Stephen Wadsworth

Wadsworth’s productions of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Wagner’s Ring cycle, a series of Marivaux comedies, the Beaumarchais trilogy, and plays and operas by Shakespeare, Molière, Handel, Goldoni, Mozart, Shaw, Wilde, and Coward, have established him as a master of the classical repertoire and one of the most influential directors in the American theater.  He has also directed plays by John Guare (Dallas Theatre Centre), Beth Henley (Roundabout), Anna Deavere Smith (Long Wharf), and Terrence McNally (Master Class on Broadway and in London’s West End, starring Tyne Daly) and during the 1990s reintroduced the work of Marivaux to the U.S. in a series of translations and productions of three plays (published by Smith and Kraus as Marivaux: Three Plays). His translation and production of Molière’s Don Juan (Shakespeare Theatre, Old Globe, Seattle Rep, McCarter) reimagined a lost text and excited great interest in the French academy, as well as on American stages. He has also translated and adapted theater works by Monteverdi, Goldoni and Handel, and worked as writer and dramaturg on many new operas and plays. He has three productions in the repertoire of the Metropolitan Opera (Rodelinda, Boris Godunov, and Iphigénie en Tauride, all telecast in HD to movie theaters worldwide), and he’s directed opera in Milan, Vienna, London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, and notably in Seattle, where his famous production of Wagner’s Ring cycle last played in summer 2013. He wrote the opera A Quiet Place with Leonard Bernstein (Grammy nomination). For his work on Marivaux and Molière he was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, he was a Harman/Eisner Artist in Residence at the Aspen Institute, and a 2013 Fellow at the Sundance Institute Playwrights Retreat at Ucross. He is the James S. Marcus Faculty Fellow at the Juilliard School, where he started the world’s first and only intensive acting program for singers, and he has taught in the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program for over 30 years.