JoAnne Akalaitis

American theater director and playwright

• Born: June 29, 1937
• Place of Birth: Cicero, Illinois

Joanne Akalaitis was one of the preeminent American theatrical directors of the late twentieth century. Unlike most directors on the commercial stage, she developed her productions using a collaborative method. Her work as a playwright and a director is considered eclectic and avant-garde.

Early Life

JoAnne Akalaitis was born and reared in a blue-collar suburb of Chicago, Illinois. Her parents, Clement Akalaitis, a supervisor at General Electric, and Estelle Mattis Akalaitis, were of Lithuanian Roman Catholic ancestry. As a child, Akalaitis attended Lithuanian school, where she appeared in many plays. In a 2024 interview with SDC Journal, she attributed her first interest in theater to the rich liturgical presentations in her school and church. Still, she did not pursue her interest in drama when she reached college, preferring instead to take a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1960. Akalaitis won a fellowship to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at Stanford University, but she eventually dropped out of that program and instead used the money to study at the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco. She met her future collaborators there and in workshops with the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

Eager to expand her theatrical experience, Akalaitis moved to New York in 1963 and to Paris in late 1964. In Paris, France, she collaborated with Lee Breuer and Ruth Maleczech, friends from San Francisco, on a production of Play by Samuel Beckett and met other experimental artists, such as composer Nadia Boulanger and director Jerzy Grotowsky. Another participant in the project was American composer Philip Glass, whom Akalaitis married on July 15, 1965.

In 1968, when her first child, Juliet, was six months old, Akalaitis joined Maleczech in studying for a month with Grotowski, the leader of the movement of the “poor,” or actor-centered, theater. This experience shaped the rest of Akalaitis’s career. She came to the realization that the psychological motivation of a character must have a physical dimension or manifestation. Also, she came to believe that the actor was not just an interpreter of other people’s art, but an artist in his or her own right, just as much as the playwright. She said, “I saw a whole development of Stanislavsky that involved the body, that involved my own personal history, and involved my value as an artist.”

When she returned to New York, in late 1969, Akalaitis formed a theater collective with Maleczech, Breuer, Glass, and David Warrilow. During the troupe’s rehearsals in 1970, which were held in Glass’s beach house in Nova Scotia, Canada, Akalaitis was pregnant with her second child. At first, the men in the group expected her and Ruth Maleczech, who was also pregnant, to cook, clean, and care for the babies in addition to rehearsing all day. Instead, they demanded equality in housekeeping chores with their male counterparts and insisted the company pay for childcare.

Akalaitis’s desire for the equitable distribution of housekeeping responsibilities continued to manifest itself as her career progressed. Though she and Glass divorced in 1980, they continued to share the upbringing of their children. “He does it three days and I do it three, then we alternate every other Saturday. Because he’s involved in performing, I take care of the children when he’s on tour, and he takes them when I’m on tour,” she said in a 1976 interview.

It was Akalaitis who suggested that the new theater company take the name of a nearby Nova Scotian mining town, Mabou Mines. The troupe debuted its first play, Lee Breuer’s The Red Horse Animation, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in November 1970.

Life’s Work

“All the people involved in the group really started their artistic lives in a sense we were reborn when Mabou Mines began,” Akalaitis later said about her work with the theatrical group. The group staged several “animations,” works that could be considered performance art, under Breuer’s direction in the early 1970s. When the Mabou Mines performed three plays by Samuel Beckett at the Theater for the New City Festival, their work caught the attention of New York’s theater establishment, and they were invited to play at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in 1976.

For her direction of her first production, Cascando, by Samuel Beckett, with the Mabou Mines company, Akalaitis won her first Obie Award for excellence in an off-Broadway production. From this point on, Akalaitis changed her focus from acting to directing. She went on to stage her own script, Dressed Like an Egg, based on the writings of the French novelist Colette, with Mabou Mines at the Public Theater in 1977. Akalaitis won her second Obie Award for this production.

In 1978, Akalaitis won a Guggenheim Fellowship and used it to cowrite, design, and direct a play about Antarctica, called Southern Exposure, with Mabou Mines in 1979. This effort brought her a third Obie Award.

Her 1980 collaboration with Mabou Mines was called Dead End Kids: A History of Nuclear Power, about the dangers of atomic energy and weapons. It played at the Public Theater for more than two hundred performances and also found success on tour at regional theaters around the country. The script was made into a film in 1986, which Akalaitis also directed.

Akalaitis won the Rosamond Gilder Award from the New Drama Forum and a Drama Desk Award for her 1981 direction of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Request Concert. Also in 1981, Akalaitis acted the role of Mrs. Lammle in the play Dark Ride by Len Jenkins. The following year, she directed a piece called Red and Blue by Michael Hurson. In 1983, she staged a multimedia production called The Photographer with music by her former husband, Philip Glass, at the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Akalaitis staged two notable works in 1984. The first was Through the Leaves by Franz Xaver Kroetz. Ruth Maleczech and Frederick Neumann, her colleagues from Mabou Mines, won Obie Awards for their acting in this production. Akalaitis went on to direct an unconventional staging of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the American Repertory Theater. Beckett became so upset when he learned that she had wavered from his exact stage directions that he threatened to go to court to stop the production. He finally allowed the show to go on, with the provision that his caveat denouncing the production be attached to every play program.

Akalaitis directed another iconoclastic production at the American Repertory Theater late in 1985, a new translation of Jean Genet’s The Balcony. In 1986, she directed herself and Ruth Maleczech in Help Wanted by Franz Xaver Kroetz. In the same year, she traveled to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to create a work entitled Green Card, about the American immigrant experience—a play considered by many to contain the hallmarks of her work as a playwright. In 1987, Akalaitis staged Georg Büchner’s play Leon and Lena at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. She returned to that theater in 1989 to direct The Screens by Jean Genet.

She finally came to national prominence, however, when she was asked to direct William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline at the New York Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 1989. In May 1990, Joseph Papp invited her to become one of his four artistic associates. She accepted, resigning from Mabou Mines, and in 1991 directed Shakespeare’s two-part historical drama Henry IV.

In August of that year, Joseph Papp, who had cancer, resigned his post as artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and named Akalaitis as his successor. Her tenure was brief and bitter. That fall, she conducted a town meeting of playwrights to discuss their concerns. She wanted to promote the works of new playwrights despite the severe budget cuts that wracked her organization. In the spring of 1992, Akalaitis staged ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford. In December, she mounted Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck. On March 13, 1993, the board of directors of the New York Shakespeare Festival suddenly fired Akalaitis and named African American playwright George C. Wolfe as her replacement. Akalaitis was given scarcely a week to clean out her desk. She had planned to stage Shakespeare’s Henry VIII that summer for the New York Shakespeare Festival. Instead, she directed a Lincoln Center Theater Company production of a play by Jane Bowles called In the Summer House, which opened in August.

Apparently, Akalaitis’s sudden dismissal was influenced by the savage reviews of her work written by New York Times theater critic Frank Rich. Robert Brustein warned, in a 1993 article in The New Republic, that Rich and the festival board of directors were, “still in the grip of Reagan-Bush conservatism, despite the recent change in administration, and a bottom-line mentality continues to rule our art.” He called this movement New Aesthetic Populism, a “war on the arts” from the center. Brustein stated that Rich exposed his “continuing indifference to art with any depth or daring. . . . It is bad enough for one newspaper to control the destiny of commercial production, but when a powerful critic begins to arbitrate the conduct of non-profit institutions, then a shudder passes through the entire theater community.”

Akalaitis concurred with this opinion, saying, “The center of this story is an agenda on the part of The New York Times. . . . In this case, it’s not that the board [of directors] has a strong opinion it has no opinion. It’s waiting to be told what to think by the newspapers.”

Brustein predicted that Akalaitis would continue to be a strong artist who might be better suited to independence than the administrative duties inherent in running a large theater. However, he worried that there might not be any place left that she will want to work, given the conservative nature of the present climate of the cultural world. His prediction proved correct, but his worries were unfounded.

Akalaitis soon found a long-term venue that allows her to practice and teach her style. She became an artist in residence at the Court Theatre in Chicago, cochair of the Direction Program at the Juilliard School, and from 1998 to 2012, Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Flint Professor of Theater at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Her seminars in acting and classes on theater have gained her a reputation for being a quirky, informal, and inspiring professor. She frequently teaches students her famous exercises to prepare actors for their roles during rehearsals. For example, each actor writes the story of the character’s life, even for unnamed chorus characters; there are also group physical exercises designed to accustom actors to moving and speaking together. Akalaitis held classes for her Bard College students in her house, often cooking for them, and she invited philosophers, curators, and actors to be guest speakers.

After her dismissal from the Shakespeare Festival, Akalaitis continued to direct classic plays, investing them with a novel spirit. In 1997 she staged a version of Euripides’ Iphigenia Cycle at the Court Theatre. Her version, which combined Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris, contained contemporary flourishes in costuming, scenery, and music (rap music, for example) and won appreciative reviews. Chris Jones, reviewing the tragedy in American Theatre, called it one of Akalaitis’s finest achievements.

In 2001 she directed an operatic treatment of Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony” (1914), a horrific tale of a prison dominated by an enigmatic machine that executes prisoners. The music was provided by Glass and the libretto by Rudolph Wurlitzer, and although Akalaitis employed the thoroughgoing collaboration for which she was renowned, the spirit of the piece was hers. In one key innovation, she has Kafka appear in the story and uses material from his diaries in the dialogue. She denied that the opera was overtly political (although the opening coincided with the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh); instead, she said, the play is about the horror of being an artist.

Among her other projects were Phèdre (2003; written 1677), a tragedy by Jean Racine; The Birthday Party (2004) by Harold Pinter, a play about psychological torture; Quartet (2005) by Heiner Müller, a play about seduction and murder; and a sequence of four one-act plays by Samuel Beckett in 2007: Act without Words I and II, Eh Joe, and Rough for Theatre, starring ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov. A couple of years later, she staged a 1980s-inspired version of Euripides'The Bacchae for Shakespeare in the Park at the open-air Delacorte Theater, with original choral music by Glass.

Around 2014 Akaliatis reportedly contemplated giving up theater, which she no longer found fulfilling. However, after she was invited to create a site-specific work for New York University, she stitched together scenes from twelve Greek dramas focusing on tragic events. The result was workshopped in 2015 and eventually became 2018's Bad News! i was there, which received mixed reviews following its premiere at Guthrie Theater in Minnesota.

During that same period, Akalaitis collaborated with fellow director Ashely Tata on Cut Piece for Pant Suits (2016). That work of performance art commented on women's status following Hillary Rodham Clinton's Electoral College defeat in the 2016 presidential election.

Akalaitis next mounted a twelve-hour marathon of María Irene Fornés plays at Mabou Mines in 2018. She then collaborated with Glass on a 2020 back-to-back production of two Fornés plays: a staging of the hour-long Mud, followed by a half-hour-long operatic treatment of Drowning. In 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she returned to Beckett, recording and distributing a video adaptation of his story “First Love” online.

In addition to numerous Obie Awards and two more Drama Desk Awards, Akalaitis received an Edwin Booth Award, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pew Charitable Trusts National Theatre Artistry Residency Program, and Rockefeller Foundation. She was invited to be the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair of Theater at Fordham University for 2015 and later inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater in 2023.

Significance

Frank Rich, the theater critic whose brutal assaults on Akalaitis may have resulted in her downfall, admitted in 1981, “Almost single-handedly she is giving new life to the whole notion of political theater.” Her power grew with the nascent women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Akalaitis remained true to her artistic vision, even when that meant she had to stand up to Samuel Beckett or to suffer a dismissal from the Shakespeare Festival that Robert Brustein described as “unusually brusque and humiliating.”

Akalaitis faced the practical problems of raising a family while working in the theater. She struggled against sexism, anti-intellectualism, and political conservatism. However, she has persisted, providing leadership in the theater world and maintaining integrity in both her personal and professional life

Bibliography

Brustein, Robert. “Akalaitis Axed.” The New Republic, 26 Apr. 1993, p. 29.

Kafka, Alexander C. “A Maverick Theater Director Finds an Appreciative Audience.” Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 51, no. 4, 17 Sept. 2004, p. A48.

Kalb, Jonathan. “JoAnne Akalaitis.” Theater, vol. 15, Spring 1984, pp. 6–13.

Kenvin, Roger. “JoAnne Akalaitis.” Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Alice M. Robinson, et al., Greenwood Press, 1989.

O’Quinn, Jim. “Change of Will.” American Theatre, vol. 10, May–June 1993, p. 43.

Mee, Erin B. “JoAnne Akalaitis Bears ‘Bad News!’” American Theatre, 3 Sept. 2019, www.americantheatre.org/2019/09/03/joanne-akalaitis-bears-bad-news/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Newell, Charles. "Idealistic in Spite of Myself: An Interview with JoAnne Akalaitis." SDC Journal, Spring/Summer 2024, pp. 14-23.

Saivetz, Deborah. An Event in Space: JoAnne Akalaitis in Rehearsal. Smith and Kraus, 2000.

Safronova, Valeriya. “The Many Meanings of the Pantsuit.” The New York Times, 20 Dec. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/fashion/pantsuit-yoko-ono-performance-art.html. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.‌

Sommer, Sally R. “JoAnne Akalaitis.” Drama Review, vol. 20, Sept. 1976, pp. 3–16.