Rebecca Taichman is an American theatre director. In 2017, she received the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for Indecent . [1]
Taichman attended McGill University, Montreal, [2] and graduated from the Yale School of Drama. [3] She was the associate artistic director at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, D.C. for two years. [4] She is an affiliated artist at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in D.C, where she has directed Taming of the Shrew , Twelfth Night (2008), [5] The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline (2011). The Washington Post reviewer wrote of her work: "Taichman has a proven knack for framing difficult plays in tantalizing ways. Her saucy, la dolce vita The Taming of the Shrew in 2007 remains one of the smartest nights of Shakespeare the company has offered." [6] [2]
Playbill noted that Taichman cannot be put in a category: "...her career is marked by an eclectic range of works—from new plays to outdoor operas. Taichman said that 'The end goal of it all...is to open people’s hearts.' ” [7]
She has directed several Shakespeare plays at the McCarter Theatre, Princeton. New Jersey, including The Winter’s Tale in 2013. She said: "With Shakespeare, there's obviously no playwright telling me what he wants to see or how he wants to see it. In a sense, it's extremely liberating, if also lonely. When directing Shakespeare, I'm looking for my deepest, most authentic possible connection to the play and trusting that way in." [8]
Sources: Internet Off-Broadway Database; [9] Internet Broadway Database [10]
Paula Vogel is an American playwright who received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play How I Learned to Drive. A longtime teacher, Vogel spent the bulk of her academic career – from 1984 to 2008 – at Brown University, where she served as Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor in Creative Writing, oversaw its playwriting program, and helped found the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium. From 2008 to 2012, Vogel was Eugene O'Neill Professor of Playwriting and department chair at the Yale School of Drama, as well as playwright in residence at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
Tonya Pinkins is an American actress and filmmaker. Her award-winning debut feature film RED PILL was an official selection at the 2021 Pan African Film Festival, won the Best Black Lives Matter Feature and Best First Feature at The Mykonos International Film Festival, Best First Feature at the Luléa Film Festival, and is nominated for awards in numerous festivals around the globe. Her web-series The RED PILLING of AMERICA can be heard on her podcast "You Can't Say That!" at BPN.fm/ycst
Nicky Silver is an American playwright. Formerly of Philadelphia, he resides in London. Many of his plays have been produced off-Broadway, and also at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.
Amy Freed is an American playwright. Her play Freedomland was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Sarah Ruhl is an American playwright, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Eurydice (2003), The Clean House (2004), and In the Next Room (2009). She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career. Two of her plays have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and she received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Play. In 2020, she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name. Eurydice was nominated for Best Opera Recording at the 2023 Grammy Awards.
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often focuses on the experience of working-class people, particularly working-class people who are Black. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: in 2009 for her play Ruined, and in 2017 for her play Sweat. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times.
The Lucille Lortel Awards recognize excellence in New York Off-Broadway theatre. The Awards are named for Lucille Lortel, an actress and theater producer, and have been awarded since 1986. They are produced by the League of Off-Broadway Theatres and Producers by special arrangement with the Lucille Lortel Foundation, with additional support from the Theatre Development Fund.
Rajiv Joseph is an American playwright. He was named a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, and he won an Obie Award for Best New American Play for his play Describe the Night.
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company is a non-profit theatre company located at 641 D Street NW in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1980, it produces new plays which it believes to be edgy, challenging, and thought-provoking. Performances are in a 265-seat courtyard-style theater.
WP Theater is a not-for-profit Off-Broadway theater based in New York City. It is the nation’s oldest and largest theater company dedicated to developing, producing and promoting the work of female-identified theater artists at every stage in their careers. Currently, Lisa McNulty serves as the Producing Artistic Director and Michael Sag serves as the Managing Director.
David Adjmi is an American playwright. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the inaugural Steinberg Playwright Award, a Bush Artists Fellowship, and the Kesselring Prize for Drama.
Maria Teresa Dizzia is an American actress. Dizzia was nominated for the 2010 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play for her performance in In the Next Room .
Jared Mezzocchi is an American theatre projection designer and director.
Stephen Karam is an American playwright, screenwriter and director. His plays Sons of the Prophet, a comedy-drama about a Lebanese-American family, and The Humans were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2012 and 2016, respectively. The Humans won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play, and Karam wrote and directed a film adaptation of the play, released in 2021.
Anne Kauffman is an American director known primarily for her work on new plays, mainly in the New York area. She is a founding member of the theater group the Civilians.
Sam Gold is an American theater director and actor. He has directed both musicals and plays, on Broadway and Off-Broadway. He won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for Fun Home.
Kirsten Greenidge is an American playwright. Her plays are known for their realistic language and focus on social issues such as the intersectionality of race, gender, and class. Her sister is the historian Kerri Greenidge.
Indecent is a 2015 play by Paula Vogel. It recounts the controversy surrounding the play God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch, which was produced on Broadway in 1923, and for which the producer and cast were arrested and convicted on the grounds of obscenity.
Jocelyn Bioh is a Ghanaian-American writer, playwright and actor. She graduated from Ohio State University with a BA in English and Theater and got her master's degree in Playwriting from Columbia University. Jocelyn's Broadway credits include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. She has performed in regional and off-Broadway productions of An Octoroon, Bootycandy and For Colored Girls. She has written many of her own plays that have been produced in national and collegiate theaters. Some of her more well-known works include Nollywood Dreams and School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play. She is a playwright with Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) and Atlantic Theater Company, is a resident playwright at Lincoln Center and is a 2017-18 Tow Playwright-in-Residence with MCC.
Maria Manuela Goyanes is a first-generation Latina theatre maker, chiefly known for her work at The Public Theatre in New York City, as well as her September 2018 appointment as the artistic director of Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington D.C.