Beckett Women: Ceremonies of Departure

Bob Scanlan Bio

Bob was for many years the Literary Director of Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theater, where he headed the Dramaturgy Program for the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard.  Bob has also lectured widely on various theatre topics (most frequently on the works of Samuel Beckett) in Paris, France; at Stirling Castle (Scotland), in Madrid and Granada, Spain; in the Canary Islands (Tenerife);  repeatedly in Taormina, Sicily; in Torino, Italy; in Aix-en-Provence; in Honolulu, Hawaii; Christchurch, New Zealand and many major cities in the United States and Canada. He has taught at Harvard since 1989, offering undergraduate courses in playwriting, dramatic literature and on dramaturgy. He also taught acting and directing at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard, where he directed the Playwriting and Dramaturgy Programs. He was appointed Professor of the Practice of Theatre in the English Department at Harvard, and chaired Harvard’s Committee on Dramatics, while also supervising undergraduate Special Concentrations in theatre before Harvard instituted a theatre major. His book Principles of Dramaturgy, the basis of his decades of teaching and directing, will soon be published by Routledge.  From 1977 to 1989 Professor Scanlan was Director of the Drama Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he directed over 30 productions for MIT’s Dramashop.

Recent Directing Credits

In the past three seasons of the Poets’ Theatre revival: Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas; The Word Exchange: The Music of Poetry in Translation;  Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters; Beckett Women: Ceremonies of Departure; Blue Front Workshop, based on the book-length poem by Martha Collins;  Mistero Buffo, by Dario Fo; King Arthur by John Dryden and Henry Purcell (in collaboration with the Henry Purcell Society of Boston); and A Muster of Poets, which launched a new series with the Boston Athenaeum.

Past Directing Credits

Codeswitch Seven, an original company-written piece on the African-American experience; Drums in the Night by Bertolt Brecht; Gilgamesh, the stage adaptation of the ancient epic by Yusuf Komunyakaa and Chad Gracia; Julius Caesar for the Actors’ Shakespeare Project; Samson Agonistes, with Claire Bloom and John Neville; his own stage adaptation of The Inferno of Dante in Robert Pinsky’s translation; and two award-winning evenings of short Beckett plays, An Evening of Beckett and Beckett Trio each in succeeding A.R.T. Fall Festivals; Oleanna at the Wellfleet Harbor Actor’s Theatre; and many others.