Lee Breuer: a legend of American theater comes to RNTF’s 20th edition

The American stage director Lee Breuer, one of the greatest theater artists, will be present in November in Bucharest, as a participant in the Debates, Conferences, Meetings module of RNTF. Lee Breuer wrote an important page in the history of American theater. First with Mabou Mines Theater Company in New York, which he cofounded in 1970, then with other companies, Lee Breuer created award-winning experimental, unconventional, innovative shows equally acclaimed by critics.

Carrying on the series of meetings with prominent personalities of international theater, such as Richard Foreman, Richard Schechner, Hand Thies Lehmann, Aleks Sierz etc., who delivered important lectures in the previous editions of NTF, in 2010 the selector Cristina Modreanu has invited renowned artists and theorists to present the history of theater as they lived it.

Lee Breuer is a theater and film director, poet and theoretician. In the 1970s he founded, with Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, David Warrilow and Frederick Neuman Mabou Mines Theater, a greatly successful company. The Animations series, including performances at the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, Hajj (1983), the “performance poem” inspired by Ruth Maleczech’s deeply personal history, Lear (1988), with an entirely female cast are some of the shows that placed Breuer in the heart of New York experimental theater.

Other shows brought him international fame: The Tempest (after Shakespeare), Gospel at Colonus (after Sofocles), Doll’s House (after Ibsen), Peter and Wendy (after J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan), A Prelude to Death in Venice (based on his own script).

A Knight of Arts in France, winner of many Obie Awards and most prestigious scholarships in the world, author of more than twenty books, Lee Breuer also added teaching to his career: he taught at Yale University School of Drama (1986-1999); Stanford University (1995-1999); UC Santa Cruz (1994); Arizona State University West (1992-1993); Harvard University (Writers and Directors Seminar, 1981).

After his sensational performances of Doll’s House and Peter and Wendy at the Edinburgh festival in 2008 and 2009, this year he was invited to remake Gospel at Colonus (after Oedipus at Colonus), one of his greatest successes. Initially staged in 1983, then twelve more times in various theaters or festivals, the show won Breuer nominations for Tony, Pulitzer, Grammy, NAACP and Emmy, as well as numerous critics’ awards worldwide.

After the Edinburgh festival, Lee Breuer will meet with audiences in Bucharest on two days: on the first, he will present his career in theater, and on the second, together with the actress Maude Mitchell, who plays the leading role, he will make an introduction to the screening of his successful show Doll’s House.

Lee Breuer is one of the fifty stage directors included in 50 Key Theater Directors, a book that will be launched at the 20th edition of RNTF. The book, edited by Maria Shevtsova and Shomit Mitter and published by Routledge in 2005, was translated into Romanian by Anca Ionita and Cristina Modreanu and published by Unitext in the RNTF Collection.

In it, the critic Gerald Rabkin writes: “Breuer has created a theater which consciously absorbs the strategies and conventions of the mass media and popular entertainment. It is often dense, elliptical, lyrical rather than conventionally dramatic, and, in the case of his adaptations of established classics, controversial in its performance choices. His consistent ambition has been to connect American theater to the vitality of its contemporary culture and to ‘wait for poetry’, composed out of the driving energy of the vernacular language, popular musical tradition, and refracted media images.”