User:Tshank

Theodore Shank, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor of Theatre at the University of California, San Diego. He is also an award winning playwright and director, and editor of TheatreForum an international journal of innovative performance.

He has been an agricultural field worker, cat skinner, cowboy, stunt pilot, US Army sergeant, photographer. His plays and musicals include Wild Indian! about Ishi, the American Indian considered by some to be the last "wild indian" who spent the final years of his life as a living exhibit in the San Francisco Museum of Anthropology. The play received two CBS/Dramatists Guild Awards and co-premiered at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco and at Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. Subsequently the play was adapted as a music-theatre piece by Theodore Shank and composer Leif Jordansson.

His music-theatre work Fly Away All, with music by Brenda Hutchinson, was commissioned by Opera America. It premiered at the Minnesota Opera New Music-Theatre Ensemble.

Other musicals include The Wives of the Magi,with Adele Edling Shank, subtitled A Mayan, Christian, Music Hall, Jewish, Calypso, Buddhist Play with Music; Black Wings, with music by William Harper, 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; and Serena in X-tremis with music by Stephanie Robinson.

Other plays include Tyrone produced by the Attic Theatre, Los Angeles, where it was awarded First Prize; The Global Economy and Electricity (two short plays); and Codex, which centers on the theft of art works and culture, is set on a Mayan archaeological dig in Guatemala and in an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York.

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.

As a Distinguished Professor of Theatre at the University of California, San Diego, he was Head of the Professional Theatre Directing Program and taught contemporary theatre. Previously he was the founding chair of the Dramatic Art Department at the University of California, Davis, where he also served as Head of the Professional Playwriting Program.

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), 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 theater photographs has been shown in Europe and the USA, and his photographs of Union Square Park, New York, on 9/11 were exhibited at the Dissenters Gallery in London for the 5th anniveraary, and for the 10th anniversary at the gallery of the New York Commissioner for Small Businesses near Ground Zero.

He is founding editor of, TheatreForum, an international journal of innovative performance, and he has served as contributing editor for several arts magazines including New Theatre Quarterly (London and Cambridge) and The Drama Review(New York). He has served on panels of the Arts Council of Great Britain, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and Opera America. His Ph.D. is from Stanford University.

His website is www.TedShank.com.