He
is one of the great directors of the American stage, he has won the Tony Award for Best Direction, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame and he is also the Swanlund Chair and a professor of theatre at the University. He is on campus to premiere a new play by award-winning playwright David Auburn. He is Daniel Sullivan, and come February 5, Urbana’s Krannert Center for the Performing Arts will get a first look at a his direction of Auburn’s new work.
Colorado-born Sullivan began his professional career with the stage in 1963 with the Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco. He made his directorial debut in 1967 with the Lincoln Center Repertory Company in New York with Martin Duberman’s In White America. From 1981 to 1997, he served as the artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Company, where he premiered new plays like Herb Gardner’s I’m Not Rappaport, a play that would win the Tony Award for Best Play when staged by Sullivan on Broadway.
“Herb was my closest friend,” Sullivan said. “He was an extremely loving individual, and he wrote very slowly. When we started rehearsals for Conversations With My Father, he was still writing, and he didn’t type. He wrote in longhand and printed.”
Sullivan has had friendships with other playwrights, such as Wendy Wasserstein, Jon Robin Baitz and Auburn. Sullivan will stage Auburn’s latest work for the first time at the Krannert Center’s Studio Theatre for seven performances between February 5 and 9. The play, Lost Lake, is a two-character play about a city dweller who looks for a getaway in a rural setting and discovers a rural landlord with his own issues.
“It’s basically about the country mouse and the city mouse who encounter each other,” Sullivan said. “David is a writer who is wonderful at creating realistic dialogue. The worlds he creates are all different and deeper than their cleverness.”
In addition to Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning writing and Sullivan’s direction, audiences of Lost Lake will experience the performances of Jake Weber (Dawn of the Dead) as the country mouse and Opal Alladin (United 93) as the city mouse.
Though Lost Lake is new, Sullivan’s relationship with the University’s theatre department is not; it dates back to 1998.
“We worked out a deal on time,” Sullivan said. “It’s a sort of work around my professional directing schedule. I have managed to average three months on campus each school year. I am involved in a series of Shakespeare courses in the fall. In the spring, I concentrate on graduate students and scene work.”
For further information on performances, go to http://krannertcenter.com or call the Krannert Center’s box office at 217-333-6280.
