True West

Sam Shepard's When the World Was Green (A Chef's Fable), co-written with Joseph Chaikin, appeared in last season's American Repertory Theater New Stages series, and will appear on tour at the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia March 28-31 and in Singapore June 9-11. Mr. Shepard won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child.  He and is also the author of the Obie-award-winning plays Chicago, Icarus Mother, Red Cross, Forsenic and the Navigators, Melodrama Play, The Tooth of Crime, Action, Curse of the Starving Class, and Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind (New York Drama Critics Circle Award), and the recent States of Shock, which premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival and moved to the Royal Court theatre in London. Mr. Shepard wrote the screenplays for Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, Altman's Fool for Love, and Wender's Paris, Texas. As an actor, he appeared in Days of Heaven, Resurrection, Raggedy Man, The Right Stuff, Frances, Country, and Fool for Love. In 1986, Mr. Shepard was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where in 1992, he was awarded its Gold Medal for Drama.

On Broadway, he directed Richard III with Al Pacino, and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, for which Mr. Pacino won the Tony Award for Best Actor. Regional theatres include the Guthrie Theatre, Alley Theatre, Paper Mill Playhouse, Berkeley Rep, Arizona Theatre Company, Pittsburgh Playhouse, and the Charles de Rochefort Theatre in Paris, where he directed the French premiere of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story.

As the artistic director of the Theatre Company of Boston (TCB) from 1963 to 75, Mr. Wheeler directed over eighty productions.  Among these were ten by Pinter, seven by Brecht, five by Albee, nine by Beckett, two by O'Neill, and numerous works by new writers such as Ed Bullins, Jeffrey Bush, John Hawkes, Adrienne Kennedy, and Sam Shepard.  Through these productions and others, he helped to launch the careers of then-unknown actors including Paul Benedict, Larry Bryggman, John Cazale, Stockard Channing, Blythe Danner, Robert DeNiro, Robert Duvall, Hector Elizondo, Spalding Gray, Paul Guilfoyle, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Jon Voight, Ralph Waite, and James Woods. His film The Local Stigmatic (with Mr. Pacino)—adapted from the play by Heathcote Williams—was presented at the Montreal Film Festival and screened at the Whitney Museum and the MOMA. It will be released in 2006.

Mr. Wheeler's honors include the Elliot Norton Award for his work on Misalliance, the St. Botolph Club Foundation's Award for Distinction in the Performing Arts, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Award. He has taught and directed at Harvard University, Boston University, MIT, Brandeis, Barnard, Colorado College, and Circle-in-the-Square. He has directed student productions at U.N.C. Chapel Hill, U.C. Irvine and Long Beach, and Évora, Portugal. After receiving his masters at Harvard, Mr. Wheeler trained with José Quintero in New York during the great "O'Neill years" of the 1950's.

Cardenio (Lighting Design). A.R.T.: Resident lighting designer, 1981–1984: Ghosts (directed by Robert Brustein), Orlando (directed by Peter Sellars), Marsha Norman's 'Night, Mother and Traveler in the Dark, Jules Fieffer's Grownups, Sganarelle (directed by Andrei Serban), the first Hasty Pudding season (True West and Robert Auletta's Rundown), Waiting for Godot (directed by Andrei Belgrader), The Boys from Syracuse, The Marriage of Figaro, The Seven Deadly Sins (all directed by Alvin Epstein). Recent seasons: A Midsummer Night's Dream (directed by Martha Clarke), The Children of Herakles (directed by Peter Sellars), The Seagull (directed by Ron Daniels), Once in a Lifetime (directed by Anne Bogart), Major Barbara, Larry Gelbart's Mastergate. Recent: New Works Festival (ten new pieces for San Francisco Ballet), Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cellphone (Steppenwolf Theatre Company/Chicago), King Arthur (directed and choreographed by Mark Morris at New York City Opera), Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater (directed by Peter Sellars at Finnish National Opera), Coppelia (Dutch National Ballet). He often collaborates with Melanie Rios and the Saint Joseph Ballet.