WILD INDIAN!
Theodore Shank Résumé
Theodore Shank has been an agricultural field worker, cat skinner, cowboy, stunt pilot, US Army sergeant, photographer, and Distinguished Professor of Theatre.
He is an award
winning playwright and director. His play Wild Indian! received two
CBS/Dramatists Guild Awards and co-premiered at the Magic Theatre in
His music-theatre work Fly Away All, with music by Brenda Hutchinson, was
commissioned by Opera
The Wives of the Magi (with Adele Edling Shank) is subtitled A
Mayan, Christian, Music Hall, Jewish, Calypso, Buddhist Play with Music. It
received a staged reading at the Magic Theatre in
Black Wings, with music by William Harper, is a
jazz-blues-gospel-country musical set in the 1920s and inspired by the life of
Bessie Coleman, the first black person in the world to receive a pilot's
license. It is nearing completion.
The Global Economy and Electricity (two short plays) have both been selected
as finalist for the Heideman Award.
His recently completed
play, Codex, is set on a Mayan archeological dig
in
He has directed over fifty
productions including many premiere productions of plays and music-theatre
works on which he was a collaborating writer. Among the theatres where he has
directed are the Magic Theatre (San Francisco), the Los Angeles Theatre Center,
the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Minnesota Opera New Music-Theatre
Ensemble.
He is Distinguished Professor
of Theatre at the
His eight books, chapters in
about twenty-five others, and a hundred or so articles on contemporary theatre
have been published in eighteen countries. His books include American Alternative Theatre (Macmillan, London; St. Martin's, New
York; and soon to be republished and updated by Michigan University
Press), The Art
of Dramatic Art
(Dickenson, Belmont, CA), Contemporary Experimental Theatre (Theater am Turm, Frankfurt), Theatre in Real Time (Studio Forma, Milan), California Performance (Mime Journal, Claremont, CA), Contemporary British Theatre (Macmillan, London; St Martin's, New
York) and Beyond
the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre (University of Michigan Press).
An exhibition of his
experimental theatre photographs has been shown in Europe and the
He is founding editor of the
international performance magazine, TheatreForum , and has served as contributing editor
for several arts magazines including New Theatre Quarterly (
E-Mail tshank@ucsd.edu
Theatre & Dance,
Tel (home) +(858) 755-3303 Fax +509 756 3073
