Jean-Marie Apostolidès

Professor, classical and contemporary French theater. Jean-Marie Apostolidès has been teaching in the Department of Drama since 1993. As a playwright, his texts have been produced in France, Canada, and the United States. Over the last twelve years, he has staged a dozen plays at Stanford and in the Bay Area, both classical and contemporary, particularly from the European repertoire. In his productions, he has focused on the notion of mise-en-tableaux, which complements the traditional techniques of mise-en-scène with silent tableaux aimed at visually translating the unconscious of the text analyzed from a theoretical perspective.

Among his books are: Le roi-machine (1981), La nauf des fous (1982), Les métamorphoses de Tintin (1984/2003/2006), Le Prince sacrifié (1985), L'affaire Unabomber (1996), Les tombeaux de Guy Debord (1999/2006), L'audience (2001), Traces, revers, écart (2001), Héroïsme et victimisation (2003/2008), Sade in the Abyss (2003), Tintin et le mythe du surenfant (2003), Cyrano, qui fut tout et qui ne fut rien (2006), Il faut construire l'hacienda (2006), Ivan Chtcheglov, profil perdu (2006), Une volée de Moineaux (2008), in collaboration with Boris Donné for the last two volumes. Also with Boris Donné, he has edited unknown texts related to the Letterist and the Situationist International movements by authors such as Patrick Straram (three volumes) and Ivan Chtcheglov (one volume).

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Harry J. Elam, Jr.

Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities; Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education;
Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Harry J. Elam, Jr. is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education, and Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts.

Elam is author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (winner of the 2005 Errol Hill Award from the American Society of Theatre Research); and co‑editor of four books, African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (winner of the 2001 Errol Hill Award from the American Society of Theatre Research); Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium; and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture. His articles have appeared in American Theater, American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, as well as journals in Belgium, Israel, Poland, and Taiwan. He has also written essays published in several critical anthologies. Elam was the editor of Theatre Journal and on the editorial boards of Atlantic Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Modern Drama. In 2006, Elam was the winner of the Betty Jones Award for Outstanding Teaching from the American Theatre and Drama Society, the winner of the Excellence in Editing Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the winner of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Theatre Research. He was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in April 2006.

At Stanford he has been awarded five different teaching awards: the ASSU Award for Undergraduate Teaching, Small Classes (1992); the Humanities and Sciences Deans Distinguished Teaching Award (1993); the Black Community Service Center Outstanding Teacher Award (1994), the Bing Teaching Fellowship for Undergraduate Teaching (1994-1997); and the Rhodes Prize for Undergraduate Teaching (1998).

In addition to his scholarly work, he has directed professionally for more than eighteen years. Most notably, he directed Tod, the Boy Tod by Talvin Wilks for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and for TheatreWorks in Palo Alto he directed Jar the Floor by Cheryl West and Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage, which was nominated for nine Bay Area Circle Critics Awards and was the winner of DramaLogue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast, and Best Direction. He has directed several of August Wilson’s plays, including Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences, the latter ofwhich won eight Bay Area “Choice” Awards.

Elam received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1978 and his Ph.D, in Dramatic Arts from the University of California-Berkeley in 1984.

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Peggy Phelan

Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts Professor of Drama and English; Chair, Department of Drama. Peggy Phelan is the author of Unmarked: the politics of performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: performing public memories (Routledge, 1997; honorable mention Callaway Prize for dramatic criticism 1997-1999); the survey essay for Art and Feminism, ed. by Helena Reckitt (Phaidon, 2003, winner of “The top 25 best books in art and architecture” award, amazon.com, 2001); the survey essay for Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001); and the catalog essay for Intus: Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 2004). She is co-editor, with the late Lynda Hart, of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993; cited as “best critical anthology” of 1993 by American Book Review); and co-editor with Jill Lane of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1997).

She has written more than sixty articles and essays in scholarly, artistic, and commercial magazines ranging from Artforum to Signs. These essays have been cited in the fields of architecture, art history, psychoanalytic criticism, visual culture, performance studies, theater studies, and film and video studies. She has edited special issues of the journals Narrative and Women and Performance. She has been a fellow of the Humanities Institute, University of California, Irvine; and a fellow of the Humanities Institute, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She served on the Editorial Board of Art Journal, one of three quarterly publications of the College Art Association, and as Chair of the board. She has been President of Performance Studies International. She has been a fellow of the Getty Research Institute and a Guggenheim Fellow.

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Michael Ramsaur

Director of Production; Professor (Teaching), Lighting Design. Michael Ramsaur is a professor at Stanford University serving as Director of Production. In addition to teaching regularly at the Bavarian Theater Academy Munich, he is a guest professor at the University of Arts Belgrade in the Interdisciplinary M.A. Program in Theater, and an honorary professor at the Central Academy of Drama Beijing. He serves as President of OISTAT (the International Association of Scenographers, Theater Architects, and Technicians), and is a long-time active member of USITT, as well as a member of the United Scenic Artist Association (Lighting Design USAA Local #829), the International Alliance Theatrical Stage Employees (Stage Hands IATSE Local #16), the Illumination Engineering Society of North America (IESNA), and the International Association Lighting Designers (IALD). Ramsaur has had a forty-year career in theater including serving as a lighting designer for many theater companies internationally and locally, including Broadway by the Bay, where he is Resident Lighting Designer. Examples of his designs have been displayed at two United States Institute of Theater Technology Design Expositions, a theater design exhibit at the Triton Museum San Jose, and at theatrical design exhibitions in Prague and Shanghai. He has been awarded Outstanding Lighting Design awards from the San Francisco Bay Area Critics Association, Dean Goodman Award, and Drama Logue Award as well as receiving a Fulbright grant. His articles on lighting techniques have been published in three countries and he has created a computerized software program to aid lighting designers.

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Alice Rayner

Professor, critical theory and dramatic literature. Alice Rayner teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in dramatic literature and theory. Her research interests include the phenomenology of theater as well as comedy, genre theory, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, and hermeneutics in the analysis of texts and performance. Published books include Comic Persuasion (University of California Press), To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action (University of Michigan Press) and Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomenon of Theatre (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Her essays on technology and culture have been included in Discourse as well as in Michal Kobialka’s book, Of Borders and Thresholds, and Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs’ Landscape and Theatre. She has written on Harold Pinter for Theatre Journal as well as the collection Harold Pinter at 60 (ed. Katherine Burkman, Indiana). Three essays on Suzan-Lori Parks, co-authored with Harry Elam, have appeared in Theatre Journal as well as in Performing America (ed. Jeffrey Mason and J. Ellen Gainor) and Staging Resistence (ed. Jeanne Colleran and Jenny Spencer). Also published in Theatre Journal is “Rude Mechanicals and The Specters of Marx,” a theory of practical labor in theater. Other essays include a study of metaphor and performance in Études Théâtrales/Essays in Theatre; on Stanislavksy and A.C. Bradley in Theatre Quarterly, “The Audience...and the Ethics of Listening,” an examination of the responsibilities of an audience; “Grammatic Action and the Art of Tautology,” a theory of action derived from Hamlet (both in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism); and “All Her Children: Caryl Churchill’s Furious Ghosts,” a study of the unborn in Churchill’s plays (in Sheila Rabillard’s Essays on Churchill). Her article on stage objects in relation to Heidegger’s essay, The Thing, appears in the collection, Staging Philosophy, (ed. David Krasner and David Saltz, Michigan, 2006). She is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Theatre Journal. From 1996-99 she was Director of Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Chair of Drama from 2002-2005.

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Rush Rehm

Professor, classical drama. An actor, director, and professor of Drama and Classics, Rush Rehm publishes in the areas of Greek tragedy and contemporary politics. He also serves as Artistic Director of Stanford Summer Theater, a professional theater that presents a dramatic festival and symposium based on a major playwright each summer.

Rehm’s books include Aeschylus’ Oresteia: A Theatre Version (Melbourne 1978); Greek Tragic Theatre (Routledge: London 1992, paper 1994, modern Greek translation 1999); Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Marriage and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 1994, paper 1996); The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 2002); and Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World (Duckworth: London 2003). Recent contributions to edited volumes include The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre (Cambridge), Rebel Women (Methuen: London), Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in Performance (Oxford), Sophocles and the Greek Language (Brill: Leiden), Antigone’s Answer (Atlanta), and Post-Colonial Classic (Oxford). As well as courses on ancient theater and culture, Rehm teaches courses on contemporary politics, the media, and U.S. imperialism.

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Janice Ross

Dance Division Director; Professor (Teaching), dance history, performance art, postmodern dance. Janice Ross has a B.A. from UC Berkeley and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford. Her books include Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (University of California Press, 2007), and San Francisco Ballet: An American Voice in Ballet (Chronicle Books, 2007). Her research interests include contemporary performance as activism and dance in prisons. Her essays on dance have been published in several anthologies including Performance and Ritual, edited by Mark Franco (Routledge, 2007), Everything Was Possible (Re) Inventing Dance in the 1960s, edited by Sally Banes (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), “Improvisation as Child's Play,” in Caught by Surprise: Essays on Art and Improvisation, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). Her awards include a Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as research grants from the Iris Litt Fund of the Clayman Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Peninsula Community Foundation. For ten years she was the staff dance critic for The Oakland Tribune and for twenty years a contributing editor to Dance Magazine. Her articles on dance have appeared in publications including The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. She is past president of the Dance Critics Association, a current member of the board of CORD and President-elect of the Society of Dance History Scholars.

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Helen Schrader

Professor Emerita, group communication. Professor Emerita Schrader taught a course on Group Communication for a wide cross-section of Stanford students during her many years in the Drama Department.

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Carl Weber

Professor Emeritus, directing and dramaturgy. Carl Weber, Professor of Directing and Dramaturgy at Stanford, began his career as an actor with the Heidelberg City Theater while completing a B.A. in Philosophy, German, and English Literature at Heidelberg University. In 1949, he was one of the founders of the Heidelberg Zimmertheater and directed the company’s opening production. He moved to Berlin in 1950, joining the company of Theater der Freundschaft, and was invited, in 1952, to join the Berliner Ensemble as an actor, dramaturg, and assistant director to Bertolt Brecht, with whom he worked on the productions of Katzgraben, Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Galileo.

After Brecht’s death in 1956, Weber became one of the directors with the company. He co-wrote and directed, with Peter Palitzsch, the play The Day of the Great Scholar Wu, staged a revival of Brecht’s production of Mother Courage, and was one of the directors of Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. He also wrote and edited program brochures and acted in eight of the Ensemble’s productions. 1955-61, Weber directed as well for other theaters, such as Berlin’s Deutsches Theater, and for television (Deutscher Fernsehfunk).

In 1961, Weber staged the West German premiere of Brecht’s Trumpets and Drums at the Lübeck City Theater, and was invited to direct Brecht’s Puntila and his Man Matti at Carnegie Institute of Technology, at Pittsburgh, in 1962. Between 1962 and 1966, he directed at theaters in West Germany, Scandinavia, and the United States, among them the San Francisco’s Actors Workshop, Memphis’ Front St. Theatre, Norway’s National Theatre in Oslo, Denmark’s Aarhus and Aalborg Theatres, and Berlin’s Schaubühne. He also served 1964-66 as principal resident director of Wuppertaler Bühnen, the home of Pina Bausch’s “Tanztheater.”
Weber moved to New York in 1966 when he was appointed Master-Teacher of Directing and Acting at the newly-founded NYU School of the Arts. Subsequently he directed numerous productions in New York and at American regional theatres, such as Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre; Chelsea Theatre Center at B.A.M.; American Place Theatre; Perry St. Theatre; the Martinique; Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.; Yale Repertory Theatre; McCarter Theatre, Princeton; and San Francisco’s Magic Theatre. Among his productions, besides Brecht plays, were the American premieres of Peter Handke’s Kaspar (the production received two Obies), The Ride Across Lake Constance, and They are Dying Out; of Witkiewicz’s The Waterhen; and the premieres of Ed Bullins’ Jo Anne; W. D. Snodgrass’s Fuehrer Bunker; Mac Wellman’s Starluster and Saul Levitt’s Lincoln. He also directed many classics, among them Molière’s The Miser, Rostand’s Cyrano, H.V. Kleist’s The Broken Pitcher; and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. While based in New York, he continued to direct in Europe: for Zürich Schauspielhaus; München Kammerspiele; Hamburg Schauspielhaus, and Wuppertaler Bühnen. He also staged one of the first Indian Brecht productions, Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1968, at the Asian Theatre Institute, New Delhi. From 1971 to 1983, he chaired the Graduate Directing Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 1984, he was appointed Professor of Drama at Stanford University where he heads Ph.D. Directing Studies. He has directed and/or taught at Columbia University, the National Theatre School of Canada at Montreal, U.C.L.A., Princeton University, Temple University, and Justus von Liebing Universität at Giessen. He also lectured and/or conducted workshops at many other American and German universities.

Weber has authored and narrated programs on Brecht and Handke for Camera 3, CBS-TV. His writings have been published in The Drama Review, Modern Drama, Performing Arts Journal, Theatre Journal, Theater, Theatre Three, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theater Heute, Theater der Zeit, Die Weltbühne, and others. His essays have appeared in the volumes The Director in a Changing Theatre, Master Teachers of Theatre, Szenische Geschichtsdarstellung, Theatre and Film in Exile, Multiculturalism and Performance, Vom Wort zum Bild, The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, Brecht Unbound, A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion, American Dramaturgy, An Introduction to Theatre, Brecht Handbuch, Heiner Müller Handbuch, and Encyclopedia of the 20th Century, among others. He is a co-editor of the Yearbook of the International Brecht Society and of Performing Arts Journal.

Weber translated, edited, and wrote introductions and commentary to four volumes of plays, poetry and prose by Heiner Müller: Hamletmachine, Explosion of a Memory, The Battle, and A Heiner Müller Reader, published by PAJ Publications and Johns Hopkins University Press. He also edited the anthology Dramacontemporary: Germany, Johns Hopkins University Press, for which he wrote introductions and translated several of the plays. His translations of Müller, Manfred Karge, and Gerlind Reinshagen have been widely performed. His translations into German of plays from the English, French, and Russian repertoire were produced at German theaters and radio.

Weber is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, and was on its Board, 1980-1986. He is also a member of PEN Club, ATHE, and the International Brecht Society.

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