The American Shakespeare Center, a Staunton, Va.-based company dedicated to producing Shakespeare in the manner he might have been originally produced, has named longtime DC Shakespearian director Ethan McSweeny as its new Artistic Director.
“To say that we’re thrilled to introduce Ethan as our new Artistic Director would be an understatement,” said Christopher Little, chair of the ASC’s Board of Trustees. “We’re ecstatic that Ethan shares our vision that Shakespeare’s American Home can showcase Shakespeare and change lives one encounter at a time and know that he will bring new ideas, new creativity and new life to the ASC.”
The American Shakespeare Center performs in the Blackfriar Playhouse, a re-creation of Shakespeare’s original stage. DC Theatre Scene visited Staunton and the ASC to see As You Like It and The Tempest.
“I’ve appreciated the ASC from afar for some time,” McSweeny stated. “As I began to learn more about the organization, I was struck by the quality of what has been achieved and the potential the company has to grow its mission locally, regionally, nationally, and even internationally. The ASC’s celebration of the human spirit through Shakespeare is an inspiring goal that transcends merely the making of plays and engages with something larger, something that I am humbled and excited to become a part of nurturing and building.”
While McSweeny was an Associate Artistic Director at Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC for four years, and has numerous Washington-area credits to his name, his reputation is international. He was co-Artistic Director at the Chautauqua Theater Company for eight years. His A Midsummer Night’s Dream opened the Macao Arts Festival in China. For twelve years, he served on the Executive Board of SDC, the labor union representing stage directors and choreographers, and he remains a Trustee of the union’s foundation.
McSweeny has won many awards for his work, including a 2018 Helen Hayes award for Outstanding Director of a Play (Hayes) for his Twelfth Night at Shakespeare Theatre Company. His take on the play included a wordless frame which suggested that the play’s narrative was the feverish dream of a woman dying in the aftermath of a plane crash. McSweeny also received awards for his direction of A Streetcar Named Desire (Gate Dublin, 2013); A Body of Water (The Old Globe, 2006); and Six Degrees of Separation (Guthrie, 2003). His 2000 production of The Best Man on Broadway received a Tony® nomination.
Although McSweeny calls himself “a classicist at heart” he has directed a significant number of newer works, including premieres of Deidre Kinahan’s Moment (Studio Theatre), Florian Zeller’s The Father (Gate, Dublin), Thomas Bradshaw’s Fulfillment (The Flea), Regina Taylor’s Trinity River Plays (Goodman, Dallas Theatre Center), and the operas Better Gods composed by Luna Pearl Wolf and Mohammed Fairouz’ The Dictator’s Wife (Kennedy Center).
In fact, one of McSweeny’s priority projects at the American Shakespeare Center will be selecting the next winners in the ASC’s “Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries” project, an international playwriting competition that seeks to inspire playwrights from around the world to compose original works in conversation with Shakespeare’s classics, creating a modern canon of 38 plays.
“I want to position the ASC not so much as a place for ‘original practices’ but as a laboratory for a cutting-edge, innovative company that dares to put the focus of theatre where it should be: on the handmade, on the performer, and on the words,” McSweeny said.
McSweeny succeeds Jim Warren, who co-founded the American Shakespeare Center thirty years ago with Ralph Alan Cohen thirty years ago and who stepped down at the end of last year. Cohen, who continues to serve as ASC’s Director of Mission, observed that “to have someone as accomplished and insightful as Ethan join us as our Artistic Director feels both gratifying and sustaining: It speaks to our success in the past three decades and assures that the future of the ASC will be brilliant.”
The American Shakespeare Center was originally known as Shenandoah Shakespeare Express.
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