DAVID CHAMBERS a producer, director, writer, and teacher of theatre, opera, and film whose work has been seen in New York, basements to Broadway; at major regional theatres around the United States; and on stages in Europe.
In the theatre, he served as Resident Director and then as Producer at Washington’s famed Arena Stage, where he also directed numerous productions, specializing in revisited classics and U.S. premieres of American and British new works.
He was also Producing Director of the Repertory Theatre of Saint Louis, and for 14 years was Artistic Associate at South Coast Repertory Theatre in California where his annual productions regularly received Drama-logue and LA Critics Circle Awards.
Other U.S. theatres he has directed at include The New York Shakespeare Festival, the Guthrie, the Goodman, the Shakespeare Theatre of Washington, The Manhattan Theatre Club (of which he was an early co-founder), and The Yale Repertory Theatre, where he was a resident director.
On Broadway, he has directed plays by Christopher Durang and Howard Korder, and has been nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Best Direction.
He has directed operas at Bard Summerscape, BAM, The Prague National Theatre, and PS 122 in New York. His adaptation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Don Juan in Prague starring Moravian avant-garde singer/vilolinist Iva Bittova, premiered in Prague in and was chosen as the capstone event for the 2006 BAM Next Wave Festival. He is currently in various stages of development and pre-production for several other opera and music-theatre projects.
His writing includes book and lyrics for musicals, librettos for operas, texts in translation including Moliere and Ibsen, as well as numerous journalistic and academic articles. From 1995 to the present he has been co-producer of The Meyerhold Project, a US/Russia collaborative effort to research and revive the works of the revolutionary director Vsevold Meyerhold, through research and reconstructed performance. He has written extensivley about this work, which has also been studied by scholars and practitioners around the world.
He is currently writing a book for Routledge Press, entitled Analysis through Action. This work examines the history, theory and contemporary deployment of a generationally-evolving Russian theatre methodology, barely known in the west. The work is rooted in the final radical researches of Konstantin Stanislavski, from 1935 to his death in 1938, and has continued advancing to today’s astonishing Russian and Eastern European avant-garde.
In film, he staged several scenes for the film The Good Shepherd, produced and directed by Robert DeNiro. starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie. In addition, he consulted regularly with Mr. DeNiro and screenwriter Eric Roth, as well as worked directly with Mr. Damon and Ms. Jolie.
As much of David Chambers’ stage work is inpsired by the intersection of history, theory, and practice, he also has extensive teaching experience on both the graduate and undergraduate level. For thirty years he was Professor (Adjunct) at the Yale School of Drama. There he focused on directing and acting, teaching everything from contemporary devised theatre to Shakespeare in performance.
Recently, he has been on faculty at Harvard University’s new undergraduate concentration of Theatre, Dance, and Media. In addition he has been teaching acting and directing on the graduate level at the New School for Drama in New York, and worked on opera at The New School for Music, formerly Mannes School of Music.
| Credit Type | Production | Season |
|---|---|---|
| Director | Medal of Honor Rag | 1975-76 Season |