and intelligence to the #MeToo movement and what would follow; tough negotiations; changing audiences; under-capitalization; and widespread recognition from the field (long overdue) that there was work to do to make certain that a career in the theatre would not be the purview of a select few, representing a single demographic.
Year in and year out the Executive Board, as duly elected representatives of the Membership, sets strategic goals, adjusting as necessary. Against the odds, SDC Membership doubled in size as our jurisdiction expanded through organizing, increasing the number of employers utilizing SDC contracts and providing Union protections to new groups of artists: fight choreographers and Broadway associates.
We made it through Covid—wondering who we would become. We once had to imagine a world without the theatre. That is now something we no longer need to do. We lived it. Now we are faced with a new set of challenges. These are more turbulent times than we have ever experienced, more uncertain, more perilous.
The layers are too many to explore in this forum as I consider the very real possibility that we may lose the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and as we struggle to imagine what the Kennedy Center may look like in the years ahead. I think we are drawn to the question of the Kennedy Center today as a tangible manifestation of threats we are experiencing more broadly to the arts and humanities.
My anxiety might be partially fueled by the question of leadership. Where will we find our leaders, the fierce advocates for the arts and humanities, in this time of such turmoil across all the texture of our lives? Where are the champions who might help show us the way?
I pause to consider the world as it was during the first decades of SDC. Those were fitful, tragic, and hopeful times for our country. Amid the turmoil, we had leaders who recognized and fought for the fundamental importance of the arts in American society. In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established a commission for a new public auditorium in Washington, DC. In 1958, he signed the National Cultural Center Act, establishing the principles that would continue to guide the Center’s work.
One year later, in 1959, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers signed articles of incorporation.
Also in 1959, troops on the ground, we entered what would be the first phase of the Vietnam War. Fidel Castro was named prime minister of Cuba, establishing a communist government, having overthrown dictator Fulgencio Batista.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy, at a fundraising dinner for the National Cultural Center, said, “Art and the encouragement of art is political in the most
PHOTO HERVÉ HÔTE
profound sense, not as a weapon in the struggle, but as an instrument of understanding….”
That year, the Union secured recognition and, with it, its first agreement with what would become, in just a few months, the Broadway League.
After President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law legislation renaming the National Cultural Center as a “living memorial” to Kennedy, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
“Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”
—PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON
At the same time, with a burst, theatres sprang up throughout the country. The regional theatre movement was fueled by individuals whose collective energy gathered behind a vision that has helped us explore, in communities across the nation, what it means to be American, in all its diversity and complexities. However flawed, that movement—led in part by a few fearless, visionary SDC Members, some of whom are highlighted in this book—would create the infrastructure that continues to provide, by far, the most employment of any jurisdiction for SDC Members.
The first decade of the Union’s life, a decade of sweeping change, took place during a remarkable period in our country’s history, with a backdrop of civil unrest and transformation. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X. The tragedy that was the Vietnam War. The premiere of 60 Minutes, the first televised newsmagazine. We walked on the moon, and to this day benefit from the discoveries and the science it took to get us there. The first successful heart transplant and Woodstock. Seeds were planted for the changes we would see, or hoped to see, in every corner of our society over the next five decades.
In his 1965 State of the Union address, President Johnson made a proclamation. “We must,” he said, “recognize and encourage those who can be pathfinders for the Nation’s imagination and understanding.”
Johnson’s Great Society initiative, a series of domestic programs enacted between 1964 and 1968, was the president’s most successful legislative achievement. In a six-month period, Congress passed 84 out of 87 bills proposed as part of the Great Society package. The center of this work—aimed at ending poverty, reducing crime, abolishing inequality, and improving the environment—created the largest social services safety net in modern history.
An additional central tenet of the administration was support for the arts and culture. On September 29, 1965, President Johnson, with bipartisan support from Republican and Democratic leaders in House and Senate, stood in the Rose Garden of the White House and signed into law the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act. This established the National Endowment on the Arts and the Humanities Foundation as an umbrella for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and their respective councils.
“Art is a nation’s most precious heritage,” Johnson said. “For it is in our works of art that we reveal ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson presents Agnes de Mille with a bill signing pen after signing the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act.
PHOTO C/O LBJ LIBRARY
“The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose… and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”
—PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
This national commitment to American arts and humanities wasn’t brought about to fix something wrong—as the WPA had been created to pull the country out of the Depression, to get us back to work. Rather, this was born of the recognition that to be our best selves—and nation—we needed the experiences that only arts and culture can bring.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” Johnson said in his Rose Garden remarks.
In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon would call on Congress not only to extend Johnson’s authorization for the NEA and NEH but also to increase its funding dramatically. He stated, “Our creative and performing artists give free and full expression to the American spirit as they illuminate, criticize, and celebrate our civilization. Like our teachers, they are an invaluable national resource.”
For the gala opening of the Kennedy Center in September 1971, SDC Member Gordon Davidson directed the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS. Nixon, following advice from Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, did not attend that event, Haldeman having described the work as, “very, very bad, maybe really bad…[it] has some political overtones and it’s very depressing, a sort of everything’s-gone-wrong kind of thing.” Even so, Nixon remained a steadfast supporter of the NEA and NEH.
And now it’s 2025. What will we say about 2025 in 65 years, of what this decade brought and how those moments informed us over the next five decades? Our work at SDC, our work as a Union, has never been more important. Our work together, all of us in the theatre, has maybe never been more important. To tell stories, to tell all the stories. To gather, and all that that means. This is a moment for us to come together.
Today, we must not be paralyzed. We must find a way to create shared language that might influence and inform cultural policy that would in turn make it possible for transformation and for sustainability.
What matters is being part of a community that thrives because of a vast and complex ecosystem, not despite it. To be responsible to a community, ensuring that those who follow, those who we are opening doors to, can build a life, professional and personal, in the theatre. Where the connection to live theatre fills the full measure, the breadth and depth of our communities. Where people know they are not alone as they laugh and question and get a glimpse of their lives and the lives of others—together.
As humans, we are responsible to others, both to those with us now and to those who will follow. A responsibility that can only be fulfilled if we are informed. Theatre is uniquely positioned to build and maintain an informed citizenry. The theatre, when available to all, when central to our lives, tells us stories that open us up, deepen our understanding, and increase our empathy for one another. Traveling through stories we become informed. Our curiosity and our outrage fuel us and a sense of possibility compels us to engage in civic discourse and action.
Of President Kennedy’s many quotes, this one, said in 1962, is my favorite: “The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose…and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”
Every generation has its challenges, to be certain, and today we are facing a very real threat to so much of what has brought us here, with all our shortcomings. Let us work to make our theatres and our culture work for everyone and strengthen the infrastructure so that those who follow will have jobs that support their lives, in whatever form and manner they choose.
And let us remember the inspiration and influence of all the extraordinary directors and choreographers who contributed to the establishment of SDC and whose unwavering commitment today leads the Union into the future with hope and determination.
Laura Penn Executive Director
Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, or SDC (originally called the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, or SSDC) was founded in 1959 by director Shepard Traube along with a small group of theatrical luminaries who united to create a labor union devoted to protecting stage directors and choreographers. Among the founders were Abe Burrows, Harold Clurman, Agnes de Mille, Bob Fosse, Hanya Holm, Elia Kazan, Ezra Stone, and Stuart Vaughan. Shepard Traube was elected as the first President of the Executive Board, with Agnes de Mille and Hanya Holm as First and Second Vice Presidents, respectively, and Ezra Stone as Secretary.
ABOVE SDC Founders Hanya Holm, Ezra Stone, Shepard Traube, and Agnes de Mille, together with legal counsel Erwin Feldman, witness as Judge Saul Streit (seated) signs the SSDC incorporation documents, April 24, 1959.
Those leaders—and the small group of women and men who joined them—founded the Union because they recognized that directors and choreographers were the only group of theatre workers on Broadway whose work lacked union protections. Their first major battle was to secure recognition as the official collective bargaining unit for Broadway directors and choreographers.
After two failed attempts to negotiate an agreement with the League of New York Theatres, in 1962 the SDC Executive Board authorized its Members to withhold their services from all first-class productions. It was only when Bob Fosse refused to break this strike pledge when offered a contract to direct and choreograph a production of Little Me that producers recognized the Union, setting the stage for the successful negotiation of the first SDC-Broadway Agreement.
The second major battle for the Union was to achieve protections for directors and choreographers with the League of Resident Theatres, which was newly organized in 1966. After two years of stalled activity,
negotiations with LORT began in 1968 and continued until a contract was officially signed on April 15, 1972, by SDC President Lloyd Richards and LORT President Thomas C. Fichandler. The Union achieved a contract that elevated it from a Broadway organization to a national one. It was a victory not about size—but about vision.
SDC’s legitimacy as an employee organization (rather than an association of freelance artists and independent contractors) was confirmed in a case against producer Jay Julien, litigated for eight years and decided in 1975. With the Union winning the important distinction that its Members are employees, this landmark decision was a tremendous victory and set the precedent on which SDC continues to base its existence as a union.
Throughout its history, SDC has tackled the complex issue of intellectual property rights with such cases as Gerald Gutierrez’s The Most Happy Fella (1994), Joe Mantello’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997), and John Rando and John Carrafa’s Urinetown (2006). These cases signified major achievements in the Union’s fight
for directorial and choreographic intellectual property rights recognition.
In 2011, SDC led a successful arbitration against the producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark over the termination of the show’s original director, Julie Taymor, without cause. After intense discussions, a settlement was reached; in the terms, the producers agreed to pay Taymor what was due under her contract, sending a strong signal to the industry that SDC Members’ intellectual property would be protected by the Union.
SDC Journal, a magazine dedicated to craft, was established by the Union in 2012 to provide a glimpse into the work practices and artistic visions of directors and choreographers. Since then, the Journal has given voice to an empowered collective of directors and choreographers working in all jurisdictions and venues across the country.
Also starting in 2012, the Union began its efforts to secure coverage of development work across all of SDC’s major collective bargaining agreements— including Broadway, Off-Broadway, and LORT—thus
providing benefit contributions and property rights protections for SDC Members for this vital work. In the past decade, nearly 4,000 developmental contracts have been filed.
In 2016, inspired by a conviction that labor unions best serve their foundational purpose—to protect the rights of workers—when they are engaged politically, SDC joined the AFL-CIO’s Department of Professional Employees, a coalition of national unions representing more than four million professional and technical workers. Today, the Union serves as an active member of the Arts and Entertainment and Media Industry Coordinating Committee (AEMI).
SDC has, throughout its history, recognized that the lives of directors and choreographers have meaning— not simply for the world of these artists individually and collectively, but for the industry. In 2018, the Union launched Next Stage, a two-year, three-phase research project that used quantitative and qualitative data to reveal the many ways in which these central artists in the field were struggling. Published in 2020, the research study very clearly captured the professional and financial insecurities of directors
BELOW SDC Member David Ruttura, resident director of The Phantom of the Opera, and the show’s cast hold up “Recognition Now” buttons during a 2015 organizing campaign for associate directors and choreographers.
and choreographers, particularly artists of color and women, and it included tangible actions that could be taken to address these needs.
Throughout the pandemic, as rehearsal rooms turned into Zoom rooms, SDC Members demonstrated their industry leadership as they guided productions of innovative remote and digital theatrical content. SDC was steadfast in its endeavor to elevate the profile of stage directors and choreographers by setting new standards for the capture of live stage productions, including fair compensation, prominent billing, collaboration with the camera director, and consultation on captured material prior to distribution. Additionally, as Members were asked to provide inperson services at theatres around the country, SDC led a collaboration with the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA) and an expert medical advisory panel to develop protocols for employers to ensure artists were protected when returning to work.
Driven by its commitment to increased transparency around non-discrimination and anti-harassment, SDC in recent years has established Labor-Management Committees with all its major multi-employer units: Off-Broadway, LORT, and the Broadway League. Each of these committees requires employers to engage with SDC specifically on topics of equity and access, to address needs and concerns outside of the bargaining
cycle and to work together to find solutions to racial and gender equity issues that may fall outside the contractual relationship.
SDC has significantly expanded the size and strength of its Membership and its covered jurisdictions since 1959. Founded with 164 Members, SDC has grown to include more than 3,400 professional directors and choreographers working across the United States. Today, SDC provides vital employment protections, including health and pension benefits, through its many collectively bargained agreements, promulgated agreements, and independent producer agreements. SDC Members file more than 2,500 employment contracts per year, and SDC has expanded its employment jurisdiction to include associate/resident directors and choreographers and fight choreographers, securing minimum terms and conditions for their employment across several of SDC’s jurisdictions.
The directors and choreographers who founded SDC might not have imagined the growth and power the Union has today. But like its Founders, today’s Membership is ready to fight for the value of directors’ and choreographers’ work and is committed to furthering the strength of the labor movement, and the Union.
ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT
SDC
Executive Director Laura Penn and past SDC Board Presidents Karen Azenberg, Susan H. Schulman, Ted Pappas, Julianne Boyd, Pamela Berlin, and Marshall W. Mason.
FOUNDER’S CIRCLE SHEPARD TRAUBE
DIRECTOR
SDC FOUNDER
Directing a play is easily the most fascinating job in the theatre. Directing is creative work and encompasses the whole job of ‘putting on a show.’
It is also a talent that defies discussion.
A director approaching a producer who has never seen him direct is at a total loss to define his ability.
You can say ‘I’m a swell director.’ Or, if you think exaggeration will help, you can add, ‘In fact, I’m a genius.’
Unfortunately, that won’t prove it, any more than being modest by saying, ‘I think I can direct a play,’ is likely to help you.
The only way a director can prove anything about himself is by directing a play.
—Shepard Traube
Shepard Traube was a director and producer who played a vital role in the founding of SDC. Traube’s theatre career began in publicity, acting, and play-reading roles before he directed and produced his first Broadway show, No More Frontier, in 1931. A series of Broadway plays followed, including his biggest success, Patrick Hamilton’s Angel Street—later made into the movie Gaslight—which opened in 1941 and ran for 1,295 performances. Traube served as an officer in the US Army Signal Corps during World War II, where he directed films for the US Army. After a five-year stint in Hollywood, he returned to Broadway; among other productions, he directed a musical called The Girl in Pink Tights starring Jeanmaire in the spring of 1954, collaborating with renowned choreographer Agnes de Mille. Other productions included The Gioconda Smile by Aldous Huxley with Basil Rathbone; a revival of The Green Bay Tree, with Joseph Schildkraut and Denholm Elliott; Time Out for Ginger, with Melvyn Douglas; and Holiday for Lovers, with Don Ameche.
Traube’s indefatigable efforts to create the Union that became SDC began in the early 1940s, over a lunch with Elia Kazan. The formal organizing effort began in 1955, when Traube invited 40 prominent stage directors to his apartment for an organizational meeting. Traube’s considerable persistence, energy, and business acumen helped move the unionization effort forward through the long years it took to establish SDC, which was officially incorporated on April 24, 1959.
Traube’s deep belief in the centrality of the director’s work and his strong sense of justice stayed with him throughout his life. Over the course of his career, he taught and lectured at Yale, New York University, the College of the City of New York, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Traube died in 1983 at the age of 76. His book, So You Want to Go Into the Theatre?, originally published in 1936, was reprinted by SDC in honor of the Union’s 50th anniversary. “Those of us who knew him were lucky,” wrote director Edwin Sherin in an introduction to the book. “Those thousands of others who came after and are following in his footsteps have simply had a better life in the American theatre because of Shepard Traube.”
AGNES DE MILLE
CHOREOGRAPHER
SDC FOUNDER
Choreographer Agnes de Mille is justly revered for her artistic contributions to ballet and musical theatre. De Mille’s career was launched with Rodeo, which she created for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (with a commissioned score by Aaron Copland) in 1942. Her work on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) revolutionized musical theatre choreography when she created dance—including her nowfamous Dream Ballet—that was motivated by the characters and advanced the musical’s plot. De Mille went on to choreograph more than a dozen other Broadway musicals, including the original productions of Carousel (1945) and Brigadoon (1947), for which she was co-recipient of the inaugural Tony Award for Best Choreography.
Less well known is de Mille’s work as an activist and labor leader. As Oklahoma! toured and its economic success increased, de Mille grew increasingly frustrated with the terms of her contract, which originally stipulated that she would receive no royalties and led to her receiving very little profit from the show despite her essential creative contributions. Her frustration fueled her desire to improve the plight of choreographers at large by pursuing unionization and copyright protection for their work. She became a Founding Member of SDC in 1959 and served as President from 1965 to 1967, when she was the only female head of a national labor union. She was a crucial part of the fight to pass copyright law that embraced choreography, testifying in front of Congress on several occasions.
Agnes de Mille was awarded a 1980 Kennedy Center Honor, the 1985 National Medal of Arts, and SDC Foundation’s “Mr. Abbott” Award in 1988. She died in 1993. Her legacy lives on in her artistic contributions and in the work of the Union she helped found.
Imagine being 20 years old and making your Broadway debut for Agnes, dancing her Tony-winning choreography from Brigadoon. Then, imagine understudying Harry Beaton and having private dance rehearsals with her.
Agnes was in a wheelchair at this time, but full of passion and sharp as a tack. Every move was watched, directed, and drilled again and again till she deemed it was right. Never malicious, always meticulous; being given the permission to be a better, more powerful dancer and to fill up the space. It was thrilling to listen to her clear and exact instructions. Years later I read many of her books and this quote is one I lived with her:
‘To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This power, it is glory on earth, and it is yours for the taking.’
—Jerry Mitchell
BOB FOSSE
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
SDC FOUNDER
Born Robert Louis Fosse in 1927, Bob Fosse began his career at a young age as a dancer in Chicago’s vaudeville and burlesque scene. After high school and a brief stint in the Navy, Fosse moved to New York. He danced the role of Hortensio in the 1953 movie version of Kiss Me, Kate, which also featured some of his first on-film choreography.
In 1954, Fosse choreographed his first Broadway show, The Pajama Game, directed by George Abbott and Jerome Robbins; his next show, also with Abbott, was Damn Yankees. These productions established his reputation as one of Broadway’s most innovative choreographers. His distinctive jazz style was grounded in his early experiences in vaudeville and characterized by hip-thrusts and rolls, hunched shoulders, and articulation of hands. Fosse received Tony Awards for Best Choreography for both productions, and Damn Yankees introduced him to Gwen Verdon, who became his wife and long-term creative collaborator. After choreographing Bells Are Ringing and New Girl in Town, Fosse craved more creative control and began to direct as well as choreograph his work. Hits like Sweet Charity, Pippin, and Chicago followed.
Fosse played a pivotal role in SDC’s history in 1963, when the young Union was fighting to secure recognition as the official collective bargaining unit for Broadway directors and choreographers. After signing a strike pledge, Fosse refused to begin work on the musical Little Me until producers Cy Feuer and Ernest H. Martin recognized the Union.
In 1973, Fosse won Best Direction and Best Choreography Tonys for his work on Pippin, an Oscar for directing the film of Cabaret, and three Emmys for his work on Liza Minnelli’s television special, Liza with a Z He was also Oscar-nominated for the films Lenny and All That Jazz. Fosse received eight Best Choreography Tony Awards during his career, the most of any choreographer, and he was honored with SDC Foundation’s “Mr. Abbott” Award in 1986. He died in 1987 at age 60.
When I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan, I wrote a letter to Bob Fosse pouring my heart out about how much I wanted to follow in his dance-steps and become a great choreographer. On the opening night of Godspell, which I choreographed for the sophomore show, I heard my phone ring. I answered to hear a very low, gravelly voice say: ‘Marcia, this is Bob Fosse.’ Me: ‘Bob Fosse, yeah right.’ The Voice: ‘I received your letter. You asked so many questions I thought I’d call.’
I dropped to the floor, and we chatted for about what seemed like an hour! I told him how much I loved his films and how I learned ‘Steam Heat’ in my dance class and that I wanted to be a choreographer, and on and on. Fosse listened and then gently told me to keep dancing, study ballet, and when I came to New York, come by the office to say ‘Hi.’ After graduation I did move to NYC. I tried to see Fosse at his office a few times, but he was always working. So, I marched over to the SDC office and said, ‘I want to join the Union Bob Fosse founded!’
—Marcia Milgrom Dodge
6565 FOR THE TH65
SDC celebrated its 65th anniversary (1959–2024) with a social media campaign that highlighted 65 directors and choreographers whose work inspired SDC Members and transformed the American theatre. In addition to a photo and brief bio of each featured artist, each spotlight included a tribute from another SDC Member.
SDC is proud to have honored the directors and choreographers featured in the campaign—and now this book, where they are presented in alphabetical order. These artists, and three of SDC’s Founders (highlighted on the previous pages) were nominated by the Union’s Membership, signaling a passing of the torch from generation to generation.
GEORGE ABBOTT
DIRECTOR
He was incredibly honest. This was a man who had a reputation for inventing the American farce where the doors slam all the time, but I never heard him or saw him direct anyone to slam a door if it wasn’t valid in terms of the character and the situation. Over the years, there’s been something called ‘the Abbott touch,’ and I’ve gone to theatres often and seen people slam doors to no effect, because it was funny or ‘Wouldn’t it be fun there to make a noise and leave the room?’ It doesn’t work, because of course it all must come from some deep basic prevailing honesty; that informed all his work.
—Harold Prince
One of the most important and admired people in theatre history, George Abbott had a career that spanned more than eight decades. As a theatre director, producer, and playwright—and sometimes all three at once—he was the creative force behind more than 100 productions, including some of the greatest Broadway plays and musicals of the 20th century. The SDC Foundation “Mr. Abbott” Award, presented to a director or choreographer in recognition of lifetime achievement, has been given in his honor since 1985.
Born in 1877, Abbott worked as a ranch hand in his youth before a tendency toward delinquency landed him at a military academy in Nebraska. He wrote his first play in college and studied playwriting at Harvard before moving to New York, where he worked as an assistant to producer John Golden. After making his Broadway debut as an actor in 1913, Abbott experienced Broadway success as a playwright for the first time in the 1920s with The Fall Guy and Broadway, which he also directed, launching his meteoric rise in the American theatre.
Known for a style dubbed “The Abbott Touch,” Abbott emphasized impeccable timing and honesty in performance. He directed such plays as Chicago, Twentieth Century, and Three Men on a Horse, and many Golden Age musicals including Pal Joey, On the Town, Wonderful Town, The Pajama Game (with Jerome Robbins), On Your Toes, Damn Yankees, Once Upon a Mattress, Fiorello!, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Abbott’s awards include six Tonys, a National Medal of Arts, Kennedy Center and American Theater Hall of Fame honors, and the Pulitzer Prize (with co-author Jerome Weidman, composer Jerry Bock, and lyricist Sheldon Harnick) for Fiorello! He won a Drama Desk Award in 1983 at the age of 96 for a revival of On Your Toes. He received a standing ovation on opening night of Jack O’Brien’s Damn Yankees revival in 1994, for which he advised on revisions to his original book, and afterwards remarked, “There must be someone important here.” He died the following year at the age of 107.
JOANNE AKALAITIS
DIRECTOR
Theatre director and writer JoAnne Akalaitis has been a vital, commanding, and uncompromising force in American theatre for more than 50 years. She developed her theatrical language early in her artistic life, which began in Chicago and took her to San Francisco, Paris, and New York. In 1970, Akalaitis co-founded the pioneering theatre collective Mabou Mines with Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow.
Akalaitis’s productions—several of which became theatrical lighting rods—reflect the powerful sense of composition, emphasis on design, and work with ensembles that established her as a director with a powerful artistic vision. “The kind of theatre I’m interested in,” she has said, “is a theatre without transitions, where you keep falling off a cliff.”
Her notable productions include Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud/Drowning and Kroetz’s Through the Leaves for
The fierce mind, the boundless curiosity. The conversations that go from Wittgenstein to General Hospital in a flash. That she said to me once: ‘Never defend your choices.’
She’s serious and fun and puts all of that on stage. She sees no conflict with the theatre being both a place where the intellect can thrive and people can have a good time. Her total lack of interest in being anything other than what she is.
When others said MAYBE, she said YES.
—Daniel Fish
Mabou Mines, and many productions for The Public Theater (where she briefly held the position of artistic director following the death of Joseph Papp), including ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline; In the Penal Colony by Glass and librettist Rudolph Wurlitzer for A Contemporary Theatre; many productions for Court Theatre including The Iphigenia Cycle by Euripides; Leon & Lena (and lenz), based on Büchner’s play and novella, at the Guthrie; and Beckett’s Endgame for American Repertory Theater.
As an educator, Akalaitis has served as the Andrew Mellon Co-Chair of the first directing program at the Juilliard School, chair of the theater program at Bard College, and the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair of the Theater at Fordham University. She was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2024 and has been honored with a Drama Desk Award and six Obie Awards for Direction (and Sustained Achievement).
PHOTO MICHAEL
DEBBIE ALLEN
DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER
Debbie Allen is a choreographer, director, producer, and actor whose career spans theatre, film, and television. Her work as a multi-hyphenate artist is matched by her passion for arts education.
At the Debbie Allen Dance Academy in California, Allen enlightens, inspires, and engages young people through dance and theatre arts. The 2020 documentary, Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker (Netflix) follows a group of her dance students as they prepare for her modern adaptation of the classic ballet, a new annual tradition that features music by Arturo Sandoval and Mariah Carey. A Kennedy Center Honoree, she has been an artist-in-residence at the Kennedy Center for more than 15 years, creating eight productions for young audiences. And in March 2020, more than 35,000 people tuned in for her first Instagram Live dance class.
Allen studied theatre and classical Greek studies at Howard University, where she received her BFA. After making her Broadway debut as a performer in Purlie in 1970, she starred as Anita in West Side Story and Charity in Sweet Charity. On Broadway, she choreographed Carrie in 1983 and directed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2008. In 2023, she directed Fetch Clay, Make Man for Center Theatre Group.
Allen’s long list of directing and producing credits for television includes Fame, A Different World, and Grey’s Anatomy, among many others, and she has choreographed the Academy Awards 10 times. She holds four honorary degrees, and her awards include six Emmys, a Golden Globe, five NAACP Image Awards, a Drama Desk, an Astaire Award, and the Olivier Award. A former member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, she was appointed by President George W. Bush to represent the United States as a Cultural Ambassador of Dance.
Debbie Allen has been my mentor and friend for over 40 years. Her ability to wear many hats— director, choreographer, producer, actress, and dancer—is beyond impressive. The way Debbie tells stories through dance and movement is simply magical.
The thing that has really moved me about Debbie is the way that she gives back. It doesn’t matter how busy she is, you can always find her at her academy, the Debbie Allen Dance Academy. There Debbie is: hands-on mentoring and guiding the future performers of tomorrow.
—Marguerite Derricks
WILLIAM BALL DIRECTOR
‘SHARE THE REFULGENCE!’
This was the theme of American Conservatory Theater’s 1972–73 season under the leadership of William Ball. Thirtytwo Equity actors on contract for a 40-week season. Fourteen productions in rotating rep, including Bill’s spectacular version of Cyrano de Bergerac. As a young ‘Acting Fellow’ (and essaying the vital role of Cadet #6), I had a bird’s eye view of the maestro at work.
The first week of rehearsal, Bill showed us photos of paintings by Rembrandt and other Old Masters. He steeped us in the art of the period, and later put us on our feet and ‘posed’ us to duplicate the paintings. This was the genesis of the group scenes, which became stunning visual works of art. With the turn of a head, or the flip of a finger, Bill would change the focus.
Beauty, Grandeur, and Theatrical Panache were paramount for Bill. Even the curtain call for Cyrano was an event people still talk about 50 years later. (Bill, bless him, LOVED curtain calls.) Like an Honor Guard Regiment, the 12 cadets entered upstage, six from each side meeting center. With precision the Rockettes would envy, our phalanx turned and moved toward the audience. When we hit our mark down center, 12 plumed hats in perfect unison shot up in the air, made a figure eight, and saluted the audience. They went insane.
Someone who is ‘refulgent’ is radiant, gleaming, dazzling. They shine brightly. My someone was William Ball.
—Warner Shook
William Ball’s influence on the American theatre began with an essay. In 1965, he wrote “Prospectus for the American Conservatory Theater,” a document that laid out his vision for a theatre led by creative artists. He founded A.C.T in 1965 in Pittsburgh (where he had studied at the Fine Arts School of Carnegie Institute of Technology, later Carnegie Mellon University) before moving the theatre the following year to San Francisco, where it became renowned for its resident company and repertory productions. Also an educator, Ball believed in creating an environment where teachers and students could learn from each other, and A.C.T. established an actor-training program whose alumni include Annette Bening, Anna Deavere Smith, and Denzel Washington.
Ball was critical of Method acting and encouraged an uninhibited, assertive acting style in his performers. Under his leadership, A.C.T. developed a national reputation for staging classic plays with strong and physically exuberant ensembles. His notable productions include Tartuffe with René Auberjonois, Cyrano de Bergerac with Peter Donat and Marsha Mason, and The Taming of the Shrew with Marc Singer and Fredi Olster. A.C.T. was awarded the Regional Theatre Tony Award in 1979.
Ball’s work outside of A.C.T. included Six Characters in Search of an Author (for which Ball received the 1963 Outer Critics Circle Award) and Tartuffe (for which he was Tony nominated in 1965), as well as multiple productions with New York City Opera. Ball resigned his artistic leadership of A.C.T. in 1986 and died, aged 60, in 1991. His book, A Sense of Direction: Some Observations on the Art of Directing, remains a cornerstone of theatre practice.
Lou Bellamy is a powerhouse director, one with a grip on the Black theatre canon that is legendary. From his renowned Twin Cities outpost, Penumbra Theatre Company, he has been a firebrand for groundbreaking interpretations of classics and new works with a national impact, providing a home for generations of artists. Experiencing a Lou Bellamy production is an inspiration, a bracing as well as dynamic history lesson, visceral, muscular, and insightful to the core with scintillating clarity. As one of the leading interpreters of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle, he has made a mark for heightening the ongoing ‘revelations’ of Black folks that Wilson brings in production after production. Lou’s consideration for other artists allows directors (such as myself) the room to discover, explore, take risks, and grow. He is the beacon, the soul, the radical, and the real deal, forever committed to demanding the recognition of the Black experience as foundational to the national fabric. It is an insistence that is aweinspiring.
—Talvin Wilks
Lou Bellamy is the founder and artistic director emeritus of Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota. Bellamy became interested in theatre after being recruited into a production of Finian’s Rainbow in college. Dissatisfied by the small number of productions featuring Black stories in the Twin Cities, he started Penumbra in 1976 at a community center located just a few blocks from the house where he grew up.
Based on the tenets of the Black Arts Movement, Penumbra produced more than 39 world-premiere plays under Bellamy’s leadership, as well as more of August Wilson’s plays than any other theatre in the world. In addition to directing Wilson’s work, among the plays Bellamy directed at the theatre are Paradise Blue, Wine in the Wilderness, Wedding Band, Dutchman, and Black Nativity. He also prioritized community engagement, opening rehearsals to the
LOU BELLAMY
DIRECTOR
public and running Penumbra’s Summer Institute to train emerging theatre artists.
He received a 2007 Obie Award for his production of Wilson’s Two Trains Running at Signature Theatre in New York. In 2011, his production of I Wish You Love, a play with music about Nat “King” Cole’s year as the first African American with his own television show, played at Penumbra, The Kennedy Center, and Hartford Stage. His directing credits also include plays at Arizona Theatre Company, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Cleveland Play House, Indiana Rep, and the Guthrie Theater.
Bellamy was an associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Theatre Arts and Dance for 38 years and was named a Distinguished Artist by the McKnight Foundation in 2006. After leading Penumbra for 40 years, he passed leadership of the company to his daughter Sarah Bellamy in 2014.
MICHAEL BENNETT
DIRECTOR-
CHOREOGRAPHER
Michael Bennett started from humble beginnings in Buffalo, New York, and went on to play Baby John in West Side Story in Europe at the age of 17. There, he met his lifelong associate choreographer Bob Avian and they collaborated on all his productions. Michael danced in several Broadway shows but always wanted to be a choreographer. He started off choreographing in regional theatres, then A Joyful Noise introduced him to producer David Merrick and Promises, Promises was born. His relationships with Neil Simon, Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim, Marvin Hamlisch, and many others all contributed to his development into becoming a Broadway genius.
So many directors and choreographers since then have been influenced by him and his work. A Chorus Line is Michael Bennett’s legacy and we celebrate its 50th anniversary this year. My relationship with Michael started when we were teenagers in New York and I was very honored by his loyalty to include me in several of his shows and to carry the baton of A Chorus Line into the 21st century. I have had the opportunity to direct and choreograph the show many times around the world and develop workshops for thousands of students to pass on his legacy to the next generation.
—Baayork Lee
Choreographer and director Michael Bennett was a dancer to his bones. After studying dance as a teenager in Buffalo, New York, Bennett became a Broadway performer in Subways Are for Sleeping in 1961. His choreography career began with the shortlived production of A Joyful Noise, an inauspicious beginning to a career that would win him 11 Tony nominations and seven Tony Awards, among other accolades. He was honored with SDC Foundation’s “Mr. Abbott” Award in 1989.
Bennett’s dance DNA propelled his career. After choreographing such productions as Promises, Promises and Company and beginning to direct with Follies (which he co-directed with Harold Prince) and Seesaw, he started interviewing dancers and workshopping a show about their lives. With the
support of The Public Theater and producer Joseph Papp, Bennett created A Chorus Line from that process. It was conceived, directed, and choreographed (with his longtime associate Bob Avian) by Bennett, and won him the 1976 Tony Awards for Best Direction of a Musical and Best Choreography, as well as a Pulitzer Prize. A Chorus Line was a smash hit and ran on Broadway for 15 years. Bennett followed it up with Ballroom and then Dreamgirls, which he directed, produced, and co-choreographed (with Michael Peters). Dreamgirls was nominated for 13 Tony Awards, and won six, including Best Choreography. In 1987, Bennett died at the age of 44 of complications related to AIDS. His style—influenced by contemporary dance and classic Broadway movement and grounded in character choices— remains hugely influential today.
PATRICIA BIRCH
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Legendary choreographer Patricia Birch has been called “a theatre giant” by no less than Harold Prince, with whom she collaborated on six musicals including A Little Night Music, Candide, Pacific Overtures, Roza, Parade, and LoveMusik.
Birch began studying with Merce Cunningham around the age of 12 and joined Martha Graham’s company while still a teenager before moving into mainstream musicals; she also performed as a soloist for Agnes de Mille. In 1960, she appeared as Anybodys in West Side Story when the national tour returned to Broadway. She transitioned to choreography with You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and The Me Nobody Knows
Her “hit of hits” was Grease, which ran on Broadway for eight years; her hard-driving energy helped make it the longest-running Broadway show of its time. She also
Pat Birch blazed a dazzling and unique path on Broadway and beyond. Her skills as a dancer and choreographer found their unique genius in her ability to make dancers out of non-dancing actors. In this, she has no equal.
Because Pat puts her whole petite being into every project, she infuses it with her energy and spirit.
Although Pat conceptualizes, researches, and plans more than she will admit, the brilliance comes from her watching the actors and then perceptively designing the movement around them and from them. She finds the dancer in them and works from there, so that when it is realized, it is of them as much as her. It is magical to watch the actors’ fears and trepidation turn to confidence, if not downright giddy bravado.
—Tom Moore
choreographed the 1978 movie version and directed and choreographed the sequel, Grease 2. Her other credits include They’re Playing Our Song and Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez.
In addition to her theatre work, Birch has numerous film and television credits. She staged musical numbers on Saturday Night Live for six years (including the “Dancing in the Dark” parody with Steve Martin and Gilda Radner and the “King Tut” musical number) and has directed and choreographed music videos for Cyndi Lauper, The Rolling Stones, and Carly Simon. She has received two Emmys, two Drama Desk Awards, five Tony nominations, and the Astaire Award for Lifetime Achievement. She was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2009.
ANNE BOGART
DIRECTOR
Born into a Navy family that moved frequently, Anne Bogart saw Adrian Hall’s production of Macbeth at Trinity Rep as a teenager and fell under theatre’s spell. She later graduated from NYU with a master’s degree in theatre history and criticism. Her early work in New York, Germany, and elsewhere abroad established her reputation as an experimentalist, and in 1992 she co-founded the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI) Company with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki and a group of likeminded artists who became SITI’s ensemble.
Committed to actor training, collaboration, and cultural exchange, SITI Company worked together for three decades on more than 40 productions of both bold new works and re-imaginings of classics. Grounded in rigorous ensemble work, the company drew on the physical forms pioneered by Bogart’s reimagining of the Viewpoints, a movement practice originated by Mary Overlie. Bogart conceived and directed many of their productions, including The Medium, Charles L. Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica, War of the Worlds: The Radio Play (co-directed with Darron L. West), The Bacchae, and many more. SITI company disbanded in 2022 after a final production of A Christmas Carol, directed by Bogart.
In addition to her work with SITI Company, Bogart has directed many notable productions including the world premiere of Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz. She is also a renowned director of opera, including her 2025 staging of Carousel at Boston Lyric Opera. A beloved teacher, since 1991 she has taught at Columbia University, where she runs the MFA Directing Program. She is the author of six books, including A Director Prepares, The Viewpoints Book (with Tina Landau), and The Art of Resonance. Her many honors include an Obie Lifetime Achievement Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, four honorary doctorate degrees, and the 2023 SDC Foundation Gordon Davidson Award.
Of the many gifts that Anne Bogart possesses, the joy she takes in the rehearsal process, the sense of discovery and how she radiates that throughout the rehearsal studio is what I was most drawn to from our first production together at Actors Theatre of Louisville, William Inge’s Picnic in 1993, until the final SITI production of A Christmas Carol.
I had auditioned for Anne twice previously and when I was called in to read for Picnic, I asked, ‘Who’s directing?’ When my agent replied, ‘Anne Bogart,’ I said, ‘She never casts me.’ But I went, and the third time WAS the charm.
From the first rehearsal there was a feeling of expectation, collaboration, and joy. We soon realized that everyone had a voice in the room, and that she loved ideas, the crazier the better.
Anne was always willing to listen and try… almost anything, because cast members Ellen Lauren, KJ Sanchez, and I were crazy with joy, excitement, and ideas, as were all the members who formed the SITI Company. For over 30 years that sense of adventure, discovery, and joy filled rehearsals, performances, and audiences.
Anne is adventurous and full of wonder. She continues to share those gifts in every production, workshop, lecture, and book.
—J.Ed Araiza
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LEE BREUER
DIRECTOR
Lee Breuer was a titan of the unorthodox and experimental Off-Off-Broadway and Off-Broadway theatre movements. After formative years in San Francisco (where he directed at the famed Actor’s Workshop) and Europe, Breuer co-founded Mabou Mines theatre collective with JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow in 1970.
As a director and writer, his work, which was often created with puppeteers and musicians, spans original experimentations and radical reinterpretations of classic texts. Blending diverse techniques and traditions into new forms, his best-known projects— many of which toured nationally and internationally, bringing him success beyond the downtown theatre scene—include the Animation series, Peter and Wendy, Mabou Mines DollHouse, and perhaps his most celebrated production, The Gospel at Colonus Breuer and Bob Telson’s adaptation of Sophocles’s
Oedipus as a Black Pentecostal church sermon, with Morgan Freeman as the Messenger and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama as Oedipus, premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983, was televised on PBS’s Great Performances two years later, and ran on Broadway in 1988.
Breuer relished his reputation as a provocative theatrical renegade. He was nominated for Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, received four Obie Awards and a MacArthur Fellowship, and was awarded the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Ministry of Culture. In 2011, he was the first artist to direct an American play on the Comédie-Française mainstage—A Streetcar Named Desire (Un Tramway Nommé Désir), designed by his longtime collaborator Basil Twist. Breuer died in 2021.
Lee Breuer refused his only Tony Award nomination—in 1988, for his direction of The Gospel at Colonus. This perfectly reveals the essence of this artist—rebellious, scrupulous, rigorous, iconoclastic. Gospel at Colonus remains one of his greatest achievements, a melding together of two historically divergent cultural expressions—Black gospel music and Ancient Greek tragedy. By conjoining these extremely different aesthetics, he and his collaborators forged a whole new artifact, one that spoke powerfully to contemporary American life. Lee spent a lifetime restlessly digging and exploring how to make the theatre a place where we could find our spiritual centers, fearlessly and unforgettably.
Until his death in 2021, he remained vigorously committed to Mabou Mines, the theatrical collective he founded in 1970 with several other downtown theatre giants—JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow. He helped shape the organization to be infinitely flexible and responsive to his and other members’ unfolding creative impulses. It was intentionally impossible to define a Lee Breuer project—because he was always inventing new meanings and forms. From The Warrior Ant, to Mabou Mines DollHouse, to Peter and Wendy—an endless parade of reinvention and repurposing. Collisions of culture and form, nothing was left on the shelf.
He was truly like no other.
—Jim Nicola
PETER BROOK DIRECTOR
“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.” The first line of Peter Brook’s The Empty Space is perhaps his most famous quote, and a signature of his heralded career, which spanned seven decades and included some of the most influential theatre productions of the 20th century.
Born in London in 1925, Brook reportedly performed his own four-hour version of Hamlet at age 7 and directed his first professional production, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, at the Torch Theatre in London in 1943. He began to work with what is now the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1946, directing seminal productions of Titus Andronicus and King Lear. Influenced by Grotowski, Chaikin, and Artaud, Brook created the Theatre of Cruelty Workshop within the RSC in 1963, with the goal of reinvigorating theatre through a theatrical vocabulary not tied to language, and he directed the US premiere of Marat/Sade the following year. The anti-Vietnam War protest play US and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a white box and trapeze set designed by Sally Jacobs, followed.
In 1971, Brook founded (with Micheline Rozan) the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris; the company opened its permanent base in the Bouffes du Nord Theatre in 1974, which became the home for Brook’s projects, many of which were performed in both French and English. Among his productions at the Centre were Conference of the Birds, a nine-hour adaptation of The Mahabharata, and The Tragedy of Hamlet
Over the course of his long career, Brook’s productions made an impact with indelible visual imagery, a focus on physicality, and above all, his constant quest for the new and truthful— boundary-pushing, often epic, always risky work that spoke to his belief in the power of theatre. Brook died in 2022.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, we were all exposed to Peter Brook. I remember his seminal production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as life-changing. Later, I saw The Mahabharata at the Los Angeles Olympics. The power went out in the venue and the company continued with the production outside while it was repaired, improvising Brook’s amazing staging in an entirely different physical space. A marathon production became an extraordinary event. When I was Seattle Rep’s artistic director, we co-sponsored his Hamlet with other Seattle theatres; the production’s simplicity was pure ‘Brook,’ as was Adrian Lester’s inspired performance.
Peter Brook’s writing, his directorial work, and the international company he created in Paris influenced me and a generation (or two or three) of directors and theatremakers to create work that was honest and true, and he encouraged all of us to connect to the ‘great beyond,’ whether that ‘beyond’ was another culture or the universe at large. Only occasionally did I feel I attained the simplicity and power of his work, but isn’t that what a North Star should be? Something out there— guiding you—even if you never fully can arrive. Such was, and is, the great Peter Brook.
—Sharon Ott
Camille A. Brown is the real deal. A storyteller and story keeper—a griot— whose project of investigating, investing in, and celebrating where dance can take a dancer and an audience is our reward for living in this time. I am grateful to be in conversation with her as an artist and always smile— and maybe tear up a little— and lean forward when I see her work.
—Pam MacKinnon
CAMILLE A. BROWN
DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER
Camille A. Brown is currently represented as a choreographer on Broadway by Hell’s Kitchen, for which she received her fourth Tony Award nomination and the Chita Rivera Award, and Gypsy, for which she received her fifth Tony Award nomination. Acclaimed as a director-choreographer and educator, her work explores ancestral and contemporary stories about race, culture, and identity.
Brown both choreographed and made her Broadway directorial debut with the 2022 revival of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, making her the first Black woman to direct and choreograph a Broadway play since Katherine Dunham in 1955. For that production, she received Tony nominations for both Best Direction and Best Choreography. In 2021, she became the first Black artist to direct a mainstage production at the Metropolitan Opera when she co-directed (with James Robinson) Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which she also choreographed.
Brown’s theatre credits as a choreographer include the Broadway productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Once on This Island, and Choir Boy. She choreographed The Fortress of Solitude for Dallas Theater Center and The Public Theater, for which she also choreographed Much Ado About Nothing at the Delacorte, and her regional credits also include choreographing Hippest Trip—The Soul Train Musical at American Conservatory Theater. She is the artistic director and choreographer of her own company, Camille A. Brown & Dancers, which she founded in 2006. The company premiered their newest piece, “I AM,” at Jacob’s Pillow in 2024 and in New York at The Joyce Theater in 2025.
Brown has received many honors and fellowships and has been honored with an Obie Award for Sustained Achievement in Choreography.
RENÉ BUCH DIRECTOR
The pioneering theatre director René Buch was the cofounder (with Gilberto Zaldívar) and artistic director of Repertorio Español, a repertory company founded in 1968 to present excellent theatre in Spanish. Today, Repertorio offers an active rotating repertoire of masterpieces from the Spanish Golden Age, diverse works by Latin American playwrights, modern classics, and contemporary plays at its home theatre in New York and in tours around the country and the world.
Buch was born in 1925 in Santiago, Cuba. In Cuba, he was the founder and director of Pro Arte de Oriente’s theatre department and Havana’s Acción Teatral de Autores. He earned his doctorate in law from Universidad de La Habana in 1948 and emigrated to the US in 1949 to study at the Yale School of Drama, where he taught Spanish language and literature while pursuing his MFA. After graduating, he worked as an editor and in advertising prior to founding Repertorio.
René Buch showed me the beauty of Spanish language theatre. He became a pioneer in his field out of necessity and deep love—he was an exile who found home, community, and inspiration in a country that was not his at first. His greatest gift as a director was a passion that inspired others to tell their stories and to immerse themselves in the Spanish language. And language was the engine that drove all of his productions, a deep respect for the magic of words and their ability to create new realities.
René’s productions were master classes in simplicity—never a wasted gesture—with moments of graceful and lucid poetry: a man wrapped in ropes pulled in multiple directions in When Five Years Pass, the pure white of every costume in Doña Rosita the Spinster, the brutal intensity and unexpectedly complex shades of black in The House of Bernarda Alba, and the heat and elegance of Anna in the Tropics, where the play finally found its natural rhythms in the language it was meant to be performed in. He taught me how to trust actors and how to dive deeply into the mysterious undercurrents of every play. I will always remember his wisdom, his wit, and his great joy.
—José Zayas
A recipient of many awards including a Drama Desk for Artistic Achievement and an Obie for Lifetime Achievement, Buch was honored in 2012 with the Order of Isabella the Catholic by King Juan Carlos I of Spain, granted in recognition of his contributions to cultural relations between Spain and the US.
Buch’s work at Repertorio included a seminal staging of Calderón’s Life Is a Dream [La vida es sueño], among many others, and he was particularly renowned for his work on the plays of García Lorca. The last play he directed, García Lorca’s Once Five Years Pass, was staged in 2011, but many of his productions remain in repertory, including Carmen Rivera’s La Gringa, which premiered in 1996 and is the longest-running OffBroadway Spanish language play. Buch died in 2020.
VINNETTE CARROLL
DIRECTOR
Director, playwright, and actor Vinnette Carroll was the first Black woman to direct on Broadway and to receive a Tony Award nomination for Best Direction of a Musical, for the musical revue Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope in 1972.
Carroll started her career in theatre while studying for her PhD in psychology at Columbia University. She studied acting with Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio and decided to commit herself to a life in the arts after earning a full scholarship to The New School, where she studied with Erwin Piscator and Stella Adler. From 1955–1966, Carroll taught directing at the High School of Performing Arts.
A pioneer of the Black theatre movement, Carroll’s folk dramas drew on Brechtian traditions to create
Vinnette Carroll was one of my drama teachers at the High School of Performing Arts in NYC. The original PA on 46th Street. The Fame school.
She was the first professional stage director I had ever met, and she happened to be a woman. I imprinted on her instantly, and she became my role model. She was fierce and loving and profoundly insightful. I remember Ms. Carroll asking these two questions of the student director: ‘What is the story you’re trying to tell? Are you telling that story?’
One day in class, she admonished me because I was hesitant in a response to a question she asked about a scene I had just performed:
‘Susan, you have important things to say. But you must speak up. You must be heard.’
I think about her all the time. The lessons she taught us resonated far beyond the classroom or rehearsal room.
I hear her booming voice to this day: ‘YOU MUST BE HEARD.’
—Susan H. Schulman
gospel plays like Your Arms Too Short to Box with God, a retelling of the Gospel of St. Matthew. Weaving together dance, music, and performance, the work— written and directed by Carroll—was originally produced in 1976, earning her two Tony nominations, and revived twice on Broadway.
Carroll founded and served as artistic director of Urban Arts Corps (later the Urban Arts Theater), a nonprofit interracial community theatre that provided arts education and mentorship for hundreds of young New Yorkers and future performers, including Cicely Tyson. She founded the Vinnette Carroll Repertory Company in Fort Lauderdale and continued to work with the theatre until her death in 2002. Carroll received the “Mr. Abbott” Award from SDC Foundation in 1999.
I’ve collaborated—and continue to do so—with Rachel Chavkin on three projects: the Broadway musical Hadestown, the podcast Live From Mount Olympus, and the TEAM’s historical infinity play Reconstructing. With each successive process, I have become increasingly aware of Rachel’s intuitive ability to manifest ‘as it is above, so is it below’ atmospheres that metamorphose into the stages upon which the actors manifest their characters.
I initially encountered Rachel’s democratic thumbprint on the far-sprawling event Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, one of the few times I’ve witnessed the intersection of history and evolution in a Broadway musical. Overriding all of these elements is the sensation that Rachel creates constellations of relationships, galaxies of symbiotic emotions, and black holes of gravitas, revealing her unique geomancy of stage craft.
—André De Shields
RACHEL CHAVKIN
DIRECTOR
When a portion of NYC’s West 48th Street was renamed “Chavkin Way” in the spring of 2024, it was to honor Rachel Chavkin’s direction of two shows that were playing across the street from one another at the time—Broadway’s long-running Hadestown, which was about to celebrate its fifth anniversary, and Lempicka, a new musical that was about to begin performances. The renaming was a fitting tribute to Chavkin’s directing career, which has straddled large- and smallscale work, generative and interpretive projects, plays and musicals, and a variety of styles and stagings.
Raised by two civil rights lawyers, Chavkin’s early lessons on art as an agent for social change and the importance of political engagement have remained with her throughout her career. Focused on creating her own work, Chavkin studied directing at NYU,
where she also began to write and adapt. After attending graduate school at Columbia, in 2004 she co-founded (with five NYU alumni) the TEAM, a Brooklyn-based experimental collective dedicated to creating new work about the experience of living in America today. The ensemble has created 12 pieces that have toured internationally, and she remains its artistic director.
Chavkin’s other collaborations include work with Bess Wohl (2016’s Small Mouth Sounds), multiple projects with Dave Malloy (including Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, which garnered Chavkin her first Tony nomination in 2017), and multiple collaborations with Taylor Mac. A three-time Obie Award winner, Chavkin won the Tony Award for her direction of Hadestown, which was also honored as Best Musical.
PING CHONG
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Ping Chong is a multidisciplinary artist and a pioneer in the world of experimental theatre. His work, self-described as a “potpourri of artistic interests,” combines theatre, choreography, sound design, video, painting, and installation into compelling works of art.
Born in Toronto in 1946 to parents who were performers with the Chinese opera, Chong was raised in NYC’s Chinatown. He enrolled in a workshop led by Meredith Monk after graduating from Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts, then became a member of Monk’s company The House and remained a collaborator until 1978.
After initially supporting his artistic work as a house painter, Chong formed Ping Chong and Company in 1975 and received grants that allowed him to focus on the creation of new work. “I remain always interested in the idiosyncrasies of the human race and the themes of time and mortality,” Chong says, “so I keep doing variations on those themes.” He has created more than 100 works of theatre featuring his unique synthesis of performance styles.
Chong imagines the stage as a blank canvas that he fills with a vocabulary of artistic elements; he often oversees the entire creative process of his pieces, from scenery to poster design. His deep interest in cultural otherness has been described as “anthropological” and much of his work explores the intersections of cultures, including his documentary series Undesirable Elements. A cornerstone of his company’s work since 1992, Undesirable Elements is shaped by extended residencies in which local communities share their own stories of identity, place, and belonging.
Chong retired at the end of 2022. Today, his company’s work continues to have a wide reach both nationally and internationally as well as across disciplines.
Ping is an artist human with no limits. There are no limits in his expansive imagination, his command of art forms and the quilting of them, and his insight into the enigmas of history revealed in the precarities of the present moment. There are no limits in the ageless sparks in his eyes, his wry humor and childlike curiosity, and his ability to see deeply into the hearts and souls of people around him. He’s so Asian he’s beyond Asian.
In Ping’s own words of what matters most in the legacy we are carrying at PCC: ‘Be free to be yourselves, and to be curious about the rights of human beings in this world and our humanity… and the loss of humanity at this time.’ His life and work exemplify what it means for an artist to be in touch with his own complex humanity while offering the chance for other makers, collaborators, and audience members to get a glimpse of theirs. The world is a more irreverent, joyful, and compassionate place because of the existence and art of Ping Chong.
—Mei Ann Teo
MARTHA CLARKE
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Martha Clarke is a director and choreographer whose dreamlike creations combine theatre, dance, literature, and art into a seamless whole. She has earned renown for multidisciplinary work that forms a visually spectacular “image theatre.” Her works synthesize modern dance choreography with text to create image-rich narratives full of power, beauty, and imagination.
Clarke started studying dance at age six; she joined the modern dance company of Anna Sokolow after graduating from Juilliard and was a founding member of Pilobolus Dance Theatre. She worked for more than a decade with Lyn Austin, founder of Music-Theatre Group, which premiered many of Clarke’s dance-theatre projects, including The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which Clarke illuminated Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych through theatre, dance, music, and flying. Her other notable productions include Vienna: Lusthaus, about Vienna
My favorite description of Martha Clarke’s groundbreaking career is her own: she compared it to an Advent calendar. ‘For each project I try and open a new door,’ she once shared. If you are lucky to walk through one of those doors with her, you are in for a mindblowing journey of discovery. Behind each ‘door’ lies a profound artist’s archeological dig into the relationship of body, mind, and spirit. Martha has the most exquisitely developed and discerning aesthetic and an insatiable curiosity about the far-ranging subjects of her work. She’s a consummate orchestrator, a peerless editor, a painter of psychology, an animal whisperer (for both two- and four-legged species), and a spirit guide. She’s also a relentless dog with a bone who wants to PLAY. Her laugh can engage any challenge with its call for ‘more life!’
I was a young teen when I first experienced Martha’s seminal work, The Garden of Earthly Delights, at St. Clement’s Church in NYC. No single work of art has had a greater influence on me, except perhaps the gift of getting to collaborate with her 20 years later. Martha opened doors of possibility for me and has done so for a generation of artists and astonished audiences.
—Vivienne Benesch
at the fin de siècle; Angel Reapers, with text by Alfred Uhry, which explores the life of a founder of the Shaker movement, and Chéri, based on French author Colette’s 1920 novel, both for Signature Theatre in New York; and God’s Fool, a narrative about St. Francis of Assisi that was performed at La MaMa in 2022.
She has choreographed for companies that include the Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and Nederlands Dans Theater 3, and she has directed many operas, including The Magic Flute and Così Fan Tutte at Glimmerglass Opera.
Clarke was honored with SDC Foundation’s Joe A. Callaway Award for choreography for both The Garden of Earthly Delights and Chéri; she is the only choreographer to win the award twice. Her many accolades also include grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a MacArthur Fellowship.
Graciela Daniele has been one of my greatest mentors—a true pioneer in the theatre who has shattered glass ceilings for directors and choreographers like myself. Her work and legacy are profoundly significant on Broadway, and she continues to inspire us all.
—Sergio Trujillo
GRACIELA DANIELE
DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER
Graciela Daniele began her career as a ballerina in her native Argentina. On Broadway, she danced in the original companies of Promises, Promises; Follies, also serving as Michael Bennett’s assistant; and Chicago, for which she was dance captain. Musical staging and choreography came next, with shows including A History of the American Film, The Pirates of Penzance, Zorba, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Then in 1987, with Tango Apasionado, she became a directorchoreographer, taking, as Mel Gussow wrote in the New York Times, “a striking tango step into the arena of innovative theatrical conceptualists.”
When Daniele received the 2020 Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, her credits included such landmark shows as the original productions of Once on This Island (direction and choreography) and Ragtime (choreography). Her other notable work includes a series of adventurous collaborations with composer-lyricist Michael John LaChiusa over three decades, beginning with Hello Again in Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and continuing through, most recently, The
Gardens of Anuncia in the same space. Their shows together also include Marie Christine, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Bernarda Alba. Daniele also worked frequently with composer-lyricist William Finn, including directing and choreographing the 1991 Hartford Stage production of March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland, the first time the two shows were produced as a single evening.
In 2016, Daniele said in an interview published by SDC Journal, “I always felt very strongly that, in musicals, dance is another language to tell a story. It’s not the language of singing, it’s not the language of text, but it’s a language like music is. It’s a language of expressing the feeling of the character, and I do not separate it. I sometimes feel like I choreograph as a director and direct as a choreographer because it feels to me that all is one. There is no difference between one or the other.”
Daniele was honored with SDC Foundation’s “Mr. Abbott” Award in 1998.
GORDON DAVIDSON
DIRECTOR
One word jumps into my mind when I think of Gordon Davidson: PASSION! Gordon helped build a national theatre that spread into every large and medium-sized and small city in America, and made a big enough table for everyone to be at. He invited theatre nerds of all ethnicities and races and genders to come and talk about the things that worry us, that scare us, that excite us. Gordon was a man who viscerally adored the stage, and believed that it was from the stage that we could engage the most difficult ideas, and really listen to them. He held a commitment to the hard stuff, the thorny stuff, the stuff that believes it can change the world. Gordon said: ‘It must be the job of the theatre to take hard looks at life, at issues people don’t always want to confront. They will listen to what is said to them from a stage. That is the power of theatre.’ Thank you for saying that, Gordon, back in 1979. And thank you for making a stage where we can try to fulfill that vision.
—Lisa Peterson
A showman, risk-taker, and artistic visionary, Gordon Davidson was born in Brooklyn in 1933; his mother had been a concert pianist, and his father was a professor of speech and theatre at Brooklyn College. Originally intending to be an engineer, he studied at Cornell University, where he pivoted to the theatre department, and then earned a master’s degree in theatre from Western Reserve University in Cleveland (now Case Western Reserve). Davidson began his career as a stage manager, working at the Phoenix Theatre in New York and at the American Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut with John Houseman, who brought him to the Theatre Group, a professional company led by Houseman and based at UCLA, which Davidson ran for two years.
When the Theatre Group was invited to become the resident company of the Los Angeles Music Center, Davidson became the founding artistic director of Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, leading the Mark Taper Forum from 1967 to 2005, the Ahmanson Theatre from 1989 to 2005, and producing the
inaugural season at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2004. The Taper opened with Davidson’s production of The Devils, a play that ignited controversy with its erotic depiction of Catholic clergy in 17th-century France. He went on to direct more than 40 productions, develop the “New Theatre for Now” program, and produce more than 300 new works—many of them landmark plays that illuminated critical political and social issues, such as Zoot Suit, The Kentucky Cycle, and Angels in America—over the course of his tenure.
Among the plays that Davidson directed for Center Theatre Group are In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, The Shadow Box, and Children of a Lesser God, all of which he also directed on Broadway. He received the Tony Award for Best Director of a Play for The Shadow Box in 1977, the same year that the Taper was honored with the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.
He received SDC Foundation’s “Mr. Abbott” Award in 1995 and the Gordon Davidson Award is named in his honor.
SHELDON EPPS DIRECTOR
Born in Compton, California, Sheldon Epps studied acting at Carnegie Mellon University and began his professional career at the Alley Theatre (where he worked with the company’s founder, Nina Vance) and Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera. In the late 1970s, in New York, Epps co-founded Off-Off-Broadway’s The Production Company with fellow alumni from CMU, including director Norman René, who served as artistic director and encouraged Epps to try his hand at directing. Among his credits for The Production Company was the musical revue Blues in the Night, which Epps conceived and directed. Originally scheduled for a 10-performance late-night run, Blues in the Night opened on Broadway in 1982 and has subsequently been produced in London and throughout the world.
In the 1980s, Epps directed as a freelancer at the Guthrie, Cleveland Play House, Seattle Rep, Arena Stage, and other major companies. In 1992, he directed his first show at Pasadena Playhouse, On Borrowed Time, which was immediately followed by a production of Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting at The Old Globe. He went on to serve as associate artistic director of The Old Globe for four years, directing numerous classics and new plays, and conceiving a new musical, Play On!, an adaptation of Twelfth Night with music by Duke Ellington. Directed by Epps and choreographed by Mercedes Ellington, the Old Globe production moved to Broadway in 1997.
Epps became artistic director at Pasadena Playhouse in 1997 and enjoyed an extraordinarily successful 20-year tenure there, transforming the theatre into a vibrant company that served a wide and diverse audience. Epps left the Playhouse in 2017 and continues to serve as artistic director emeritus. He published a memoir, My Own Directions: A Black Man’s Journey in the American Theatre, and is a senior artistic advisor at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC.
He listens. He takes it all in. When he speaks, out pours wisdom and inspiration, laced with unapologetic graciousness and humor. And it will change you.
He directs as he moves through life: heart open and welcoming, while keeping his cards close to the chest. Thus, an audience member willingly takes the journey into his productions and is rewarded with delightful surprises.
He is not only an award-winning director and conceiver, but also a successful artistic director who endured the exhausting challenges of running a major nonprofit theatre in the US. He remained steadfast in his commitment to create beautiful and joyful art for everyone, and he always found a way.
He has what Zelda Fichandler said every artistic leader needs: ‘stamina to persist; capacity for a deep interiority on one hand and practical manipulativeness on the other; concentration to hear one’s own voice and courage to listen to it in the midst of a cacophony of other voices; toughness in the service of something that is tender while you try to remain tender yourself.’
He is Sheldon Epps.
—Seema Sueko
Theatre has a terrible and wonderful power to reach people’s minds through their hearts and—maybe— change them. Who knows what exquisite mischief can come from a changed mind?
—Zelda Fichandler
ZELDA FICHANDLER
DIRECTOR
Zelda Fichandler, the founder and longtime artistic director of Arena Stage, was a director, writer, and artistic leader whose example and eloquence inspired a generation of theatre artists and administrators. Fichandler was still writing her master’s thesis for the George Washington University when she founded Arena Stage in 1950 with her then-husband, Thomas C. Fichandler, and teacher, Edward Mangum. Over the next 40 years, she led Arena to national prominence, in large part due to her unwavering support for the artists she worked with. Productions she stewarded included The Great White Hope, which became the first play to transfer from a regional theatre to Broadway, and the first production of the full-length version of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. Fichandler directed more than 50 productions at Arena over the course of her career, including Awake and Sing! by Odets, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In 1973, her production of Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E.
Lee was one of two Arena shows chosen to be part of a cultural exchange program and travel to the Soviet Union, where it was performed at the Moscow Art Theatre. Following her tenure at Arena, Fichandler spent more than two decades chairing the Graduate Acting Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Paired with her artistic accomplishments, Fichandler’s silver-tongued championship—and clear-eyed criticism—of the American regional theatre movement made her a beloved figure in the field. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1997, and in 1999 was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. Fichandler died in 2016. Two books recording and celebrating her life’s work were published in 2024: a collection of her writing and speeches, The Long Revolution, edited by Todd London; and Mary B. Robinson’s oral history, To Repair the World
She received SDC Foundation’s “Mr. Abbott” Award in 1999 and the Zelda Fichandler Award is named in her honor.
RICHARD FOREMAN
DIRECTOR
Richard Foreman was a director, playwright, and founder of the Off-OffBroadway company Ontological-Hysteric Theater (OHT). Influential, iconoclastic, and a legend of the downtown theatre scene, Foreman started writing plays as an undergraduate at Brown and continued at the Yale School of Drama. He founded his company in 1968 and wrote, directed, and designed more than 50 plays under its banner.
Influenced by Brecht, Gertrude Stein, and the work of the Living Theatre, Foreman’s nonlinear plays often explore the writing process itself, collaging from his notebooks to create dense texts featuring impulsive and extravagant characters. He would often rehearse for more than 12 weeks with his signature design elements, including video and string grids that crisscrossed his sets, already in place. Foreman also provided a home for thousands of emerging artists. He established OHT’s Blueprint Series to nurture experimental theatre directors and the Bridge Project with Sophie Haviland to promote international art exchanges.
His directing work outside OHT included Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center Theater (with Raul Julia and Ellen Green), Woyzeck at Hartford Stage Company, and Don Juan at the Guthrie Theater and New York Shakespeare Festival, where he also directed multiple productions, including the premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus. He collaborated as librettist and stage director with composer Stanley Silverman on eight music-theatre pieces produced by the Music-Theatre Group and New York City Opera. Foreman’s many awards included 10 Obies and a MacArthur Fellowship, and he was elected an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France. His final play, Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, directed by Kara Feely, premiered at La MaMa in December 2024. He died on January 4, 2025.
In Richard Foreman’s work, the costumes, set, lights, text, and choreography are one, and Foreman created it all! His plays are in a perpetual presenttense, the awakened state of non-narrative living; rough and gruff—director as eternal disassociated stranger. And sewn into the work, there is a joyous and dark mayhem, a dedication to some mix of the errand and the irrational. If you analyze what he is up to physically, he is masterfully playing with variations of energy and density, gesture and rhythm. And he loves a raggedy unison. The movement he creates feels as age old and specific as a Japanese Noh piece or Peking Opera in the sense that it is staging as dance, but in Foreman’s work, dance and staging are wedded into an abstract, task-based nightmare-fairytale-myth that we the audience experience simply as NOW. The internal monologues, the Hebrew letters, the ritual, the angst—what I perceive as the buried narrative of Jewishness in that post-war generation—his tone is that of the stranger. This is theatre born of generational suffering fused with slapstick angstycomedy. It’s lonely and mad and sad and hilarious. And it has some shtetl in it all.
FRANK GALATI
DIRECTOR
Director, playwright, and actor Frank Galati was a highly influential artist and educator in the Chicago theatre community. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Northwestern University, where he began teaching in 1973 and was named professor emeritus in the Department of Performance Studies upon his retirement in 2006. A specialist in adaptation, he was known for work that preserved much of an author’s original voice and often included long narrative passages.
Galati joined the Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble in 1985; for his adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, which he wrote and directed for Steppenwolf in 1988, he was awarded two Jefferson Awards and two 1990 Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Direction. He was also nominated for a Tony Award in 1998 for directing
No one who was ever in a rehearsal room, or classroom, or perhaps any room with Frank Galati can forget it. In his work, he was governed by a visceral devotion toward text. He was emotional, quick to tears; he sometimes spoke in a kind of aria. He was also the most incisive, astute, and specific respondent to performance I’ve known. His energy, intellect, and imagination were boundless.
Once, in class, a student was working on an adaptation of a Borges story, a piece of surreal literature. Two actors were positioned at a little table, close to each other, in a natural way. Frank eliminated the table and moved one of the actors 45 feet away, diagonally upstage of the other, and instructed them to play with the same intimacy. It was a perfect visual representation of the surreal, reminiscent of a Dalí painting. This ability to convert words into images that were gorgeous, startling, unique, and always apt came to him naturally, a dozen times an hour.
Every day, I am sure someone—at rehearsal, gazing at a painting, listening to music, reading a beautiful passage, or looking out at some marvel of nature—thinks of Frank. He remains a model not only of a consummate artist, but of a human being.
—Mary Zimmerman
the musical Ragtime. He was an associate director at the Goodman Theatre, where he worked for nearly 50 years and directed 12 productions, including She Always Said, Pablo, which brought together words by Gertrude Stein, works by Pablo Picasso, and music by Igor Stravinsky. He was most recently an artistic associate at Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, where he directed the theatre’s 2022 worldpremiere musical Knoxville, which he adapted from James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family
Galati won nine Jefferson Awards for his work in Chicago, and his students during his 40-year career at Northwestern included Mary Zimmerman and The Late Show host Stephen Colbert, who said that Galati “gave me a confidence to think as an artist for the very first time.” Galati was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2022 and died in 2023.
MICHAEL JOHN GARCÉS
DIRECTOR
Michael John Garcés is a director and playwright whose work elevates both community and professional theatre. Born in Miami, Garcés was raised from the age of five in Colombia. He received his BFA in Theatre from the University of Miami; after graduating, he moved to New York to be an actor. There, he interned at INTAR, where he was encouraged by Max Ferrá, the company’s then artistic director, to create an actors group that became the company’s developmental New Works Lab—and to direct. Garcés went on to direct at INTAR and at theatres across the country, including Woolly Mammoth, where he was a company member.
Currently a professor of practice at the Los Angeles campus of Arizona State University, Garcés was artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company, a community-engaged, ensemble-based company in Los Angeles, from 2006 to 2023. Under his leadership, Cornerstone launched The Justice Cycle—six plays exploring how laws shape or disrupt communities—with Los Illegals, which he wrote in collaboration with day laborers, domestic workers, and others on the front lines of the immigration debate. As a director, his productions for Cornerstone included new plays by writers including Alison Carey, Juliette Carrillo, Naomi Iizuka, Lisa Loomer, Mark Valdez, and three by Larissa FastHorse: Wicoun, Native Nation, and Urban Rez He directed For the People by Ty Defoe and Larissa FastHorse at the Guthrie Theater, and his most recent collaboration with FastHorse, Fake It Until You Make It, was produced by Center Theatre Group and Arena Stage.
His other recent productions include Seize the King by Will Power (Alliance Theatre), the just and the blind by Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Daniel Bernard Roumain (Carnegie Hall and The Kennedy Center), The Play You Want by Bernardo Cubría (Road Theatre Company), and What Happens Next by Naomi Iizuka (La Jolla Playhouse). Garcés is a recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, Alan Schneider Director Award, Princess Grace Statue, and SDC President’s Award.
Michael John Garcés brings to the table a sharp wit and keen sense of vision. He is not lacking in confidence nor patience for the things he loves. He makes ferocious choices, watches them fall flat on their face—all while having three more options seemingly in his pocket to get any production to exactly where it needs to be. His work is unstinting, looking to unearth the complexities of the most heinous as well as the most vulnerable of characters with brutal honesty.
He is also a great defender of people. The actors, writers, and designers he works with know he has their backs. Supporting them by creating the safest of rooms to seek honesty in the scariest of circumstances, as well as a loyalty that those who have known and worked with him cherish on a daily basis. I have had the benefit of a lifelong friendship, but I have watched him cultivate that loyalty among everyone he touches. He is a defender of people, honesty, and, most importantly, theatre.
—Lou Moreno
Director Michael Greif has won three Obie Awards: for Sophie Treadwell’s expressionistic tragedy from 1928, Machinal; Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters at The Public Theater; and Jonathan Larson’s Rent, which he directed in its original, groundbreaking production at New York Theatre Workshop and on Broadway, where it ran for 12 years. From his early career onward, Greif has championed new plays and musicals on and off Broadway and at theatres across the country.
Greif has put his stamp on genre-defining work, which also includes Next to Normal, If/ Then, and Dear Evan Hansen, and has collaborated with a roster of writers that includes John Guare, Katori Hall, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, Doug Wright, and many more. His projects often expand the subject matter of the American musical by
MICHAEL GREIF DIRECTOR
Michael Greif is a once-in-ageneration director who has continued to transform and evolve how we see each other, the full breadth of humanity, and the complications of life on the American stage. He has a keen eye, always pushing the cast and creative teams to go to deeper, unexpected places. It’s a masterclass watching him work. I cherish the opportunities I have had to work with him as an actor and alongside him as a director. He is a dear friend and my respect and admiration for him has no bounds.
—Schele Williams
bringing to life difficult subjects like HIV/AIDS, alcoholism, mental health, and dementia with memorable, emotional performances.
In 2023–24, Greif made theatrical history as the first director to helm three new Broadway musicals in a single season: Days of Wine and Roses, The Notebook (which he co-directed with Schele Williams), and Hell’s Kitchen, for which he received his fifth Tony Award nomination. (The others were for Rent, Grey Gardens, Next to Normal, and Dear Evan Hansen.)
Greif attended Northwestern University and graduated with an MFA in Directing from UC San Diego. He served as La Jolla Playhouse’s artistic director from 1994 to 1999 and was an artistic associate at New York Theatre Workshop. He continues to develop and direct new work.
TYRONE GUTHRIE DIRECTOR
Born in Tunbridge Wells, England, in 1900, Tyrone Guthrie began his career as an actor, and after a stint spent writing radio plays, began to direct for the theatre. His work in the United Kingdom— including as artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre and in opera, with productions of Peter Grimes and Carmen —earned him an invitation to help launch the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, in 1952. There he enlisted designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch to further develop an idea he first tried in his 1948 Edinburgh Festival production of Sir David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of The Thrie Estaits : staging productions on a thrust, or “open” stage. Guthrie served as the Stratford Festival’s artistic director for three years.
It is impossible to be precise about what we vaguely and metaphorically term inspiration. It is, for me at any rate, impossible to deny its existence. It is when inspiration takes over that the competent and experienced craftsman becomes an artist. A theatrical director must be a craftsman first and foremost; must devote all his energy to learning the intricacies of the stage. If, now and then, craftsmanship is ennobled by inspiration, let him not be puffed up. Inspiration bloweth where it listeth. It is not a wage earned by the industrious apprentice working overtime; it is a gift.
—Tyrone Guthrie
In 1959, disenchanted with Broadway—where he had directed several productions including The Matchmaker and Candide—Guthrie founded (with Oliver Rea and Peter Zeisler) the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre (now the Guthrie Theater) in MinneapolisSt. Paul. The new theatre, which opened in 1963, included a 1,441-seat thrust stage, also designed by Moiseiwitsch. Guthrie continued to push the boundaries of staging classical theatre with the opening production, Hamlet, as well as Henry V, Volpone, The Cherry Orchard, and The House of Atreus, among others. Tyrone Guthrie was the theatre’s artistic director from 1963 through 1966 and returned there to direct each year until 1969. He was knighted in 1961 and died in 1971.
STEVEN HOGGETT
CHOREOGRAPHER
A movement director and choreographer based in London, Steven Hoggett has received international recognition for his physical storytelling.
While at university at Swansea, in Wales, Hoggett was introduced to the work of a physical theatre company called Volcano. Inspired by members of Volcano, in 1994 Hoggett became a co-founder (with Scott Graham) of the theatre company Frantic Assembly. Known for its movement direction of such innovative works as the National Theatre’s production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which after runs in the West End and on Broadway has been mounted around the world, Frantic Assembly continues to make theatre pieces with a unique, highly physical style.
Hoggett works frequently with director John Tiffany, who he met when they were both 15 years old. One
Steven Hoggett has forever altered the definition of choreography in the theatre. In his vast and eclectic career in the UK and the US, he—with his work—has not only asked audiences to embrace classical dance, but also pushed them to understand that there is dance in the everyday: in a morning routine, in the patterns in which people walk on the street, in the way a crowd responds to a band. Hoggett has found ways to mine beauty, depth, and movement from the most ordinary of interactions; he has found ways to articulate and augment the most conventional behaviors into seismic acts of theatrical expressionism, all the while staying rooted in the importance of narrative and the primacy of story. Through his work on shows like Once, American Idiot, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Close to You, and Let the Right One In, he has expanded the minds of choreographers around the world, redefined what we categorize as choreography, and inspired whole new ways to interpret text and music that transform humanity into dance. Hoggett has not just changed the landscape of the industry—he has changed the way audiences receive and respond to movement in a way that will impact creators and viewers for decades to come.
—Katie Spelman
of their earliest partnerships was on Black Watch for the National Theatre of Scotland, which had its world premiere in 2006 and went on to an acclaimed international tour. Black Watch—a passionate, intensely physical drama drawn from interviews with former soldiers who served in Iraq—earned four Olivier Awards, including Best Choreography for Hoggett. The pair’s many other collaborations include the emotionally resonant musical Once (for which Hoggett won an Obie Award), The Glass Menagerie, and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is currently running in London, New York, on a North American Tour, and around the world.
Hoggett is a five-time Tony Award nominee and fourtime Drama Desk Award nominee. His other Broadway credits include Sweeney Todd, A Beautiful Noise—The Neil Diamond Musical, Angels in America, The Crucible, The Last Ship, Rocky: The Musical, Peter and the Starcatcher, and American Idiot.
MICHAEL KAHN
DIRECTOR
Michael Kahn knew he wanted to be in the theatre when he directed Humpty Dumpty in the second grade. While a student at Columbia, he directed his first Shakespeare play, Pericles, as well as a production of Cocteau’s Orphée featuring Terrence McNally, with sets by Andy Warhol. His work Off-Broadway included Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and was seen by Joseph Papp, who invited him to direct at the New York Shakespeare Festival.
Kahn directed Measure for Measure for Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park in 1966, which led to his appointment as artistic director of the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. Multiple positions of artistic leadership followed, and he taught at the Juilliard School for more than five decades, including leading the Drama Division from 1992 to 2006.
Kahn’s reputation as one of the country’s most respected directors in classical theatre is reflected by his tenure as artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, where he served from 1986 until his retirement in 2019. In that role, he helped move the company from the Folger Shakespeare Library into two theatres in downtown DC, established the Free for All initiative, and directed more than 60 productions for the company, including new adaptations of classic plays penned by David Ives. He also founded the Shakespeare Theatre Academy for Classical Acting, a graduate program at the George Washington University.
Kahn was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2013. Also in 2013, he received an Honorary CBE from Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his 25 years of service to the Shakespeare Theatre and significant contribution to the cultural ties shared by the UK and US.
Michael Kahn is the kind of artist who comes along once in a generation.
What Michael achieved as artistic director of Shakespeare Theatre Company is nothing short of miraculous. His interpretations of Shakespeare and the classics changed the way American directors and actors approached the material. Imagine casting Pat Carroll as Falstaff in Merry Wives? Genius. Or opening a new theatre with a Christopher Marlowe repertory? Bold. Or having the wisdom to ask David Ives to adapt multiple French comedies in verse? Exciting!
Michael wanted Washington to fall in love with the more challenging classical works they didn’t know. From Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein to Ben Jonson’s Volpone to Pierre Corneille’s The Liar, Michael loved the process of rediscovering great writing hidden in plain sight. He relished taking a challenging play, sweating over its problems, and ultimately delivering it with such clarity that audiences thought it was easy. It never was, and he delighted in that too.
Michael remains the most important figure in my theatrical life. Whenever I face a challenge today, he’s my first call. His words of wisdom give me comfort and confidence. I love him and he will always be my ‘true north’ when it comes to a life in the theatre.
—Alan Paul
ELIA KAZAN
DIRECTOR
Elia Kazan, a theatre and film director whose work left an indelible mark on some of the greatest plays in the American theatrical canon, was born Elia Kazanjoglous in 1909 in Constantinople (now Istanbul), Turkey.
After emigrating to America and studying drama at Yale, Kazan began his theatre career at The Group Theatre, where he stage managed and acted in small roles. He first made his mark as a director on Broadway in 1942 with Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, and became a major force five years later when his back-toback productions of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons electrified audiences and critics alike. That same year he cofounded The Actors Studio, putting into practice techniques based on the work of Stanislavski that helped actors find truth on stage through intimate psychological understanding of their characters. His work with actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean would help launch their careers and popularize “The Method.”
Kazan went on to a prolific career in Hollywood but stayed connected to the theatre, directing Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth on Broadway in the 1950s, and later becoming involved in the early days of what was then called the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center.
Among his many accolades, Kazan was a three-time Tony Award winner and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1983. He published a biography, Elia Kazan: A Life, in 1988, and Kazan on Directing, drawn from his notebooks and other materials, was published in 2009. He died in 2003.
I don’t know how many times I’ve read Elia Kazan’s notebook, published in Kazan on Directing—the notes he made to himself while preparing to direct A Streetcar Named Desire. He talked about the ‘spine’ of each of the major characters. He analyzed the way every scene moved the story of the play forward. He understood in his work the intersection of an actor’s needs and a playwright’s needs to a degree I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anybody else achieve, except for people who are clearly influenced by him.
He was a ruthlessly honest man. And an infinitely curious man. Curious about people. Curious about everyone he ever met. He set a standard for me, as he did, and still does, for many people.
—Austin Pendleton
WOODIE KING JR.
DIRECTOR
Woodie King Jr. is most definitely an American theatre treasure, as witnessed by his countless contributions and productions. He has mentored and inspired many American artists like myself to reach for greater heights. His wisdom, generosity, and heart has made the theatre landscape more diverse and beautiful. It goes without saying, but there would be a huge hole in the soul of American theatre without his vision, courage, and sheer willpower. Definitely at the top of the Mount Rushmore of American theatre.
—Kenny Leon
Director, actor, producer, and writer Woodie King Jr. is a pioneer of the Black Arts Movement. He grew up in Detroit and worked as an arc welder for Ford Motor Company after high school but was passionate about acting. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for Black actors, King and other students from Wayne State University, where he was studying theatre, created a new company called Concept-East in 1960. In 1964, the company brought a touring production of Study in Color to New York, where King remained; he was hired to run a theatre training program through Mobilization for Youth, an anti-poverty program on the Lower East Side.
Inspired by the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s, King founded the New Federal Theatre in 1970, then
created the National Black Touring Circuit in 1974 to increase access to Black theatre for communities across the nation. New Federal Theatre has produced more than 400 plays, serving as a trailblazer for Black artists and bringing national attention to numerous writers and actors. In 2020 the company received a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theatre. King retired from New Federal Theatre in 2021. His many awards include an Obie for Sustained Excellence; NAACP, AUDELCO, Peter Zeisler, Paul Robeson, and Rosetta LeNoire Awards; and honorary doctorates. He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2011 and received the Off-Broadway Alliance’s “Legend of Off-Broadway” Award in 2020.
MARK LAMOS
DIRECTOR
Mark Lamos is a celebrated director and artistic leader who has been at the helm of multiple American theatres during his long career, including Hartford Stage (where he served from 1981 to 1998, and which was awarded the Tony for Outstanding Regional Theatre in 1989) and Westport Country Playhouse (2009 to 2024).
As a young actor, Lamos appeared in Arthur Miller’s The Creation of the World and Other Business and as Christian opposite Christopher Plummer in a musical version of Cyrano on Broadway, directed and choreographed by Michael Kidd. He started his directing career while working as an actor at the Guthrie, which was then under the leadership of Michael Langham, and was invited to direct Equus for Arizona Theatre Company when he was playing Hamlet at The Old Globe.
Mark Lamos once said he thought of each production as an Event and his productions have always felt special to me in that they are celebrations of the texts and convey a sense of the importance of the storytelling. Mark’s work is always gorgeous—rich in visual detail, utterly thought through. He highlights in his work the best and worst of our humanity, as well as his appreciation of great writing, great acting, and great design. In leading Hartford Stage from 1981 to 1998, a remarkable stretch of 17 years, he made his theatre a destination and created an appreciation for classics and new works in the audience of the region that continues to this day. Watching Mark’s productions taught me to think largely, to think with beauty, to view the theatre as a gorgeous canvas full of possibilities.
—Melia Bensussen
Lamos’s notable productions include Ibsen’s complete Peer Gynt with Richard Thomas, large-scale classical plays by Shakespeare, the Greeks, and others, and many new works by A.R. Gurney, with whom he had a close artistic collaboration. He directed Our Country’s Good, Seascape, and The Deep Blue Sea on Broadway, and Lortel Award-winning productions of Tiny Alice and Measure for Measure. Lamos has directed extensively in opera, including new productions of I Lombardi with Luciano Pavarotti and Wozzeck (both filmed for PBS’s Great Performances), as well as the world premiere of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby and Adriana Lecouvreur with Placido Domingo, all for the Metropolitan Opera.
Lamos was the first American to direct a company in the former Soviet Union (Desire Under the Elms at Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre), and the first to act as dramaturg in the creation of a ballet (Alexei Ratmansky’s The Tempest for American Ballet Theatre). He received the John Houseman Award from The Acting Company in 2016.
TINA LANDAU
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Tina Landau is a director and writer whose productions of Redwood (which she coconceived with Idina Menzel, and for which she wrote the book and co-wrote the lyrics with composer Kate Diaz) and Floyd Collins (for which she also wrote the book and additional lyrics with composer/lyricist Adam Guettel) were both on Broadway this season.
She is an ensemble member at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, where she has directed more than 20 productions. Landau’s work ranges from classics of Greek tragedy— including Orestes and The Trojan Women: A Love Story, both adapted by Charles L. Mee for the site-specific company En Garde Arts— to SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical, which she conceived and directed. Her production of SpongeBob celebrated the surreal energy of the animated series—she described it to the New York Times as “rather subversive, really psychedelic”—and featured songs by artists including Sara Bareilles, Cyndi Lauper, and John Legend.
Landau frequently collaborates with Tarell Alvin McCraney, including on Ms. Blakk for President (which they co-authored for Steppenwolf), Head of Passes, Wig Out!, and In the Red and Brown Water, among many others. Her other productions include Paula Vogel’s Mother Play, Tracy Letts’s Superior Donuts, and the revival of Bells Are Ringing, all on Broadway, and Bill Irwin and David Shiner’s Old Hats for Signature Theatre. With Anne Bogart, she co-authored The Viewpoints Book. Landau’s honors include Drama Desk, Drama League, Outer Critics, Obie, and Princess Grace Awards.
With her imaginative craftsmanship, emotional complexity, and genre-defying vision, Tina Landau is a multi-hyphenate storyteller. Her creations at En Garde Arts: visionary; her work at Steppenwolf: boundless; her capacity to mount consecutive Broadway musicals: masterful. As those who have worked with Tina can attest, she is a creator of indelible worlds, not just on the stage, but off.
On stage, Tina has transported audiences from celestial skies to cavernous depths, from redwood canopies to ocean floors, and from shifting marshlands to waterfront saloons. She inhabits these theatrical worlds with characters who embrace life’s multiplicity, contradictions, and messiness. Her visuals, physicality, language, and ensemble work fuse to form diverse communities that reflect a world we live in and, often, a world that could be.
But long before the footlights come on, Tina establishes a world where exploration can happen—emotional and physical playgrounds, teeming with possibility, where artists feel empowered to collaborate, question, and create with open hearts. Through Viewpoints work, she endows actors with a unique set of tools to hone awareness of themselves and others. Her ability to inspire collaborators, build ensemble, and create community permeates every rehearsal process, launching explorers into the void, ready to shine light on the infinite delights and mysteries of the world.
—Kenneth Ferrone
MICHAEL LANGHAM
DIRECTOR
Michael Langham was an extraordinary classical director with a reputation for meticulous text analysis and mastery of the specific demands of working on thrust stages. He began his career in his native England, running repertory theatres in Coventry, Birmingham, and then Glasgow, directed at Stratford-on-Avon in 1950, and made his West End and Old Vic debuts in 1951.
Among the many artistic leadership positions he held over the course of his career, Langham was the second artistic director at the Stratford Festival in Canada. He held that position from 1956 to 1967 and returned often to direct in subsequent decades. There, he staged acclaimed productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost—he directed that play, which was known to be his favorite, multiple times, including in 2008, as an octogenarian—and Timon of Athens, starring his frequent collaborator Brian Bedford, which went to Broadway.
On Broadway, he also directed Jay Allen’s adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with Zoe Caldwell, and Noël Coward’s Waiting in the Wings, starring Lauren Bacall and Rosemary Harris. He was the third artistic director of the Guthrie Theater (1971 to 1977) and director of The Juilliard School’s Drama Division in New York (serving from 1979 to 2011, the year he died).
As a young man, after enlisting in the British Army in 1939, Langham was captured by the Germans and spent five years as a prisoner of war; he started directing his fellow prisoners in plays. The first production was Thunder Rock, he later recounted to the Juilliard Journal, “a play about people who think there is no way out of their situation and are proved wrong. Two men I know of went back on their decision to commit suicide after seeing the play. It was that production and its impact on these men and all the men that made me decide to devote my life to the theatre.”
He was Tyrone Guthrie’s protégé. And I was his, though I didn’t know it, as he directed me in a series of productions. Yet I learned everything about directing Shakespeare by being part of an ensemble of actors who pretty much worshipped him. He toughened us up. He taught us how to lift off. His preparation was profound and intense. And long. It cost him.
Mercurial. Demanding. Waspish. Delightful. Painstaking. Acting in his scintillating productions of Shakespeare was like being part of a great wheel of life, a dance, a celebration of the exhilarating—and articulate—speed the playing of Shakespeare requires, whether hurtling toward tragedy or sailing into coupling and resolution. In his productions, actors had to be ‘on their toes’ linguistically and physically; each ensemble member became alive with character through movement and detailed blocking, which had a precision that simply lifted everything up, like a breath of wind. Because it made so much sense. It told the story. You looked across the stage at your fellow actors and we were all of us telling the story, and it was electrifying. Such humanity!
—Mark Lamos
BAAYORK LEE
DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER
In 1951, at the age of five, Baayork Lee made her Broadway debut as Princess Ying Yawolak in the original production of The King and I, and in 1954, she danced in George Balanchine’s original production of The Nutcracker. While attending the High School of Performing Arts in New York City, she met fellow student Michael Bennett. She became a “Michael Bennett dancer” on Broadway including performing “Turkey Lurkey Time” (with Donna McKechnie and Margo Sappington) in Promises, Promises. In 1975, she originated the role of Connie Wong in A Chorus Line, a character that was based on her life, and also served as Bennett’s assistant choreographer and dance captain on the landmark production.
On opening night at the Shubert Theatre in 1975, Bennett told her, “You’re gonna take this all over the world,” Lee told CBS News in an interview. A Chorus Line would be her last show as a performer. Lee has subsequently directed and/or overseen Bennett’s choreography for more than 40 national and international productions.
Her directing and choreography credits include The King and I and Bombay Dreams (national tours), Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (New York City Opera), Barnum (Australia), Carmen Jones (Kennedy Center), Porgy and Bess and Jesus Christ Superstar (European tours), West Side Story, Miss Saigon, and The King and I (Kansas City Starlight), and she has choreographed many productions at Arena Stage and Washington National Opera. For PBS, Lee directed Wicked in Concert
In 2017, she received the Isabelle Stevenson Award, a philanthropic award given annually as part of the Tony Awards, for her work as co-founder of the National Asian Artists Project (NAAP), which promotes Asian-American theatre artists through community outreach, educational programming, and performances.
Baayork is a powerhouse of energy, dedication, chutzpah, and heart whose influence in American musical theatre is immeasurable. She has left an indelible mark on Broadway through her decadeslong career as a performer, director, and choreographer.
Her work ethic is legendary. So are her warmups! She once told me she runs shows like a Chinese restaurant: rehearsals are about ‘cooking the food,’ tech is ‘preparing it to be served,’ and opening night is ‘when the food is placed on the table. Everything on time. Everything delicious!’ This precision and efficiency perfectly reflect her first-generation American mentality— meticulous, timely, always striving for (and delivering) excellence.
Her legacy is one of joyful dedication and tireless hard work. As co-founder of the National Asian Artists Project (NAAP), Baayork continues to create space for underrepresented voices, providing AAPI theatre artists the platform to showcase their talents and promote greater diversity in the performing arts.
She’s the most fun, joyful, vibrant, skilled, and kind person you will ever meet. We are all lucky to have had her twirl her magic across the boards.
—Yasmine Lee
KENNY LEON DIRECTOR
Kenny’s style is reminiscent of my favorite sports coaches growing up. They would identify your talent, teach you tricks they learned over their years of watching the game, and skillfully guide you to craft performances that you were unsure even existed inside of you. Like those coaches, he knows that to coach every player the same would produce uneven results. Instead, Kenny’s keen observations lead him to give the right note at the perfect time so that each artist feels empowered in the ensemble.
It’s important to point out the way that Kenny has made space for so many. While not boasting about his accolades, he has become one of the most prolific contemporary Broadway directors. In each of his productions, he invites the world in to see the value of how sharing tales from a diverse collection of voices enriches the fabric of American storytelling.
Early in my journey, I was in deep need of identifying an example of what might be possible for someone like me in this field. Kenny appeared, and I set my sights on what a career in this industry could look like.
I’m grateful to call him a mentor, a friend, and one of the best coaches I’ve had the blessing to have.
—Jamil Jude
Kenny Leon is an American director represented on Broadway in the 2024–2025 season by Othello, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, starring Jim Parsons.
A native of Florida and graduate of Clark Atlanta University, he briefly attended law school in Los Angeles before returning to Atlanta in 1979. He became associate artistic director of the Alliance Theatre in 1988 and artistic director two years later. After 11 years with the Alliance, Leon cofounded True Colors Theatre Company with Jane Bishop in 2002 to provide a platform for Black storytelling in Atlanta; there, he established the August Wilson Monologue Competition for high school students.
Leon made his Broadway debut in 2004 with A Raisin in the Sun and directed August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean later the same year. He has directed 17 Broadway plays in 20 years, including the final play in Wilson’s American Century Cycle, Radio Golf, in 2007 and Fences in 2010. His other works include Broadway productions of Children of a Lesser God and Purlie Victorious; Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet at the Delacorte/Shakespeare in the Park; and his television work includes Hairspray Live! and The Wiz Live! on NBC.
Leon received the Actors Fund Medal of Honor and the 2017 “Mr. Abbott” Award from SDC Foundation. His memoir, Take You Wherever You Go, was published in 2018.
IRENE LEWIS DIRECTOR
Irene Lewis is the kind of artist you pray will cross your path at least once in your lifetime. It is unquestionable that without her I would not have the life in theatre I now enjoy. She saw a tiny light in me and opened the aperture.
What she achieved while at the helm of Baltimore Center Stage was nothing short of revolutionary. She brought a whole new audience to the theatre that hitherto saw it as a palace built not for them. She introduced the idea of one third of her season being programmed for Baltimore’s 70 percent African American residents at a time very few others across the American theatre landscape were even thinking about it. But I want to speak for a minute about her directorial prowess. Her production of Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind changed me. It wasn’t just her curatorial brilliance by programming this then little produced—nay, forgotten—play, but the truth she facilitated with the cast, including E. Faye Butler and Thomas Jefferson Byrd, that had my head spinning for weeks.
I discovered a classic. I discovered that nothing is new under the sun. Her direction of Pinter’s The Homecoming was another production that excavated such depth, that placed masculine barbarity under such an unflinching spotlight, that I was forced to walk the two miles back to my hotel, simply so I could process what I had just seen. Been part of. Irene Lewis, I thank you for being such amazing shoulders to stand upon. A true legend.
—Kwame Kwei-Armah
Irene Lewis is a director and artistic leader who has mentored generations of theatremakers. After serving as associate artistic director at Hartford Stage from 1972 to 1980, Lewis first worked with Baltimore Center Stage as a guest director, staging Watch on the Rhine in 1980. She became interim artistic director in 1991, assumed full artistic leadership in 1992, and remained at the helm until 2011, working in partnership with the theatre’s longtime managing director, Peter Culman. Under her leadership, Center Stage continued its dedication to developing and producing new works, premiering such plays as David Feldshuh’s Miss Evers’ Boys, Elizabeth Egloff’s The Lover, and Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage.
At Center Stage, Lewis directed numerous musicals, new works, world masterpieces (including plays by Shakespeare, Molière, Goldoni, Shaw, Chekhov, and Marivaux), and American classics by writers including August Wilson and Alice Childress, whose Trouble in Mind she directed in Baltimore and at Yale Rep in 2007 and returned to in 2011 at Arena Stage.
As an artistic director in a majority African American city, Lewis dedicated a third of Center Stage’s programming to Black stories and hired global majority associates including Kwame KweiArmah, who succeeded her as artistic director. Her proudest achievement, she has said, was the racial diversification of the theatre’s Board, staff, repertory, and audience.
Lewis has also directed at American Conservatory Theater, Philadelphia Theatre Company, Mark Taper Forum, Seattle Rep, Sundance, Berkeley Rep, Williamstown, and the New York Shakespeare Festival.
EMILY MANN
DIRECTOR
Emily Mann began studying theatre at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while a student at Radcliffe, and received an MFA from the University of Minnesota. In 1979, five years after having been awarded a directing fellowship at the Guthrie Theater, she became the first woman to direct on its mainstage with a production of The Glass Menagerie. In 1991, she began her tenure as artistic director of McCarter Theatre Center with the same play. Under her leadership, the McCarter received the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre in 1994.
During her 30-year tenure at McCarter, where she also held the title of resident playwright, Mann directed world premieres by Ntozake Shange, Edward Albee, Christopher Durang, Ken Ludwig, Nilo Cruz, and Danai Gurira, among others, and earned acclaim for her productions of Williams, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Ibsen.
An award-winning playwright, Mann’s documentary works include Having Our Say (based on the lives of Sadie and Bessie Delany) and Execution of Justice (about the trial of Dan White for the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk). Both plays were performed on Broadway under her direction; her other Broadway credits include Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz and A Streetcar Named Desire
A collection of Mann’s work, Testimonies: Four Plays, is published by Theatre Communications Group. A recipient of numerous awards and honors, including being inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2019, Mann received the Gordon Davidson Award for Lifetime Achievement from SDC Foundation in 2021.
Emily Mann is a theatrical luminary whose artistry has transformed the landscape of theatre, helping to create cutting-edge forms like the theatre of testimony. Her work is brave, bold, honest, human, sexy, and adventurous. Mann has championed, developed, and produced generations of artists; she is a trailblazer of American theatre.
Seeing her productions of Miss Julie, Betrayal, Betsey Brown, The Mai, Having Our Say, Anna in the Tropics, All Over, and so many others showed me that anything is possible, to always embrace the magic, and to seek deeper truths.
Mann has a unique way of fostering creativity. As a director and playwright, she seamlessly enhances the narrative with nuance and truth, never overshadowing it; this style defines her leadership and mentorship as well. Her ability to bring the community together through story is what inspired me to become a producing artistic director.
I remember watching her production of The Glass Menagerie when I was 10 years old and realizing then that I wanted to be a director. She has been a lifelong mentor who continues to innovate and expand her vital artistic legacy and I’m excited to see what this next chapter brings.
—Jade King Carroll
Joe Mantello was my mentor and to this day is a close friend and confidant. He is generous, kind, and tirelessly supportive. He gives the best notes to actors of anyone ever. They are so incisive and spot on and brilliant. He also showed me as a baby director that having excellent taste (his is truly sine qua non) is the best weapon in a director’s arsenal. His productions are always the gold standard to which I aspire in my own work, and his humanity and acumen know no bounds.
—Trip Cullman
JOE MANTELLO
DIRECTOR
A native of Rockford, Illinois, Joe Mantello graduated from the School of Drama at the North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) in 1984 and moved to New York with an interest in both acting and directing. He co-founded the Edge Theater with fellow alumni from the school, including playwright Peter Hedges and actor Mary-Louise Parker. Mantello’s early directing work Off-Broadway included Hedges’s Imagining Brad, which was produced by Circle Repertory Company; he went on to both direct and act for Circle Rep, including performing in the Off-Broadway premiere of Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz
In 1993, Mantello appeared on Broadway in a Tony Award-nominated performance as Louis Ironson in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika. A year later, he directed Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour!
Compassion! in its Off-Broadway run and subsequent Broadway transfer, for which he earned his first Tony nomination as a director.
Mantello won his first Tony Award in 2003 for Best Direction of a Play for Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out. Later that year, he directed Wicked—now the fourth-longest-running Broadway production of all time—and in 2004 he received a Best Direction Tony Award for Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins.
Mantello’s recent productions have included Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road for Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Sondheim’s final musical, Here We Are, written with David Ives, at The Shed in New York and the National Theatre. He is a recipient of Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Helen Hayes, Clarence Derwent, Obie, and SDC Foundation’s 1995 Joe A. Callaway and 2020 “Mr. Abbott” Awards.
PHOTO DAVID KRYSL
KATHLEEN MARSHALL
DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER
Kathleen Marshall taught me so very much for which I am forever grateful. Such as how important it is to do proper research when starting a project, how to collaborate with a dance arranger, a music director, a set or costume designer, how to be a good storyteller, to always be prepared when walking into a rehearsal room, how to get the best from dancers and actors at an audition, how to build a number, how to make each day in the studio or theatre a privilege not a job, how important it is to be loyal to those who always deliver, how to be a good leader, and how to be a great friend. Personally, I can’t imagine any degree of success in this business without her friendship, her guidance, and her encouragement. Thank you my friend!
—Rob Ashford
Director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall began her career as a professional dancer in Pittsburgh, where she grew up in a family of theatre fans that also included her brother, Rob Marshall. She performed in the national tour of Cats before transitioning into choreography. Marshall assisted her brother Rob on Broadway productions of Kiss of the Spider Woman, She Loves Me, and Damn Yankees before making her own Broadway debut as a choreographer with Swinging on a Star: The Johnny Burke Musical.
Marshall became the artistic director of Encores! at New York City Center in 1996 and ran the program for four years; it was there that she began to direct on her own, as well as choreograph. Encores! was honored with a special Tony Award under her leadership. She received her first Best Choreography Tony nomination in 2000 for her showstopping work on Michael Blakemore’s revival of Kiss Me, Kate, and has subsequently been honored with the award three times, for Wonderful Town (an Encores! transfer), The Pajama Game, and Anything Goes. (She was also nominated for Best Direction of a Musical for each of these productions.) Her work on Golden Age musicals preserves the spirits of the original productions, while using her own carefully researched and considered approach to lift them with a fresh perspective.
Marshall’s production of Anything Goes at London’s Barbican Theatre was nominated for nine Olivier Awards— with Marshall winning for Best Choreography—and was filmed for PBS’s Great Performances. Her recent projects include the world premiere of My Best Friend’s Wedding at Ogunquit Playhouse and Sinatra: The Musical, which premiered at Birmingham Rep and was recently presented as a reading at the Apollo Theater.
Marshall has been honored with the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for the Arts as well as the Smith College Medal and, with Rob Marshall, the 2005 “Mr. Abbott” Award from SDC Foundation.
MARION McCLINTON
DIRECTOR
Marion McClinton was a pioneering American theatre director, actor, and writer whose long association with August Wilson began with a chance meeting at a poetry reading in 1978. He played the narrator in Wilson’s first professionally produced work, a playbased-on-poems called Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, and played Fielding in the first production of Jitney at Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul in 1985. In 1993 he directed his first Wilson play, The Piano Lesson, at Penumbra, and he went on to become one of Wilson’s closest collaborators, directing productions of the 10-play American Century Cycle all over the country. McClinton’s productions of Wilson’s plays were muscular and musical, balancing fidelity to the text with directorial innovation.
While remaining rooted in the theatre communities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, McClinton’s career took him to companies across the United States, including The
Marion Isaac McClinton brought daily into the rehearsal hall joy and an aesthetic that found its genesis in deep cultural understanding, rigorous historical research and scholarship, life experience, dramaturgical acumen, and a genuine love for the artists and for the form. He relished his role as the director—the single unifying element in the building of production. His fidelity to playwright intent and total belief in the power of ensemble acting are models for the staging of culturally specific performance.
—Lou Bellamy
Public Theater and Baltimore Center Stage, where he was an associate artist. He helped develop the acting aesthetic at Penumbra, centering African American ideas, self-expression, and ensemble building. His work as a director also encompassed plays by Beckett and Shakespeare, as well as new work by Cheryl L. West, Regina Taylor, Lynn Nottage, and Tarell Alvin McCraney, among other writers.
McClinton directed two Wilson plays on Broadway: in 2001, he made his Broadway directorial debut with Wilson’s King Hedley II, followed by Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2003, featuring Whoopi Goldberg and Anthony Mackie. That same year, he directed the world premiere of Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean at the Goodman Theatre. His awards include a Tony nomination, an Obie, and three AUDELCO Awards. McClinton died in 2019.
JERRY MITCHELL
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Jerry Mitchell grew up in Paw Paw, Michigan, appearing with the Paw Paw Village Players when he was 10. He knew then that he wanted to be in show business. Mitchell began his Broadway career performing in the 1980 revival of Brigadoon, choreographed by Agnes de Mille. As a dancer, choreographer, and director-choreographer, his work in the theatre has been “full out.”
In 1992, while performing in The Will Rogers Follies, Mitchell created the fundraising event Broadway Bares. The first performance raised $8,000 for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS; Broadway Bares is now produced annually in New York and on the West End and has raised $24.5 million for BC/EFA. A tireless philanthropist for the LGBTQIA+ community and a fierce advocate of the healing and philanthropic powers of the arts, Mitchell was honored in 2023 with the Isabelle
Full out. Two words Jerry uses every day and in almost any interaction. They are encouragement, expectation, and aspiration. He lives them and leads by example. My first time meeting Jerry Mitchell in a meeting about La Cage found him jumping off the couch to demonstrate in vivid detail his idea for a button-tufted wall of keyholes where we might discover the Cagelles. Years later, when I assisted him on Legally Blonde, his Broadway debut as a director, I watched him in a similar meeting with boundless energy, holding hands over his face and opening them like shutters—‘Omigod, omigod you guys!’ Jerry’s magic comes from his infectious passion. He has a singular vision and doggedly follows his ideas to their logical conclusion. But he’s never stuck—his pragmatism about making it work means constantly editing those ideas and frequently throwing out whole numbers and concepts wholesale and starting over when necessary. He’s always confident there will be another idea where that one came from and tomorrow means another chance to get it right. When you come to see a Jerry show, you know you’re in for a good time, but more importantly you know there’s heart leading the way. Both on stage and off. Full out.
—Marc Bruni
Stevenson Tony Award for his more than three decades of volunteer service through the arts.
Mitchell is acclaimed for his work on musicals including Legally Blonde, Kinky Boots, and Pretty Woman, all of which he directed and choreographed, as well as for his choreography of The Full Monty, Hairspray, and La Cage aux Folles, and direction of On Your Feet! His most recent projects include The Devil Wears Prada in the West End, with music by Elton John and starring Vanessa Williams, and the new Broadway production of BOOP! The Musical, for which he received his eighth Tony nomination for Best Choreography.
He has won the Tony for Best Choreography twice, for Kinky Boots and La Cage aux Folles, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards, as well as SDC Foundation’s “Mr. Abbott” Award in 2013—30 years after he appeared in George Abbott’s production of On Your Toes
MIKE NICHOLS
DIRECTOR
Born Michael Peshkowsky in 1931 in Berlin, Mike Nichols directed some of the most influential plays and films of the 20th century. He began his career at the University of Chicago, where he decided to become an actor, and moved to New York City to study with Lee Strasberg. Soon after, he returned to Chicago and began working with Elaine May at the improvisational comedy troupe the Compass Players, predecessor of The Second City. Nichols and May broke away from the troupe in 1957 to form a comedy duo, which resulted in their 1960 Broadway production, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May The LP album of the show won the 1962 Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.
Following the pair’s breakup in 1961, Nichols directed six Broadway productions between 1964 and 1968, with four of them running simultaneously. He went on to direct or produce more than 25 Broadway shows, earning eight Tony Awards for Best Direction for productions including The Odd Couple, Luv, Plaza Suite, The Real Thing, Spamalot, and Death of a Salesman
Nichols is one of 21 people to have won all four of the competitive American entertainment awards: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (EGOT). His first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, based on Edward Albee’s play, premiered in 1966. He received the Academy Award for his second film, The Graduate, and Emmy Awards for directing acclaimed television adaptations of the plays Wit and Angels in America
Nichols received SDC Foundation’s “Mr. Abbott” Award in 1987. He was honored at the Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 1999, earned the National Medal of Arts in 2001, was presented with a Kennedy Center Honor in 2003, and given the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010. He died in 2014.
There’s only one question the audience asks: ‘Why are you telling me this?’ There has to be a good strong reason. If it’s funny, that’s a reason. If it’s not funny, you better have a very strong other reason. The more clearly and specifically you answer this question, the more you’ve done your job. Whether it’s poetic theatre, stylistic theatre, musical theatre, naturalistic theatre, the aim is always, in a way, to imitate life believably, to make the people in the audience say, ‘Me too, I know that.’
—Mike Nichols
TREVOR NUNN
DIRECTOR
Sir Trevor Nunn was born in Ipswich, England, and educated at Cambridge University, where he worked with student groups including the Footlights and the Marlowe Society and won a scholarship to be the resident director at the Belgrade Theatre after graduation.
Nunn joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964; in 1968, at age 27, he was appointed the company’s youngest-ever artistic director. He remained with the RSC until 1986, directing such notable productions as Macbeth with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, which was performed in the round for an audience of 200; an epic staging of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (co-directed with John Caird) that lasted eight-and-ahalf hours; and (also with Caird) Les Misérables, now one of the most-performed musicals in the world.
One of the greatest joys of my career was collaborating with Sir Trevor Nunn. Trevor is a director of immense vision and intelligence who approaches every piece with a sense of history and storytelling. Being in a rehearsal room with him is like stepping into a masterclass—constantly challenged, constantly learning, and always inspired.
Trevor has a remarkable way of honoring the traditions of a piece while breathing fresh life into it. His approach to Oklahoma! was no exception. He brought out the psychological depth of the characters, illuminating layers that had always been there but perhaps never fully explored. Watching him dissect a moment and guide actors toward something truly profound was an astonishing experience.
As a choreographer, working alongside a director with such a keen eye for movement and staging was a gift. Trevor understood how dance could be an extension of storytelling, how every step could carry emotion and meaning.
Trevor is simply a joy to be around— thoughtful, generous, endlessly curious. He creates an atmosphere where artistry can thrive and every collaborator feels valued. To work with him is to be reminded of why we all fell in love with theatre in the first place.
—Susan Stroman
Recognized for his work both on classic plays and popular musicals, Nunn directed the longrunning British and American productions of Cats, choreographed by Gillian Lynne. At the Royal National Theatre, where he served as artistic director from 1997 to 2003, he directed many productions, including Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and Oklahoma!, choreographed by Susan Stroman, both of which were also produced on Broadway.
Nunn is the winner of numerous awards, including seven Olivier Awards, three Tony Awards, and SDC Foundation’s “Mr. Abbott” Award in 1993. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2002 and inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2012.
Jack has been a candle for many, and for me, the brightest artistic light. In the early years of my directing career, Jack hired me to direct Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s From the Mississippi Delta. I was pretty new, pretty far from home, and coming from a strictly acting perspective. Jack made it clear that, as the director, my vision, point of view, experiences, ethnic knowledge, gender—and my outrage—were as important as the words on the page. Jack supported my perspective. That first experience at The Old Globe led to a dozen shows at the Globe. Jack’s belief in me set my career in motion. Much love and gratitude, Big Guy.
—Seret Scott
JACK O’BRIEN
DIRECTOR
Jack O’Brien is renowned as a director of Shakespeare and other classics, new musicals and dramatic works, and contemporary and classic comedies. For 27 years, he served as artistic director of The Old Globe, leading the company to international acclaim, nurturing a generation of artists, and directing and producing work that is now part of the Broadway canon.
O’Brien was a student at the University of Michigan when he joined the University’s resident theatre company, the APA (Association of Producing Artists) Repertory Company, founded by Rosemary Harris and Ellis Rabb. His first Broadway credit was as Rabb’s assistant for the 1965 Broadway revival of You Can’t Take It With You, and his own Broadway debut as a director came in 1969 with Sean O’Casey’s Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy. His most recent Broadway shows were the musical Shucked, which garnered him a 2023 Tony Award nomination, and The Roommate
He received the 2002 “Mr. Abbott” Award from SDC Foundation and in 2024, he was honored with a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.
The sweep of his work includes two Tony-nominated productions in 2001 alone—The Full Monty, the musical by Terrence McNally and David Yazbeck, and Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. Between 2003 and 2007, he was honored with Tony Awards for Best Direction for his productions of Stoppard’s trilogy of plays, The Coast of Utopia; Shakespeare’s Henry IV; and the musical Hairspray, written by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, with music by Marc Shaiman and lyrics by Scott Wittman and Shaiman.
A Jack O’Brien production brings out a play’s emotional truth, no matter if the plot is about the question of consciousness or corn. His direction is meticulous, his productions are exhilarating, and his theatrical sensibility always ensures the audience a good time.
HAROLD PRINCE
DIRECTOR
Simply, there is not a musical of any significance at all that Hal Prince didn’t produce, direct, or produce and direct or influence since the mid-1950s. His work in the 1970s in collaboration with Stephen Sondheim (Company, Follies, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, among others) cannot be overpraised. Most directors of Broadway musicals have show business as their influence; Hal, on the other hand, brought world theatre to the Broadway arena— German Expressionism with his production of Cabaret, Kabuki and Noh theatre with Pacific Overtures, Grand Guignol with Sweeney Todd. He pushed the boundaries of what musical theatre could be and set the bar for what excellence in the form looks like. There is no larger contributor to the musical theatre; we are all deeply indebted to him.
—Lonny Price
Harold Prince—known as Hal—was one of the most honored and impactful theatre artists of the 20th century; his career as a director and producer spanned seven decades. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1948, Prince began working as an assistant stage manager to producer and director George Abbott, who became his mentor. He hired Abbott to direct (with Jerome Robbins) what became Prince’s first hit as a producer—The Pajama Game—in 1954.
Prince is credited with pioneering “concept” musicals that explore a central theme rather than a conventional narrative plot. His work with Stephen Sondheim on six musicals produced between 1970 and 1981— Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along—redefined the American musical.
Among the many other productions Prince directed were She Loves Me, Cabaret, Zorba, Candide, On the Twentieth Century, Evita, The Phantom of the Opera (the longest-running show in Broadway history), Kiss of the Spider Woman, Show Boat, and Parade.
Prince was known for gathering his team immediately after opening night to start working on his next project, regardless of the success of the last. He won a record 21 Tony Awards, the National Medal of Arts, a Kennedy Center Honor, and he was the first winner of the SDC Foundation “Mr. Abbott” Award, in 1985. He published two memoirs, Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre in 1974 and Sense of Occasion in 2017, the same year he co-directed (with Susan Stroman) a musical revue of his work, Prince of Broadway. Prince died in 2019 at the age of 91.
JOSÉ QUINTERO
DIRECTOR
José Quintero was born in Panama City in 1924. After attending the University of Southern California and training at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, he made his directorial debut in 1949 with a production of The Glass Menagerie in Woodstock, New York.
With Theodore Mann, he founded Circle in the Square Theatre in 1950, helping to propel OffBroadway from relative obscurity into a nationally recognized movement. A heralded 1952 production of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke with Geraldine Page established his reputation. And his first Eugene O’Neill production— The Iceman Cometh , which he directed in 1956 with Jason Robards, Jr.—re-established the playwright as one of America’s greatest dramatists. Today, no director
A director must not just see a play. He must learn to listen to a play. It’s going to take me a long time before I’ll be able to hear the rhythms, and the angers and the love and the laughter inherent in this play. A long time before I can hear with my whole being, not only with my ears. So let’s begin today and we won’t stop until that curtain goes up opening night, and let’s hope not even then.
— José Quintero
is more indelibly associated with the works of O’Neill than Quintero.
Quintero’s other O’Neill productions span three decades and include the original Broadway staging of Long Day’s Journey Into Night with Fredric March and Robards, Strange Interlude , Hughie , More Stately Mansions, A Moon for the Misbegotten (for which Quintero won the Tony Award), Anna Christie with Liv Ullmann, A Touch of the Poet with Robards, and revivals of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey with Robards and Colleen Dewhurst.
Quintero’s autobiography, If You Don’t Dance They Beat You , was published in 1974. He was inducted in the Theater Hall of Fame in 1979 and died in 1999.
ELLIS RABB
DIRECTOR
Ellis Rabb was an actor, director, and artistic leader whose work came close to achieving the dream of an American national theatre. Rabb’s early acting work included the Dauphin in King John for Arthur Lithgow and Froth in Measure for Measure directed by John Houseman. He toured with Katharine Hepburn in Much Ado and became the artistic leader of Shakespeare Under the Stars at Antioch College in 1957.
Rabb founded the Association of Producing Artists (APA) in 1959, a nonprofit repertory company in partnership with the Phoenix Theatre that produced classics and classically ambitious modern work. The company toured from Bermuda to Bucks County and was the first American repertory company to perform on Broadway since Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in the 1930s. Rabb directed the
Ellis Rabb was a visionary, inspiring and thrilling as a director and actor.
In the 1950s, when Ellis Rabb auditioned for what was then known as Carnegie Tech, his audition piece, from Richard II, exceeded the time limit by more than six minutes. They continually yelled ‘stop!’ But he carried on to the end of the speech without batting an eye. That should’ve explained something back then…
At the end of the decade, stung by reading in Tyrone Guthrie’s A Life in the Theatre that American actors could never be great without a repertory experience, he married Rosemary Harris and together with a group of friends created something they called APA. It stood for the Association of Producing Artists. By 1962, the company was named resident professional theatre at the University of Michigan, where I was a graduate student. Sitting before their inaugural production, Sheridan’s School for Scandal, I was gobsmacked and overwhelmed by the originality, the attack, the technique, the freshness, and the spirit of this remarkable young company.
Everything I’ve ever understood about the theatre, the classics, leading a company, the art of giving notes, and the ability to understand and celebrate ‘the grand gesture’ in theatre, I learned from Ellis Rabb. There was never anyone else remotely like him.
—Jack O’Brien
APA’s 1965 Broadway production of You Can’t Take It With You, highlighting the characters’ humanity in addition to their eccentricities. In 1969, he directed himself as Hamlet. Despite success and a special Tony Award, the company closed that year.
Rabb was named to the five-person directorate that reopened the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in 1980 and directed its opening production, The Philadelphia Story, as well as A Streetcar Named Desire and The Merchant of Venice starring his then wife, Rosemary Harris. He directed and appeared in The Royal Family on Broadway in 1975, winning a Tony for Best Direction of a Play, and helmed a successful revival of You Can’t Take It With You in 1983. Rabb played Robert in the original production of David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre and was a beloved professor at SUNY Purchase before his death in 1998.
LLOYD RICHARDS
DIRECTOR
Lloyd Richards was the first SDC Member honored with a “65 for the 65th” tribute. It was posted on June 29, 2024—commemorating both the day he was born, in 1919, and the day he died, in 2006. That day in 2024 was also a celebration of the co-naming of Broadway’s 47th Street as “Lloyd Richards Way.”
Richards was born in Toronto and raised in Detroit. He entered Wayne University (now Wayne State) intending to become a lawyer; his love of theatre caused him to change course and become a speech major. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1944 during World War II and earned his pilot wings at Tuskegee. After the war, he acted in two semiprofessional theatres in Detroit that he helped create, worked as a radio disc jockey, and was employed as a social worker for the Welfare Department.
He moved to New York City in 1947, and worked as an actor in radio, Off-Broadway, and eventually Broadway. In 1956, his friend and former student Sidney Poitier enlisted him to direct A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. With this production, Richards became the first Black director on Broadway.
The relationship between Richards and playwright August Wilson had an indelible impact on both of their careers—and the American theatre. In 1987, Richards became was the first Black director to win the Tony for Best Direction of a Play for Wilson’s Fences, which was developed at the National Playwrights Conference (NPC) at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center; Richards headed that program from 1968 until 1999, and he was dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre from 1979 to 1991. After selecting Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for the NPC in 1982, Richards went on to direct Fences and five other new plays by Wilson while creating a developmental process that brought those plays from the O’Neill to Yale Rep through a tour of three or four regional theatres, culminating in commercial productions on Broadway.
Richards was a Founding Member of SDC, served as SDC President from 1970 to 1980, and was a staunch advocate for artists’ rights as workers. He received SDC Foundation’s “Mr. Abbott” Award in 1996 and the Lloyd Richard New Futures Residency is named in his honor.
The great Lloyd Richards was the epitome of what integrity is, what grace is, what leadership is. In 1994 my dream to work with Lloyd became a reality when he cast me in Seven Guitars. That would prove to be a turning point in my life not only as an actor but as a human being. Not because of any accolades that the production would go on to receive but because of Lloyd Richards. He taught, nurtured, challenged, and sometimes just sat back and allowed us to simply bask in the glow of his presence. Lloyd carried himself with respect and dignity and demanded it from each of us by his example.
Thank you, Lloyd, for allowing us all to shine, for demanding that each time we stepped on a stage, every performance, was a hallmark of who we are as a people. I will never forget you saying to me, ‘The only thing at stake is you and all you stand for.’ You gave us our assignment and we continue to march forward steadily and fearlessly, firmly embracing all of the generous gifts that you placed in our hearts, our minds, and our souls.
—Ruben Santiago-Hudson
JEROME ROBBINS
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Jerome Robbins was born in 1918 in New York City. He began his career as a dancer with Senya Gluck-Sandor’s dance company and in Broadway choruses before being accepted into the newly formed Ballet Theatre (later American Ballet Theatre), where he attracted attention for his work with choreographers Mikhail Fokine, Anthony Tudor, and Agnes de Mille.
Robbins’s first dance for the Ballet Theatre, in collaboration with composer Leonard Bernstein, was Fancy Free. “Why can’t we do ballets about our own subjects,” he had asked, “meaning our life here in America?” Debuting on April 22, 1944, Fancy Free received two dozen curtain calls on opening night and was transformed into the stage musical On the Town by the end of the year.
After successes with Broadway shows like The Pajama Game, Peter Pan, and Bells Are Ringing, he served as director and/or choreographer on the original productions of The King and I, West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof, for which he won Tony Awards for both Best Direction and Best Choreography in 1965.
At the same time, Robbins remained preeminent in ballet. He left Ballet Theatre in 1949 to join George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, where he was almost immediately named associate artistic director; after Balanchine’s death in 1983, he served as co-artistic director along with Peter Martins, holding the position until 1990.
In 1989, he won his fifth Tony Award for his staging of his anthology show Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. Over the course of his prolific career, he also was made Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor and received five Donaldson Awards, two Academy Awards, an Emmy Award, and a Kennedy Center Honor. Robbins died in 1998.
In rehearsal for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, we were workshopping a song called ‘Dreams Come True’ from the musical Billion Dollar Baby. I think there were about six ladies in the company that Jerry worked with on this; myself, Charlotte d’Amboise, Debbie Gravitte, Nancy Hess, Faith Prince, and Mary Ellen Stuart. (The musical number was eventually cut from the show.)
Not one of us was giving him what he wanted, what he needed from this character. He proceeded to take over the part and act out the character with full precision, from how this person would sit, accept a flower, to holding it in her mouth.
He was magnificent, he was better than all of us put together. It was such a lesson in clarity, specificity, and fully committing to the piece.
I take that with me always and strive to pass it forward.
—JoAnn M. Hunter
RUBEN SANTIAGOHUDSON
DIRECTOR
Ruben introduced himself as a writer and actor to the theatre world and the world at large through Lackawanna Blues, a love letter to Rachel ‘Nanny’ Crosby. His writing and his acting have never fallen from that height. And to our great benefit, his history with pioneers like Douglas Turner Ward and Lloyd Richards made directing a natural legacy for Ruben. I met him when Lloyd paired us for an exercise in class at The Actors Center. We have been tight through thick and thin since then.
Ruben’s same deep dive into roles ranging from Canewell in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars to Leontes in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is evident in the voluminous research he amasses as a director into plays and playwrights. His rehearsal room and green room are wallpapered with photography, news articles, and original source material. The world of the play surrounds the cast always. Everyone, including the design and production team, is nourished by intellect, food, music, and dance in the Santiago process. And the greatest nourishment comes from his generous, loving, wise heart inherited from ‘Nanny.’ He has affection for humans and their backstories.
A play is lucky to find a home with Ruben.
—Stephen
McKinley Henderson
Recognized as one of the preeminent interpreters of the work of August Wilson, director, actor, and writer Ruben Santiago-Hudson won the Best Featured Actor Tony Award for his performance as Canewell in the Broadway production of Seven Guitars. He has directed acclaimed productions of Wilson’s works, including The Piano Lesson for Signature Theatre, for which he was honored with Obie and Lortel Awards as Best Director. His 2017 production of Jitney—the play’s belated Broadway debut—at Manhattan Theatre Club was honored with Tony, Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, and Drama League Awards. With Stephen McKinley Henderson, he served as co-artistic director of National Public Radio’s recording of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle, comprising the entire canon of Wilson’s plays.
In his one-man play Lackawanna Blues, SantiagoHudson performs more than 20 roles in his theatrical remembrance of the woman who raised him in Lackawanna, New York, in the 1950s. Miss Rachel—or
“Nanny”—ran a boarding house at 32 Wasson Avenue, caring for all who came through her doors. Originally produced by The Public Theater in 2001, the play helped reopen Broadway in 2021 when it was staged at Manhattan Theatre Club, with Santiago-Hudson performing and directing—a balm for audiences emerging from the pandemic.
Santiago-Hudson recently directed John Kani’s Kunene and the King for the Shakespeare Theatre Company, John Leguizamo’s The Other Americans at Arena Stage, and Destiny of Desire by Karen Zacarías at The Old Globe. Other directing credits include Skeleton Crew for Manhattan Theatre Club, Othello for The Public Theater, and Paradise Blue for Signature Theatre.
Santiago-Hudson received his MFA from Wayne State University, BA from Binghamton University, and honorary doctorates from Wayne State University and Buffalo State College. In 2014, he opened the Ruben Santiago-Hudson Fine Arts Learning Center in Lackawanna, NY.
PHOTO MICHAEL HULL
Working with Alan Schneider was like working with a theatrical time bomb. Rehearsals seemed to be taking place inside a volcano. Every minute was invested with extraordinary, intense energy, and the stakes were very high. You were always being tested, provoked, prodded, teased, pushed to the limit of what you could contribute. Alan’s mind worked like lightning, and he dared all of us to keep up with him.
—Susan Einhorn
ALAN SCHNEIDER
DIRECTOR
Known for his intensity and commitment to his work, Alan Schneider directed more than 100 plays in his career, including the American premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the original production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which he won a Tony Award in 1963. He was considered the primary American director of Beckett’s plays and the preeminent interpreter of Albee’s work. Other notable productions included works by Bertolt Brecht (The Caucasian Chalk Circle), Harold Pinter (The Birthday Party), and Michael Weller (Moonchildren), among many others.
Born in Kharkov, Ukraine (then Russia) in 1917, Schneider briefly acted on Broadway before beginning his teaching career at Catholic University. He worked at educational institutions throughout
his career, and his longest professional association was with Arena Stage, where he directed more than 40 productions and briefly served as artistic director. His Arena Stage production of Our Town toured to Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1973, part of the first Soviet Union tour by an American resident theatre company.
Schneider was a co-artistic director of The Acting Company and was preparing a new play in London when he died in 1984. In his New York Times obituary, which ran on the paper’s front page, Mel Gussow wrote that “perhaps more than any other director of his time, he was associated with new plays and new playwrights.” He received a posthumous Drama Desk Special Award for his work with playwrights, and his autobiography Entrances: An American Director’s Journey was published in 1986.
SUSAN H. SCHULMAN
DIRECTOR
Susan H. Schulman is a graduate of the New York City High School of Performing Arts and Hofstra University, where she performed as an actor and studied drama. In the 1960s—having been told that women could not apply to the Yale School of Drama graduate directing program—she attended Yale on a playwriting fellowship, graduating with a master’s degree. While acting at Buffalo Studio Arena Theatre, Schulman directed her first production, an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, when another director left the project.
Schulman was the resident director for the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera from 1981 to 1989 and directed several productions for Equity Library Theatre, including A Little Night Music. She directed the York Theatre Company production of Sweeney Todd in 1989. Impressed by her work, Stephen Sondheim recommended her for an upcoming Broadway revival. She remounted her York Theatre production, which was originally performed in a school gymnasium, at Circle in the Square, where she was acclaimed for the small-scale production and earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Direction of a Musical. In 1994, she returned to the York to direct a revised version of Merrily We Roll Along, which won her an Obie Award.
Schulman’s Broadway productions also include The Secret Garden (which garnered her a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Director of a Musical) as well as its highly successful national tour, a revival of The Sound of Music, and a musical version of Little Women starring Sutton Foster as Jo and Maureen McGovern as Marmee. For her direction of Violet at Playwrights Horizons, she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Best Director. Her other credits include a scaled-down production of Sunset Boulevard for a US tour starring Petula Clark, as well as many shows for the Stratford Festival.
For many years, Schulman led the MFA directing program at Penn State, educating and influencing generations of musical theatre directors.
Susan H. Schulman’s work has profoundly shaped my understanding of musical theatre and the craft of directing— not merely as entertainment but as a deeply human and transformative art form. Her direction blends emotional truth with elegant theatricality, revealing the essence of every story she tells. I consider her a friend and mentor, and watching her work—or simply hearing actors discuss her process—reminds me that kindness, precision, and vision are not mutually exclusive; instead, they are essential partners in the creation of enduring art. She has educated and inspired me to lead with heart and skill and to trust simplicity’s power. Her legacy continues to ripple across American theatre, reminding us what it means to create with care, purpose, and profound respect for collaboration.
—Steve H. Broadnax III
Passionate. Caring. Fierce and funny. A Freedom Fighter. A Peacemaker. A true Woman of the Theatre.
These are some of the first words and thoughts that come immediately to mind when I think of my dear friend and colleague Seret Scott. Despite her everyouthful appearance and mien, Seret has created great work in our theatres for many decades and over countless miles in every part of the country, as both an actress and a director. She has brought all of her many talents and pervasive spirit to the task of creating art and building communities through the magic and provocation of the theatre. She has been both gentle and fiery in that process. The results have reflected those very qualities in her work over and over again.
It occurs to me that I have never known anyone else with the name Seret. It is unique. Theatrical and beautiful. So is the woman who proudly bears that name. What a pleasure and an honor it has been to have her in our company— both on stage and off.
—Sheldon Epps
SERET SCOTT DIRECTOR
In 2020, Seret Scott received the Gordon Davidson Award, given annually by SDC Foundation to recognize a director or choreographer for lifetime achievement and distinguished service in the regional theatre. Scott has directed more than 100 professional theatre productions since the late 1980s, working with major regional theatres around the country— including a dozen productions alone at The Old Globe in San Diego as an associate artist.
Off-Broadway, Scott’s directing credits include the Young Playwrights Festival, Zooman and the Sign and Birdie Blue for Second Stage, Mujeres Y Hombres at New Victory Theatre, and Yohen for Pan Asian Rep. In 2019, her staging of Nambi E. Kelley’s adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son was produced in New York by The Acting Company; the play had its world premiere in 2014 at Chicago’s Court Theatre in a co-production with the American Blues Theater, which was followed by productions at Marin Theatre Company and Yale Rep.
Scott began directing after earning considerable acclaim for her work as an actor, including her Broadway debut, a Drama Desk-winning lead role in My Sister, My Sister, and replacing Ntozake Shange as the Lady in Orange in the original Broadway production of for colored girls… in 1976.
Seminal to Scott’s life and career was the Free Southern Theater, one of the country’s most important activist theatres, which was co-founded in 1964 by Doris A. Derby, Gilbert Moses, and John O’Neal. In 1969, Scott became a member of the company, traveling and performing throughout rural Louisiana and Mississippi, educating audiences about such issues as workers’ rights, desegregation, and voter registration, in community centers, church basements, backyards, parking lots, and cotton fields.
“The Free Southern Theater opened everything for me: arts and activism,” Scott said in a 2016 interview in SDC Journal “To this day, it is probably the single most important time of my life.” Her play, Second Line, about her experiences in the Free Southern Theater/Civil Rights Movement, was produced by Passage Theatre in New Jersey and Atlas Theatre in Washington, DC.
ANDREI SERBAN
DIRECTOR
Theater should be, as Shakespeare says, the mirror of life— and life as we know it never has unity. It’s always in conflict—from one moment to another, there’s a paradox. Nothing follows in a predictable line—everything is in contradiction. So if the main law of life is contradiction, then I don’t think there’s anything wrong in trying to mirror that in the theater.... The responsibility is that although things seem to go against each other, all in all they should do that for a very clear aim—and the aim is to create in the audience a kind of a fresh impression, a surprising shock as to the experience of that play.
—Andrei Serban
Born in Romania, Andrei Serban is a titan of the theatrical avant-garde. He studied at the Institute of Theatre and Film Arts in Bucharest before arriving in the US in 1969 under the sponsorship of Ellen Stewart. His many productions at La MaMa include plays by Shakespeare and Brecht, as well as bold adaptations of Greek tragedies. In 1974, Fragments of a Greek Trilogy , conceived and directed by Serban with a musical score by composer Elizabeth Swados, combined Medea , Electra , and The Trojan Women into a single performance incorporating indigenous and ancient languages. The Trilogy won multiple awards, including an Obie for its original run, and was performed at more than 20 international festivals; Stewart herself considered it the highest achievement in La MaMa’s history.
Serban was affiliated for more than two decades with American Repertory Theater, where his productions included Lysistrata, The Merchant of Venice, The King Stag, Three Sisters, The Miser, and Sweet Table at the Richelieu. He has also directed for Yale Repertory Theatre, the Guthrie Theater, and The Public Theater/ NYSF, including The Cherry Orchard in 1977 at Lincoln Center’s Beaumont Theater, with a company that included Irene Worth, Raul Julia, and Meryl Streep.
Serban has staged bold theatre and opera productions all over the world; his work in opera includes his American opera debut, a La Traviata that he described as “awash in blood” at Juilliard, and a Turandot with the Royal Opera House that was performed at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. His many prizes include the Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence and SDC Foundation’s 1999 “Mr. Abbott” Award.
BARTLETT SHER
DIRECTOR
Bartlett Sher’s career began in San Francisco, where he was born and raised, and where he attended his first Grateful Dead concerts as an 11-year-old— something he would go on to cite in interviews when asked about his earliest influences. Further influenced as an adult by Polish theatre theorist Tadeusz Kantor and mentored by directors including Robert Woodruff and Garland Wright, Sher has forged his own path as a director, working in theatres and opera houses around the world, staging Shakespeare and other classics, musicals, and new works.
Luminously theatrical, Sher’s productions are sleek, fluid, and lucid. His career highlights include Cymbeline, the first American production of a Shakespeare play at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon; The Light in the Piazza by Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas at Lincoln Center Theater, where he became
Bart is the defender of our craft of directing. From him I learned how all decisions begin and end with the perfect mixture of tension, rhythm, and balance. The power of storytelling—so inherently, our field—rests on the elements of craft. Working with and around Bart is a masterclass in the process of protecting this science. And paradoxically, Bart also reminds me with a blasé wave of his hand, ‘Planning is for amateurs.’ So what is ‘the work’ when working with Bart when you don’t plan but also have a delicate experiment in your hands? The work is that we say yes to the opportunity to try again.
Relentlessly chase the unknown and then when you peep a glimmer of truth, nurture it gently so it can happen eight times a week. On my worst days, Bart reminds me that as an artist (and honestly, a human being) the work will always continue. The work gives way to being curious forever. To unite and juxtapose back-to-back. To exist as the beautiful, complicated, unpredictable, and completely banal beings that we are in life and in art. How lucky are we, then, as artists, to do this work. And how lucky am I, to do it alongside my mentor and friend, Bart.
—Miranda Haymon
a resident director in 2008; South Pacific, for which he received his first Tony Award; Oslo by J.T. Rogers, which he later directed for HBO; and Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway, which became the best-selling American play in Broadway history.
Sher’s work is drawn from his belief in both the power of ideas and possibility of a spell, cast by artists telling a story to audiences who are listening deeply, as if around a campfire. His recent projects include Kiss Me, Kate at the Barbican in London, Ayad Akhtar’s new play McNeal for Lincoln Center Theater, starring Robert Downey, Jr., and two worldpremiere musicals: Millions by Adam Guettel and Bob Martin at the Alliance Theatre, and DOLLY: An Original Musical with a book by Dolly Parton and Maria S. Schlatter, in Nashville.
SUSAN STROMAN
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Susan Stroman is a five-time Tony Awardwinning director and choreographer, most recently represented on Broadway as director of the new musical Smash
After beginning her career as a dancer, Stroman won plaudits for her choreography of musicals including Crazy for You (for which she won her first Tony Award), Show Boat, and Steel Pier. She vaulted into the top ranks of director-choreographers with the original dance drama Contact, which she co-created with John Weidman, and for which she won the Tony Award for Best Choreography and was nominated for Best Direction of a Musical in 2000—the same year she was nominated in both categories for a revival of The Music Man
Stroman’s credits include directing and choreographing The Producers (winner of a record-making 12 Tony Awards, including Best Direction of a Musical and Best Choreography) and The Scottsboro Boys (on Broadway and in London’s West End, where it was honored with the Evening Standard Award for Best Musical).
In addition to working in opera, film, and television, her wide range of Off-Broadway credits includes The Last Two People on Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville, starring Mandy Patinkin and Taylor Mac, and she choreographed Madison Square Garden’s annual spectacular A Christmas Carol by Alan Menken and Lynn Ahrens for 10 years.
Recently, Stroman directed and choreographed the Broadway-bound Ahrens/Flaherty musical Little Dancer Among her many accolades are the Olivier Award, SDC Foundation’s 2001 “Mr. Abbott” Award, and a record six Astaire Awards. She was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2014.
As choreographers, we spend so many hours alone in the studio and alone in our heads, navigating our imaginations and trying to piece together stories in dance. In those hours, the weight of being alone can sometimes feel overwhelming.
I have often wondered if those hours for Susan Stroman are lonely, frustrating, or as comfortable as a polished song and dance, but what I do know is that when Stro leaves her world and enters ours, she is the sterling reminder that the true joy of making theatre is in collaboration. Her face beams as she speaks to the rehearsal pianist. She and her co-creators laugh together, constantly. Her words grace and elevate the cast with support, guidance, and respect. Making theatre isn’t easy, but somehow Stro makes it easy. Perhaps that ease is from the fact that she’s an unbelievably skilled and inventive artist. Perhaps it’s because she’s a masterful communicator. Perhaps that ease is from the fact that she just loves theatre so very much. Thinking of Stro, I tell myself to get out of my own head and get into the room with others.
Susan Stroman shows us the true celebration of making something together.
—Andy Blankenbuehler
I have never worked with anyone who understood how to structure and pace the entire rehearsal process better than Dan Sullivan. You feel you are in the hands of a particularly skilled and experienced pilot who is bringing the 747 in for a landing so smooth that the passengers never experience a lurch, sudden drop, or hasty overcorrection. Rehearsing in an atmosphere of patience, rigor, and warm professionalism frees the artists in a Dan Sullivan production to release their emotional energy on stage; and this is part of what produces his work’s extraordinary clarity and immediacy. Writers and actors who work with Dan once want to do so again and again. He makes us all better.
—David Auburn
DANIEL SULLIVAN
DIRECTOR
Born in Colorado and raised in San Francisco, Daniel Sullivan attended San Francisco State University where he directed the annual campus musical review with music by Paul Gemignani and met director Jules Irving. Irving brought him to the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop and then to the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, which was under Irving’s direction; there, he acted in plays including The Good Woman of Setzuan and A Streetcar Named Desire, and won a Drama Desk Award for his first production with the company as a director, A.R. Gurney’s Scenes from American Life.
As artistic director of Seattle Repertory Theatre from 1981 to 1997, Sullivan led the theatre to prominence, particularly as a home for the development of new work, and it received the 1990 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. At Seattle Rep, Sullivan
directed workshops and premiere productions of notable works by his frequent collaborators Herb Gardner (I’m Not Rappaport and Conversations with My Father) and Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig). Other playwrights who have enjoyed longstanding professional relationships with Sullivan include Jon Robin Baitz, David LindsayAbaire, Donald Margulies, and Charlayne Woodard.
Sullivan won a Tony Award in 2001 for directing David Auburn’s Proof and has directed more than 40 productions on Broadway, both new works and classics—more than any other living director. His many honors include the SDC Foundation “Mr. Abbott” Award in 2007, and he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2011.
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JULIE TAYMOR
DIRECTOR
Acclaimed for her ongoing exploration and innovation in integrating the use of puppets and masks in theatre, opera, and film, director and designer Julie Taymor was the first woman to win a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical, an honor she received for her production of The Lion King in 1997; she was also honored with a Tony for Costume Design, and she co-designed the masks and puppets with Michael Curry.
Taymor’s interest in theatre took root early in her life and has been united with a passion for the opportunities for creative growth afforded by immersion into the traditions of world theatre. In 1974, she received a Watson Fellowship to travel to Eastern Europe, Japan, and Indonesia, where she lived for four years and developed a mask/dance company, Teatr Loh, consisting of Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese, French, German, and American actors, musicians, dancers, and puppeteers.
Taymor made her Broadway debut at Lincoln Center with her original music-theatre work Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass (written with Elliott Goldenthal); the piece was originally produced by Music-Theatre Group. Her notable productions also include The Green Bird at New Victory Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, and on Broadway. Taymor continues to create work across creative disciplines; her films include cinematic versions of Titus, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (filmed during the run of her stage production at Theatre for a New Audience), as well as Frida and Across the Universe. She has directed many operas including Grendel, composed by Elliot Goldenthal and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (Los Angeles Opera and the Lincoln Center Festival), and The Magic Flute, which was originally produced by the Metropolitan Opera in 2004 and is now an annual tradition.
Taymor’s many awards include the 2018 SDC Foundation “Mr. Abbott” Award, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, and the first annual Dorothy B. Chandler Award in Theatre. She was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2015.
As a younger director, I had the great honor of watching Julie work and it was a formative experience for me—she isn’t just a ‘director,’ she is a shaman of the theatrical form. She mobilizes the language of the theatre in an unparalleled way—weaving together painting, sculpting, music, movement, flight, engineering, and language—to make work that can only exist in three-dimensional space and that plumbs the theatre for its transcendent potential. She modelled for me that theatre can still access the ancient while also harnessing modernity. And that poetry and entertainment can be bedfellows with integrity. If theatre is indeed ‘a place of seeing,’ Julie’s work makes us see the world anew—one is suddenly awake to its beauty, its wildness, its scope—and after a Julie Taymor piece you are left acutely aware of your aliveness. Isn’t that essentially what art is meant to do? Julie also shows us what it is to be an artist no matter the context— whether she is doing Shakespeare downtown or a musical uptown or a movie all over town—her artistic compass never waivers. Julie is a pioneer, and our field would not be the same without her.
—Tyne Rafaeli
TWYLA THARP
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Twyla Tharp is among the most innovative and boundary-pushing choreographers working today. She formed her first company in 1965, where she developed her signature style, combining elements of jazz and ballet with natural movements. Known for her exacting discipline and precise choreography, Tharp believes that dance is theatre, and her work often expands the boundaries of both disciplines.
From Tharp’s earliest works, she has crafted dances set to pop music, such as the Joffrey Ballet’s Deuce Coupe, set to songs by the Beach Boys in 1973. She has continued this exploration on the Broadway stage, bringing Twyla Tharp Dance’s The Catherine Wheel, with music by David Byrne, to the Winter Garden Theatre in 1981. In 2002, she conceived, directed, and choreographed Movin’ Out, a dance musical featuring songs by Billy Joel. Movin’ Out told a Vietnam-era coming-of-age story through Tharp’s choreography, expanding the possibilities of narrative dance in the American theatre, and ran for more than three years on Broadway. The Times They Are a-Changin’, featuring the songs of Bob Dylan, and Come Fly Away, with songs associated with Frank Sinatra, followed.
Tharp developed her interest in narrative through a screenwriting class at Columbia, and her film work includes the Miloš Forman films Hair, Ragtime, and Amadeus Tharp’s awards include a Best Choreography Tony for Movin’ Out, the National Medal of the Arts, Jerome Robbins Prize, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a 1992 MacArthur Fellowship. She has written an autobiography, Push Comes to Shove, and several books, including The Creative Habit, and she continues to lecture and choreograph. Diamond Jubilee, celebrating her 60th year as a dance maker, is currently touring.
Twyla has always been a great iconoclast. Able to successfully and seamlessly hop, skip, and jump between the concert dance stage, the Broadway stage, and cinema, she has broken new ground in all three fields as a choreographer and director. One of my favorite evenings in the theatre was opening night of The Catherine Wheel at the Winter Garden on Broadway. Her magical collaboration with David Byrne created a dance show with music that crossed over into the popular punk/ rock/avant-garde and was truly a breakthrough eye-opener for audiences. Twyla is able to communicate with her dances and tell stories so that there is no need for spoken words. From her early experimental Judson Church roots to Push Comes to Shove with a young Mikhail Baryshnikov, to the sublime Nine Sinatra Songs, Twyla has gifted us some of the world’s greatest dances to enjoy, enrich, and inspire our lives.
—Daniel Ezralow
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TOMMY TUNE
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Tommy Tune began his career as a dancer on Broadway and, in his heralded career, has received 10 Tony Awards, including the 2015 Tony for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. Standing 6’6” tall, he was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, grew up in Houston, and began taking dance classes at age five. His first big break came as a performer in Michael Bennett’s Seesaw (1973), in which he stopped the show with “It’s Not Where You Start (It’s Where You Finish),” a number that he choreographed himself as one of two associate choreographers (the other was Bob Avian) to Bennett and Grover Dale. His first Broadway directing and choreography credits were for the original production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 1978. His direction of Maury Yeston’s Nine in 1982, which won the Tony for Best Musical, garnered
Tommy Tune is a true artistic genius. He doesn’t wait to see how others view the world; he has his own unique perspective.
Tommy’s work always contains moments of creativity and imagination that we have never seen before on stage. This is why Frank Rich said, in his review of Grand Hotel, that Tommy ‘may have the most extravagant imagination in the American musical theater.’
He taught me how to rely on my imagination rather than money to solve challenges. Tommy insists that realism is for the movies and that theatre is best when visual poetry and metaphor activate the imagination and allow the audience to see what isn’t really there.
Collaborating with Tommy has been the greatest gift of my career.
—Jeff Calhoun
him his first Tony for Best Direction of a Musical. For Grand Hotel (1990) and The Will Rogers Follies (1991), he received Best Choreography and Best Direction of a Musical, the only artist to garner both awards in two successive years.
Designated a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy in 2009, Tune has also been honored with the National Medal of Arts, eight Drama Desk Awards, two Obie Awards, three Astaire Awards, and SDC Foundation’s 1991 “Mr. Abbott” Award. The annual Tommy Tune Awards (TTA) Program—developed by Theatre Under the Stars in 2002—celebrates the educational value, artistry, and community of high school musical theatre in the Greater Houston Area.
I remember when I was in college I was directing a play that I had written and the opening number in it wasn’t right. I was with the composer, trying to find a solution, and the actors were over on the side making noise around the piano. I kept saying, ‘Quiet please. We’re trying to work,’ but the actors kept on making noise. I turned around, was about ready to yell, when I realized they had solved the problem. It was one of the most brilliant lessons I had ever learned, because as a director you have a responsibility to hear and see and be open to the entire room; you have no idea where the solutions are going to come from. That to me is collaboration. It’s somebody saying, ‘Well, what about this’—and it transforms a whole moment. That’s what’s wonderful about theatre and about the community of theatre. It could be a chorus person, it could be the star; anybody can contribute an idea that will be the missing ingredient, the pinch of salt that transforms the seasoning for what you’re trying to create. And it’s thrilling when it happens, because it means everybody’s in the play together.
—George C. Wolfe
GEORGE C. WOLFE
DIRECTOR
George C. Wolfe is a director, playwright, and producer; from 1993 to 2005 he was the producer of The Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival. In 2024, he received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Wolfe’s most recent production, Gypsy—exploring the classic musical through a Black lens and starring Audra McDonald—is currently running on Broadway. Born in Frankfurt, Kentucky, his career was launched with his award-winning play The Colored Museum, a satire that address stereotypes of the Black experience in America. His other plays—all of which he also directed—include Spunk, adapted for the stage from three short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Jelly’s Last Jam, and Shuffle Along.
Wolfe directed both parts of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America on Broadway, winning the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. His other notable
productions include Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; the musical Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk; Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, or Change; and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (co-directed with Joel Grey), among other theatrical achievements. Wolfe’s direction is grounded in moment-to-moment work with actors, leading to a body of work filled with remarkable, deeply compassionate performances that live in enduring, humane theatrical worlds.
His honors include the Actors’ Equity Paul Robeson Award, NAACP Lifetime Achievement Award, Brendan Gill Prize, and Monte Cristo Award. He was awarded SDC Foundation’s “Mr. Abbott” Award in 2011. He is the chief creative officer of the Center for Civil and Human Rights, and from 2009 to 2017 served on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Wolfe was named a Library Lion by the New York Public Library and a living landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
PHOTO CHRIS BUCK
ROBERT WOODRUFF
DIRECTOR
Robert Woodruff has directed more than 60 productions of new works by living artists— including world premieres by Sam Shepard, Philip Glass, and Charles L. Mee—as well as classic texts, often radically deconstructed, by such writers as Shakespeare and Brecht.
Born in Brooklyn, Woodruff co-founded the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco in 1972. He founded the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, which remains one of the country’s leading forums for the development of new work, in 1976; that year, he directed Shepard’s The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill at the Festival, launching a collaboration that would become seminal for both artists. Woodruff went on to direct the American premiere of Curse of the Starving Class at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the world premieres of Buried Child and True West at the Magic Theatre.
Woodruff’s projects in the 1980s included The Comedy of Errors with The Flying Karamazov Brothers, which was produced by the Goodman Theatre for the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival and later broadcast on PBS, and a production of In the Belly of the Beast, which explored the US prison system, at the Mark Taper Forum. He succeeded Robert Brustein as the artistic director of American Repertory Theater in 2002 and served for five years, directing productions of Oedipus, Richard II, and In the Jungle of Cities, among others. His work in opera includes the world premieres of Philip Glass’s The Sound of a Voice and Appomattox.
“The nice part about working in the theatre is that it makes you aware of everything going on around you,” he said to Arthur Bartow. Woodruff’s many professional associations include residencies at New York Theatre Workshop and the Mark Taper Forum as well as teaching positions at Columbia and Yale School of Drama.
Robert Woodruff’s productions are renowned for their daring visual landscapes, emotional intensity, and boundary-pushing concepts. His artistic contributions to the field include revitalizing classic texts with modern sensibilities, nurturing new playwrights and work, and inspiring fellow artists with his unwavering commitment to theatrical innovation. Each production that I encountered demonstrates his radical thinking, his passion for the art of theatre, and his deep consideration for all his collaborators. Over the years, Robert taught me not to be afraid. His productions serve as a masterclass in courage, demonstrating the power of artistic risk-taking and the beauty of unconventional storytelling in theatre.
—Anne Bogart
GARLAND WRIGHT
DIRECTOR
Garland Wright was born in Midland, Texas, and carried its vibrant colors into his creative work; his first ambition was to be a painter. As a student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, he was inspired by a trip to New York where he saw Marat/ Sade and Funny Girl the same week. “They were both extremely powerful experiences,” he later recalled to Don Shewey. “So I didn’t see any difference between wanting to be Jerome Robbins and wanting to be Peter Brook.”
Wright was hired as an actor at the American Shakespeare Festival soon after graduation. There, under the tutelage of Michael Kahn, he took his first steps as a director with a student production of Julius Caesar before co-founding Off-Broadway’s Lion Theater Company with a group of young actors from the Festival. Wright’s productions for Lion included K: Impressions of The Trial, an adaptation of Kafka for which he received his first Obie Award, and Vanities, a play about Texas cheerleaders that became one of the longest-running plays OffBroadway, with more than 1,300 performances.
Wright was associate director at the Guthrie Theater under Liviu Ciulei from 1980 to 1983, served as an artistic associate for Zelda Fichandler at Arena Stage from 1985 to 1986, and became the Guthrie’s sixth artistic director in 1986. A leader in the regional theatre movement, he led the company for 10 years, establishing a resident acting company and creating the Guthrie Lab, the theatre’s second stage, to provide space for developing new work. As a director, his work ranged from musicals to Shakespeare and he had a particular obsession, as he called it, with Molière; his production of The Misanthrope in his first season as the Guthrie’s artistic director famously ended with Célimène kneeling alone in a spotlight in front of shattered doors.
Wright worked with the New Directors Program at Juilliard before his death in 1998. A biography of Wright, Painting the Stage with People by Thomas Woldt, was published in 2017.
Maybe the bravest and boldest artist I ever knew. I was lucky enough to sit at his side while he transformed classics and musicals and built personal, deeply experimental new works—all while pushing the boundaries of artistic leadership, forming a permanent repertory company at the Guthrie and teaching us all what it meant to be an inclusive, beautifully expressive artistic director.
His work was legendary, exploring Molière, Musset, Chekhov, Frank Loesser, Shakespeare, Leonard Bernstein, Euripides, Brecht, Harry Kondoleon, and Kafka, to cite only a few. And always, always, he found in every classic the most personal and human insights while fearlessly exploring movement and the music of language alongside our most profound wickedness. Every production was a journey of joy and immersion into worlds you never knew could be so beautiful and true and full of a constant experience of paradox. He had a perfect eye, seeing deep into an actor and elegantly lifting his arm like a magician sprinkling magic into unimaginable new worlds.
—Bartlett Sher
CHAY YEW
DIRECTOR
Director and playwright Chay Yew has worked extensively in Los Angeles, New York, and across the country. His production of Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band—the story of a Khmer Rouge survivor as he returns to Cambodia for the first time in 30 years, that is part play, part rock concert—has been seen at East West Players, A Contemporary Theatre, Arena Stage, Berkeley Rep, Alley Theatre, Signature Theatre Company, La Jolla Playhouse, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and South Coast Rep.
Yew’s production of Alex Lin’s Chinese Republicans will be seen at Roundabout in Winter 2026. His recent credits include Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord by Kristina Wong, Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey, and Brian Quijada’s Where Do We Sit on the Bus?—all of which have had multiple productions—and South Pacific for Goodspeed and The Light in the Piazza by Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas for Encores! at New York City Center.
Yew’s opera credits include the New York premiere of Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang’s An American Soldier (Perelman Performing Arts Center), the world premieres of Osvaldo Golijov and Hwang’s Ainadamar (Tanglewood and LA Philharmonic), and Rob Zuidam’s Rage D’Amors (Tanglewood).
Yew was artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago from 2011 to 2020, where he expanded the theatre’s commitment to new work development and launched the Directors Inclusion Initiative to support diverse emerging directors in the Chicago area. Previously, he was affiliated for 20 years with Center Theatre Group, where he started the Asian Theatre Workshop and became an associate director. In addition to numerous awards for his plays—which include Porcelain, A Language of Their Own, and adaptations of Chekhov, Ibsen, and Lorca—he is the recipient of Obie, Drama League, and Craig Noel Awards for direction.
Chay Yew has had a vast impact as a director, visionary, and mentor to countless emerging artists. But to me, he’s an artist who makes you want to be braver.
I worked with Chay for several years as associate director on his production of Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band. As he helmed the national tour, I was struck by how personal the story was for Chay, how much of himself he put on the line for every rehearsal, every performance.
Chay’s dedication to his collaborators is matched only by his devotion to audiences—especially new audiences. He has risked so much to champion new plays and marginalized voices and has seen sustained success.
And while his productions are always in deep conversation with the canon, Chay continues to work on innovation’s bleeding edge. His art rests on a foundation of craft and skill, but he thinks beyond what a play should be, creating instead what he sees, and what his collaborators and communities need, here and now.
For my part, I look forward to his next show, to being one of those in the dark, settling in for the journey Chay has prepared.
JERRY ZAKS
DIRECTOR
Jerry Zaks is a four-time Tony Award-winning director of 26 Broadway shows, including recent productions of Hello, Dolly!, Mrs. Doubtfire, and The Music Man. Born in Germany to Holocaust survivors, he changed his plan to pursue a medical degree after seeing Wonderful Town on a blind date while in college at Dartmouth. He began his career as an actor; one of his early roles was Motel in a summer production of Fiddler on the Roof with Zero Mostel, who told Zaks’s parents that their son would be “more than all right” in the theatre business.
When Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote about Zaks’s flair for directing comedy in 1988, he noted that “with Mr. Zaks one can use the word ‘comedy’ in the broadest sense.” That statement is indicative of the wide range of his work.
Jerry Zaks is synonymous with the sound of Broadway laughter. He often says: ‘Laughter is the sound of two people falling in love.’ In his productions, audiences laugh as they fall in love with the characters, laugh watching them struggle to connect, and just when they think they’re going to laugh again, they find themselves unexpectedly moved.
Jerry’s passion, intelligence, and enthusiasm are infectious. You’d do anything to get the approving flash of his smile or one of his treasured theatre stories.
He charges his actors to ‘protect the possibility of a happy ending’ and to pursue it as if their lives depended on it. He expertly crafts his companies of actors into teams, invested in passing the ball and focusing their attention on their scene partners. He’s a fantastic collaborator and thrives being in the ‘trenches’ with great theatrical racehorses.
Jerry reminds his companies that on any given night, a kid in the audience will see their show and fall in love with the theatre. Lives will be changed. And suddenly we remember that moment in our own lives.
For all of us who get to do this thing we love…to quote Jerry one last time: ‘Aren’t we lucky?’
—Stephen Edlund
A founding member of Ensemble Studio Theatre, Zaks began his career as a director with Christopher Durang’s plays, including EST’s production of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and Beyond Therapy. He went on to win Tony Awards for directing John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor, and the 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls.
Zaks has received Obie, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Awards, the SDC Foundation “Mr. Abbott” Award in 1994, and an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth. He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2013.
MARY ZIMMERMAN
DIRECTOR
Mary Zimmerman is a director and playwright who specializes in adaptations of classic works of world literature for the stage. A professor of performance studies at Northwestern—where she earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees—Zimmerman was inspired by a university assignment from Jungian psychologist Leland Roloff to “stage an image from a myth of any culture, using light in a significant way, and with no sound.” Her work often features combinations of poetry, movement, and music to create striking visual images.
An early version of Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, adapted from Ovid, began as a student production at Northwestern in 1996; it went on to premiere at Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago and run Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre in 2001 before transferring to Broadway the following year. With a set that featured a 30-foot pool, the play, Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review, “seemed to flow directly from the collective unconscious of a stunned city” and was a triumph and a comfort in the aftermath of 9/11. Zimmerman won the 2002 Tony Award for Best Direction for her work; she was honored in 1998 with a MacArthur Fellowship.
Zimmerman’s other productions, many of which have been performed in Chicago and at regional theatres around the country, include The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, The Odyssey, The Arabian Nights, Eleven Rooms of Proust, and The Secret in the Wings. She has directed operas at the Metropolitan Opera, including Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl and Matthew Aucoin, and Galileo Galilei, which she directed and co-wrote with Philip Glass and Arnold Weinstein, premiered at the Goodman. Zimmerman is an artistic associate at the Goodman, an ensemble member of Lookingglass Theatre, and has received more than 20 Joseph Jefferson Awards for her work in Chicago.
Watching Mary work is an experience like nothing else—the air around her practically crackles with her special kind of electricity. It’s instinct, insight, and inspiration all bundled together with a gorgeous, joyful spirit that cannot be ignored. Her creativity is infectious—actors, designers, producers become enlivened and emboldened. Impossible things become possible, so long as Mary’s at the helm; and the esprit de corps among those who travel with her through her stories is undeniable.
I remember co-composing for Mary’s The Steadfast Tin Soldier (alongside Andre Pluess)—a wordless piece made from
movement, music, five actors, a Danish fairytale, and Mary’s electric imagination. We came in each day with new music, and Mary would unspool her theatrical creation onto the actors right before our eyes. When we feared our work was repetitive and sought to create variations, she firmly (and wisely) instructed: simplicity. The music would mean more by doing less—and this proved to be exactly the case.
As directors, we strive to create some perfect moments on stage, where all the elements align and crystallize into indelible pieces of stagecraft. Mary’s productions are hundreds of these moments flowing end to end. Electric. It’s like nothing else.
MEMBERS OF THE SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD
1959–2025
PAST PRESIDENTS
Shepard Traube 1959–1962
Joseph Anthony 1962–1965
Agnes de Mille 1965–1967
Danny Daniels 1967–1970
Lloyd Richards 1970–1980
Charles Abbott
Jerry Adler
Saheem Ali
Richard Altman
Joseph Anthony
Julie Arenal
Alan Arkin
David Armstong
Lawrence Arrick
Rob Ashford
Christopher Ashley
Karen Azenberg
Ralph Beaumont
David Bell
Michael Bennett
Melia Bensussen
Joshua Bergasse
Herbert Berghof
Pamela Berlin
Melvin Bernhardt
Rick Besoyan
James Hammerstein 1980–1983
Marshall W. Mason 1983–1986
Gene Saks 1986–1992
Julianne Boyd 1992–1998
Ted Pappas 1998–2001
MEMBERS OF THE BOARD
Valerie Bettis
Patricia Birch
Walter Bobbie
Anne Bogart
Jo Bonney
Margaret Booker
Julianne Boyd
Jay Broad
Mark Brokaw
Perry Bruskin
George Bunt
Phillip Burton
Shelley Butler
Donald Byrd
Joe Calarco
Edward Payson Call
Larry Carpenter
Vinnette Carroll
Tisa Chang
Martin Charnin
Rachel Chavkin
Pamela Berlin 2001–2007
Karen Azenberg 2007–2013
Susan H. Schulman 2013–2016
Pam MacKinnon 2016–2019
Evan Yionoulis 2019–2025
Dorothy Chernuck
Desdemona Chiang
Hope Clarke
Harold Clurman
Dennis Cole
Edie Cowan
Hume Cronyn
Valerie CurtisNewton
Morton DaCosta
Howard da Silva
Grover Dale
Barbara Damashek
Graciela Daniele
Danny Daniels
Marc Daniels
Clinton Turner Davis
Patti D’Beck
Agnes de Mille
Curt Dempster
Reginald Denham
Dennis Dennehy
Liz Diamond
John Dillon
Marcia Milgrom Dodge
Vincent Donehue
Kevin Dowling
Byron Easley
Susan Einhorn
Justin Emeka
Sheldon Epps
Jean Erdman
André Ernotte
Geraldine Fitzgerald
Lydia Fort
Bob Fosse
Richard France
Aaron Frankel
Gene Frankel
Gerald Freedman
Michael John Garcés
Leah C. Gardiner
Christopher Gattelli
Liza Gennaro
Ella Gerber
Gino Giglio
Tony Giordano
Peter Glazer
John Going
Wendy C. Goldberg
Marvin Gordon
Bick Goss
Ulu Grosbard
Thomas Gruenewald
Gerald Gutierrez
Joseph Haj
Richard Hamburger
James Hammerstein
Joseph Hardy
Linda Hartzell
Judith Haskell
Robert Herget
John Hirsch
Jack Hofsiss
Steven Hoggett
David Holdgrive
Hanya Holm
John Houseman
Doug Hughes
JoAnn M. Hunter
Mary Hunter
Jules Irving
Alan Johnson
Robert D. Kalfin
Garson Kanin
Anne Kauffman
Moisés Kaufman
Elia Kazan
Barnet Kellman
Dan Knechtges
Danya Krupska
Mark Lamos
Sue Lawless
Paul Lazarus
Zoya Leporska
Roberta Levitow
Irene Lewis
Robert Lewis
Robert Livingston
Rick Lombardo
Pam MacKinnon
Richard Maltby, Jr.
Emily Mann
Joe Mantello
David Marshall
Kathleen Marshall
William Martin
Marshall W. Mason
Vivian Matalon
Billy Matthews
Matt Mattox
Michael Mayer
Des McAnuff
Meredith McDonough
Dianne McIntyre
Donald McKayle
Ethan McSweeny
D. Lynn Meyers
Jerry Mitchell
Gene Montanino
Tom Moore
Jerry Morris
Amy Morton
Gilbert Moses
Gregory Mosher
Robert Moss
Gloria Muzio
Timothy Near
Mike Nichols
Robert O’Hara
Charles Olsen
John O’Shaughnessy
Sharon Ott
Ted Pappas
Annie-B Parson
Austin Pendleton
Arthur Penn
Shauneille Perry
Lisa Peterson
Jim Petosa
David Petrarca
Daniel Petrie
Sam Pinkleton
Lisa Portes
Lonny Price
Harold Prince
José Quintero
John Rando
Norman René
Elmer Rice
Lloyd Richards
Jon Lawrence Rivera
Mary B. Robinson
Steven Robman
Frederick Rolf
Stephen Rothman
WORKS CITED
Donald Saddler
Gene Saks
Amy Saltz
Ruben SantiagoHudson
Margo Sappington
George Schafer
Alan Schneider
Susan H. Schulman
Ellenore Scott
Oz Scott
Seret Scott
Mel Shapiro
Bartlett Sher
Edwin Sherin
Buff Shurr
Paul Shyre
Joan Micklin Silver
Leigh Silverman
Anna Sokolow
Katie Spelman
Casey Stangl
Tony Stevens
John Stix
Ezra Stone
Ted Story
Susan Stroman
Seema Sueko
Daniel Sullivan
Jack Sydow
Helen Tamiris
Tony Tanner
Lynne Taylor-Corbett
Lee Theodore
Tazewell Thompson
John Tillinger
Eric Ting
Maria Torres
Shepard Traube
Porter Van Zandt
Lucia Victor
David Warren
Janet Watson
Carl Weber
Paul Weidner
Arthur Williams
Billy Wilson
Michael Wilson
Walt Witcover
George C. Wolfe
Tamilla Woodard
Garland Wright
Annie Yee
Chay Yew
Evan Yionoulis
Jerry Zaks
The quote from Shepard Traube on p. 9 is from his book, So You Want to Go Into the Theatre? (1936; reprinted Converpage, 2009).
Harold Prince’s quote about George Abbott on p. 13 and the quote from George C. Wolfe on p. 72 are from The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Richard A. Davidson (Rutgers University Press, 2005).
The quote from Zelda Fichandler on p. 32 is from the essay “To the Faculty and Students,” published in The Long Revolution, edited by Todd London (TCG, 2024).
The quote from Tyrone Guthrie on p. 37 is from his book, A Life in the Theatre (Readers Union/Hamish Hamilton, 1961).
The quote from Mike Nichols on p. 53 is from an interview with Newsweek, published November 14, 1966.
The quote from José Quintero on p. 57 is from a letter to actor Florence Eldridge prior to the start of rehearsals for Long Day’s Journey Into Night
The quote from Andrei Serban on p. 65 is from Theater Voices: Conversations on the Stage by Steve Capra (Scarecrow Press, 2004).
