User:KCdirector/sandbox

<Karen Lynn Carpenter is an American theater director from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who garnered notoriety for her direction of Nora Ephron and Delia Ephon's Love, Loss and What I Wore, guiding the play from its inception, a reading to benefit Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY, through seven Monday night readings produced by Daryl Roth at the DR2 to benefit Dress for Success. Carpenter directed the opening of Love, Loss and What I Wore, Off Broadway, met with critical acclaim and the 2010 Drama Desk Award for Best Unique Theatrical Experience and the Audience Favorite Award from Broadway World's readers. To date, Karen has directed over 150 of our most celebrated comediennes in the play. Karen began her career as a production stage manager at the Charles Playhouse in Boston, the Theater at Monmouth, and subsequently the Huntington Theater, where she began working with Lloyd Richards and August Wilson as their Production Stage Manager on Joe Turner's Come and Gone. She went on to stage manage the regional tour of the play to Arena Stage, the Seattle Repertory Theater, and the Old Globe Theater, before opening it on Broadway at the Barrymore Theater on DATE. Karen continued to work with Lloyd Richards and August Wilson on two more of Wilson's premieres, The Piano Lesson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in DATE, and Two Trains Running, both plays also toured through regional productions, and opened at the Walter Kerr Theater on Broadway, in DATE and DATE.> <At the invitation of Benjamin Mordecai, then Executive Producer of the Wilson plays and Chair of the Yale School of Drama MFA in Theater Management, Karen went to Yale School of Drama to head its MFA program in Stage Management, where she revamped the curriculum for this discipline, and helmed the premieres of John Guare's Moon Over Miami and Suzan Lori Parks' Venus. Upon leaving the YSD faculty, Carpenter became first production stage manager of Sunset Boulevard during Betty Buckley's run, then of the national tour of Les Miserables. Subsequently, Cameron Mackintosh asked her to take over the management of the Broadway production of Les Miz. In 2001, Jack O'Brien, having recognized her leadership ability when she was in residence with the Wilson plays, hired her as his Associate Artistic Director for the Old Globe Theater, enabling Carpenter to evolve as a director. Karen studied directing, production, and design at Boston University's School for the Arts, where she was presented with the Alumni Award upon graduation in 1981. In 2011, Boston University's School of Theater Arts in the College of Fine Arts created The Karen Carpenter Award for Excellence in Theater Arts, to be awarded to a graduating student of exceptional merit, in perpetuity.