Endgame

Theater director and writer JoAnne Akalaitis (The Birthday Party) is the winner of five Obie Awards for direction (and sustained achievement) and founder of the critically acclaimed Mabou Mines in New York. In addition to the American Repertory Theater — where she directed Endgame and The Balcony — she has staged works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Schiller, Beckett, Genet, Williams, Philip Glass, Janacek, and her own work at Lincoln Center Theater, New York City Opera, Goodman Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Court Theatre, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and the Guthrie Theater. She is the former artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and was artist-in-residence at the Court Theatre. Ms. Akalaitis was the Andrew Mellon Co-chair of the Directing Program at Juilliard School, and is currently the Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Flint Professor of Theater at Bard College. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants, Edwin Booth Award, Rosamund Gilder Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre, and Pew Charitable Trusts National Theatre Artist Residency Program grant.

ART: Oedipus, Endgame, Jacques and his Master, Measure for Measure. Broadway credits include Dirty Blonde, Falsettos, Our Town, Fool Moon, Timon of Athens, The Government Inspector, The Molière Comedies, and John Leguizamo's Freak. Off-Broadway credits include the original productions of March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, 36 Views (Lucille Lortel Award), Bill Irwin’s The Regard of Flight, Scapin, and Texts for Nothing (Obie Award), Franz Xaver Kroetz's Through the Leaves (Obie Award), Edward Bond's Saved (Obie Award),  Tarell McCraney’s The Brothers Size, and Lemon Andersen’s County of Kings.  He has designed for all the major regional theaters including a ten-year association with Garland Wright and the Guthrie Theater.  His designs for opera and dance include Philip Glass & Susan Marshall's adaptation of Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles (BAM) and Susan Marshall’s Sleeping Beauty (Bessie Award). A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he has taught at New York University, Princeton University, the School of Visual Arts in New York City and Fordham University and has served on the boards of Theatre Communications Group and Theatre For a New Audience.

The Sound of a Voice (Composer). Renowned for music for opera, dance, theater, chamber ensemble, symphonic works, and film. A.R.T.: commission and world premieres of The Juniper Tree (co-composed with Robert Moran), The Fall of the House of Usher, and Orphée; presentation of 1000 Airplanes on the Roof (with libretto by David Henry Hwang and designs by Jerome Sirlin). His 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, a five-hour epic created by Glass and Robert Wilson, is now seen as a landmark in twentieth-century music-theater. Other operas: Galileo Galilei, (directed by Mary Zimmerman, commissioned by the Goodman Theatre in Chicago); The Voyage (with libretto by David Henry Hwang, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera); Akhhnaten; the CIVIL warS (Rome Section); The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 and Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (librettos by Doris Lessing and based on her novels); Hydrogen Jukebox (libretto by Allen Ginsberg and based on his poetry); In the Penal Colony (based on the short story by Franz Kafka); presented in venues such as Houston Grand Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Boston Lyric Opera, San Francisco Opera, Seattle Opera, the English National Opera, the Music Theater of Amsterdam, and the Stuttgart Opera. Orchestral works: Symphony No. 5 (commissioned by the Salzburg Festival, premiering in 1999 with subsequent performances worldwide); Symphony No. 2, Symphony No. 3, Symphony No. 6 (Plutonian Ode, with text by Allen Ginsberg, commissioned by Carnegie Hall to commemorate Philip Glass's sixty-fifth birthday); Low Symphony and Heroes Symphony (both based on the music of David Bowie and Brian Eno). Films: The Hours (nominated for an Academy Award and winner of the British Academy of Film and Television Association Award), Martin Scorsese's Kundun (nominated for an Oscar), The Truman Show (Golden Globe award), Godfrey Reggio's trilogy Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi; Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time, and Paul Schrader's Mishima, among others.