Dr. Londré is a theatre historian specializing in American, French, and Russian theatre plus Shakespeare. She is Honorary Co-Founder of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival. In 2006 she received the Inspirational UMKC Faculty award. In 1998 she received a University of Montana Distinguished Alumna Award, having earned her B.A. in French there. She earned her M.A. at the University of Washington, and her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. In 1999, she was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and has served twice as secretary of the board and a 2012-14 term as Dean of the College. In 2001, she was elected to the National Theatre Conference. That year she also received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s national award for 2001 as Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education. Ten years later, she received the 2011 Betty Jean Jones Award for Outstanding Teacher of American Theatre and Drama. She was the founding secretary of the Shakespeare Theatre Association of America, and has served as president of the American Theatre and Drama Society. Dr. Londré has held visiting professorships at Hosei University in Tokyo and at Marquette University in Milwaukee. She has lectured internationally, including Beijing, Nanjing, Tokyo, Osaka, Venice, Rouen, Caen, Paris (Sorbonne), Brussels, Moscow, and a lecture tour of Hungary. For 22 years (1978-2000), she was dramaturg for Missouri Repertory Theatre. Of her fourteen books, her favorite is the twelfth one, The Enchanted Years of the Stage: Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theatre, 1870-1930, which won the George Freedley Memorial Book Award presented by the Theatre Library Association in 2008. Photo: Manon Halliburton, Natural Light Photography.
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Dr. Gil Lazier is Dean Emeritus of the Florida State University School of Theatre, Former Associate Artistic Director of the Asolo Rep, and Director Emeritus of the FSU/Asolo MFA Conservatory. Past President of ATHE, Past Vice President of ITI/US, Education Committee of ITI Worldwide, Commissioner for NAST, Board of Trustees for NTC, Past Dean of the College of Fellows of the American Theater. Over 30 refereed research articles. Directed over 80 productions in the U. S. and abroad, served as Artistic Director of the Banyan Theater and currently directs for the FUSION THEATER COMPANY in Albuquerque. Acted on stage, in films and television.
R. Keith Michael’s professional career began as an actor with the Barter Theatre in Virginia. Having received an undergraduate degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, he received his M.F.A from the University of Iowa and Ph.D. from the University of Bristol, England. In 1971 he was asked to serve as the first Chair of the newly created Department of Theatre and Drama at Indiana University. He continued on as Chair and Artistic Director of the Department until his retirement in 1996.
During the course of his career Dr. Michael has produced over 400 plays and served as an office of numerous professional organizations including the presidency of NAST. In 1997 Dr. Michael was the recipient of the Indiana Governor’s Arts Award; in 1999 he was honored by being made a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre; and in 2002 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Indiana University. Dan Carter holds theatre degrees from Illinois State and Florida State universities, studied at the American Conservatory Theatre, apprenticed at the Alley Theatre, and made his professional debut in Theatre Company of Boston’s Richard III, starring Al Pacino. He served as President of the National Association of Schools of Theatre and the National Theatre Conference and as Dean of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. He is a recipient of the Society of American Fight Directors’ Patrick Crean Award. For twenty-two years he served as Professor and Director of the Penn State School of Theatre and Artistic Director of Pennsylvania Centre Stage. Previously, he was Associate Dean of the School of Theatre at Florida State and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Illinois State and Producing Director of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. He has been a free-lance theatre artist during this time, working in New York and throughout the country as actor, director, fight director, and stage manager. He is currently focused on dramatic writing.
CHARLES MOREY is a director, playwright and former artistic director with more than fifty years experience in the professional theatre and extensive credits from coast to coast.
PLAYWRIGHT... He is the author of twelve produced plays. FIGARO was commissioned and produced Off-Broadway by the Pearl Theatre Company in 2012 and was named a NY Times “Critic’s Pick.” THE GRANITE STATE was premiered by the Peterborough Players in the summer of 2014. In addition he has written LAUGHING STOCK (which has received close to two hundred productions around the world) DUMAS’ CAMILLE, THE YELLOW LEAF, THE LADIES MAN (an adaptation from Feydeau with over 70 productions to date) as well as adaptations of the 19th century classic novels, THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, DRACULA and THE THREE MUSKETEERS. His plays have been produced at numerous professional theatres including: Denver Center Theatre Company, Pioneer Theatre Company, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Geva Theatre Center, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare and Company, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Asolo Theatre Company, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, A Noise Within, Meadow Brook Theatre, PCPA Theaterfest, L.A.Theatreworks, Peterborough Players, Connecticut Repertory Theatre, Elm Shakespeare Co., Centenary Stage Co., Creede Rep., Arvada Center, Shadowland Theatre, Sierra Rep., Theatre in the Square, Cortland Rep., Tamworth Barnstormers and many more as well as hundreds of amateur, university and international productions as far afield as New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Austria, Singapore, Argentina and Israel as well as Ireland, the U.K. and Canada. LAUGHING STOCK has been playing continuously since 2013 in the repertory of the Arcadia Theatre in Moscow in Russian translation; since 2014 in the repertory of the Variant Drama Theatre in Pervouralsk; since May 2015 in the repertory of the Mirinisky Theatre, Yakutia, since December 2015 in the repertory of the Ostrovsky Theatre in Seversk, joined the repertoire of the Studio Theatre in Omsk in November 2016, the Buratino Theatre in Magnitogorsk in 2019 and the Drama Theatre of Bratsk in 2020. THE THIRD SKY - as yet unproduced in English - received its world premiere at the Vilnius Chamber Theatre in Lithuanian translation and will receive its premiere in Russian translation at the Wheel Theatre in Tolyatti, Russia in 2020. FIGARO was a N.Y. Times "Critic's Pick" and a L.A. Times "Critic's Choice" in its west coast premiere at A Noise Within. LAUGHING STOCK was nominated for the American Theatre Critic's Association Steinberg Award and won the "Best New Play" citation from the New Hampshire Theatre Association and the “Readers Choice” Award for Best Play from the Sarasota Herald Tribune. In it's 2013 revival by the Peterborough Players, it won six New Hampshire Theatre Association Awards including "Best Play." DUMAS' CAMILLE received the City Weekly "Slammy" award for Best New Play in Utah. THE LADIES MAN received the "Readers' Choice Ovation Award" from the Denver Post for Best Comedy. THE GRANITE STATE was nominated as Best New Play by the New Hampshire Theatre Awards in 2014. His, as yet un-produced play, THE SALAMANDER'S TALE, was a finalist for the Woodward/Newman Award for Drama. DUMAS' CAMILLE was a finalist for the 2003 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and THE THIRD SKY was a semi-finalist in 2016. L.A Theatreworks presented a national tour of their “LIve Radio Theatre” production of DRACULA in 2015-2016 and the original 2011 recording is re-played regularly every October on public radio stations around the U.S. He is published by both Dramatists Play Service (“Laughing Stock”, “Figaro” “The Ladies Man”) and Playscripts (“The Count of Monte Cristo”, “The Three Musketeers”.) His current projects include a commission to write the Libretto for a Music-Theatre piece about Walter Reuther and the American Labor Movement with composer Greg Pliska, tentatively titled "A Most Dangerous Man." He is also working on the first draft of a new play, "Monadnock", the third of the "New Hampshire Plays" including "The Granite State" and "The Third Sky." DIRECTOR... During his tenure as Artistic Director of the Pioneer Theatre Company from 1984 to 2012 he directed more than ninety productions including world premieres of FIND AND SIGN by Wendy MacLeod, Bess Wohl's TOUCH(ED) and IN as well as first regional theatre productions of LES MISÉRABLES, THE PRODUCERS, and THE VERTICAL HOUR; in addition to THE TEMPEST, HAMLET, CHICAGO, METAMORPHOSES, JULIUS CAESAR, HUMBLE BOY, JAMES JOYCE'S THE DEAD, CYRANO DE BERGERAC, THE REAL THING among many others. While serving as Artistic Director of the Peterborough Players from 1977 to 1988, he directed some thirty five productions including significant world premieres by Percy Granger (EMINENT DOMAIN and UNHEARD SONGS) and Poet Laureate of the United States Donald Hall’s RAGGED MOUNTAIN ELEGIES. In addition he directed a wide variety of material ranging from Shaw, Synge, Williams, Wilder, Saroyan, Coward and Feydeau to O’Neill and Ben Jonson. As a free-lancer he has directed in New York for the Ark Theatre Company and the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Regionally he has directed for the Contemporary American Theatre Festival (the world premiere of Bess Wohl's "Barcelona"), Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Geva Theatre Center, Asolo Theatre Company, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, MeadowBrook Theatre, the American Stage Festival, PCPA Theatrefest, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Florida Repertory Theatre, Centenary Stage Company and the Hilberry Repertory Theatre as well as having returned frequently to both the Peterborough Players and the Pioneer Theatre Company as a guest director. ARTISTIC DIRECTOR... As artistic director from 1984 to 2012 he led the Pioneer Theatre Company in conceptualizing and implementing a new mission that fully professionalized the theatre, moving PTC from the University Resident Theatre Association contract to the League of Resident Theatres Contract and an increase in AEA contracts from an average of eighteen equity contracts per season to an average of ninety. He refocused the mission on the classics, the great plays of the contemporary theatre and produced fourteen world premieres. In close collaboration with managing director Chris Lino, he increased the theatre's annual budget five-fold to over five million dollars, while retiring a long term debt of one point five million and building a four million dollar endowment. He collaborated on two major capital campaigns during his tenure, the first significantly expanded the facilities, building new scene and costume shops, rehearsal halls and green room, sound studio and extensive new office space while renovating the existing facilities from top to bottom. The second campaign raised funds to purchase and gut renovate a nearby apartment building into a twenty unit guest artist residence. The Meldrum House (named for its principal donors, Pete and Cathie Meldrum) is one of the finest housing facilities for guest artists in the regional theatre world. In 2007, PTC was chosen to be the first American regional theatre to produce "Les Miserables" which he directed for a sold out run of ten weeks. As Artistic Director of New Hampshire's Peterborough Players (1977 to 1988) he more than tripled the size of the Equity Company and production staff, increased the budget five-fold and more than doubled seasonal attendance. He inaugurated a highly successful New Plays Program which ultimately sent one play to Broadway and five to Off-Broadway production. During his tenure the theatre launched its first ever capital campaign resulting in major new construction, renovation and expansion of existing facilities and the creation of the theatre's first endowment while undergoing a major transition from family management to institutional structure. In June of 2012 he was named Artistic Director Emeritus of Pioneer Theatre Company. He currently splits his time between free-lance directing and writing projects. He began his career as an actor working with many New York and regional theatres such as the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Ensemble Studio Theatre, the New Dramatists, Ark Theatre Company, The Folger, Syracuse Stage, Peterborough Players, Theatre by the Sea and many others. He has served as both a panelist and on-site evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts and on the Board of Trustees of the National Theatre Conference. He is a member of SDC, the Dramatists Guild, AEA and SAG-AFTRA (honorable withdrawal). He received a BA from Dartmouth College and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony. http://www.charlesmorey.com/ Linda Burson, American Theatre director, playwright. Beloit College scholar, 1984, humanities scholar Arrowhead Library. Sys., Beloit, 1986; State Arts communications of Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee grantee, 1968-1971, 78-79, 81; named Outstanding Working Woman Sigma Delta Tau, 1976, Achievement in Arts, Tennessee, 1974.
Milly Barranger is an author, educator, and producer and lives in New York City where she writes books about women and the modern American theater.
She is Dean Emerita of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. She has served on boards of the Paul Green Foundation, the National Theatre Conference, The College of Fellows of the American Theatre, and the League of Professional Theatre Women. She has also served as Past President of the National Theatre Conference and the American Theatre Association. She holds the title of Distinguished Professor Emerita of Dramatic Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she served concurrently as chairwoman of the Department of Dramatic Art and producing director of PlayMakers Repertory Company, a member of the League of Resident Theatres. She received the 2009 Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education and the New England Theatre Conference 2010 Special Award for Outstanding Achievement in the American Theatre. Recent books include Audrey Wood and the Playwrights; A Gambler's Instinct: The Story of Broadway Producer Cheryl Crawford ; Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater; Unfriendly Witnesses: Gender, Theater, and Film in the McCarthy Era; Theatre: A Way of Seeing (seven editions); and Understanding Plays (three editions). She is coeditor of The Group Theatre: Passion, Politics, and Performance in the Depression Era by Helen Krich Chinoy; and coeditor of Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary; and she has compiled reference works on Margaret Webster and Jessica Tandy. She is at work on a book entitled The Group Theatre's Women: A Cautionary Tale. She has lectured at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts on Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford and on stage director Margaret Webster and the 1943 Broadway production of Othello with Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and José Ferrer. More at: http://www.millybarranger.com/
What have you seen as positive change in the theatre in your lifetime? Are there negatives? The positive change is that the quality of our work has vastly improved in my lifetime. The negative is that the popularity of the American Outdoor Historical Drama is waning. 3. What is the best piece of advice you were ever given? From Mark Sumner, the outgoing director of the Institute of Outdoor Drama when I was following him in the job: “Don’t get stuck in this chair. Go out and see what’s being done across the country.” Did or didn't you follow it? Indeed, I did follow it for my 18 years at the IOD, and I would visit as many as 25 outdoor theatres (history plays, Shakespeare festivals and religious dramas in 38 states), each summer season. What were the consequences? I had a reading of the pulse of the outdoor theatre genre in the U.S., and could address trends and concerns that best served the movement.
Margot Harley co-founded The Acting Company with the late John Houseman in 1972. She co-produced the Broadway productions of The Robber Bridegroom and The Curse of an Aching Heart with Faye Dunaway. She produced John Houseman's celebrated revival of Marc Blitzstein's musical play The Cradle Will Rock in New York and at the Old Vic Theatre in London. Off-Broadway, she produced Ten by Tennessee, a two evening retrospective of Tennessee Williams' one-act plays directed by Michael Kahn at The Lucille Lortel Theater, and the New York premiere of Eric Overmyer's On the Verge, directed by Garland Wright at The John Houseman Theater. She was Administrator of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School for its first twelve years, from 1968 to 1980. Prior to that she appeared in numerous Broadway and off-Broadway productions as an actress and dancer. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she attended LAMDA on a Fulbright Scholarship.
Influences and Changes by D.L. Rosenberg - 2/19/17 As a teenager growing up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan in the mid-nineteen fifties, I was taken by my cousin Ann, a concert pianist, to what was to make an indelible impression on my imagination. I did not understand it at the time but Brecht’s THREE PENNY OPERA at the Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village introduced me to a wondrous world of whores, thieves and corrupt politicians who certainly were not common characters on the polite drawing room stages of those days.
Marc Blitzstein’s text, Kurt Weiil’s music, Brecht, and what I later understood to be a magnificent performance by a woman named Lotte Lenya, in a small theatre with a shower curtain backdrop, simply became the most exciting thing I had ever seen. While I had been thrilled by the original production of OKLAHOMA on Broadway, this was “something else.” The eight-piece German ratskeller band, the thrilling words and music in the tongue-in-cheek satire and the messages sung directly to the audience by actors who stepped out of character showed me a new world of theatre. “What keeps a man alive? He lives on others.”
I thought it would be fitting to begin with the protean and erstwhile peripatetic Ted Herstand, who started the ball rolling while the subway rolled uptown. - David Fuller, NTC Vice President
My first experience with Miss Mullin was at the age of nine or ten when I became a student in her Saturday classes, one class for the younger children, one class for the older. I started in the early class, for one dollar per year, which my parents told me they could afford. The fee was obviously not for profit, but rather to make it seem more important to the kids. As I later figured out, this was the perfect class for developing some of the child and juvenile actors used in the theatre company's major productions. Soon I learned that it also could provide training for a life in the theatre in every other aspect of theatre employment and, of course, for the development for future audience members.
The genesis of the Living Legacies series began during a conversation I had on the Uptown No. 2 Train (7th Ave. Express) during the 2015 NTC Conference, when I shared the trip to Harlem with long-time member Ted Herstand. We talked about one thing and another, but got around to personal history and Ted told me some interesting tales of his time as a child actor at the Cleveland Playhouse in the 40's, as well as working in radio and early TV. With the passing this spring of my father, I got to thinking about lives lived and how often stories remain untold. Fortunately for my family my Dad wrote some of his stories down.
But what of our NTC family? Are we preserving the past for the future? Our members all have lived and are living wonderful, full lives, specifically in the theatre and in show business generally. Certainly, many have written books, but some books don't get written simply because the potential writer is too busy living! Living Legacies is an attempt to bridge that gap. - David Fuller, NTC Vice President |
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