Painting by Peter Steiner
For The Shed last fall, Kent Paul directed Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, with Tommy Russell as the man. He helped launch Contemporary Stage Company in Wilmington, DE, where he directed productions of Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories starring Lynn Redgrave, Joe Sutton’s Restoring the Sun, and two plays in the 2006 Athol Fugard Festival: The Island with Keith Powell and Sean Patrick Thomas, and Exits and Entrances. Other productions include The Bird Sanctuary by Frank McGuinness, with Elizabeth Franz and Hayley Mills (U.S. Premiere, Pittsburgh Public Theater, Alabama Shakespeare Festival); Long Day’s Journey into Night with Sam Waterston, Elizabeth Franz, John Slattery and James Waterston (Syracuse Stage); The Glass Menagerie and Look Homeward, Angel (PlayMakers Repertory Company); and Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders (Burning Coal Theatre Company). Musicals include: She Loves Me (choreographed by Marge Champion) and Kiss Me, Kate at the Berkshire Theatre Festival. New scripts he has directed include The Double Bass with Boyd Gaines (an adaptation by Eric Overmyer of the German play by Patrick Süskind), Peking Man by Cao Yu (the foremost Chinese playwright of our time), Journey to Gdansk, which introduced Polish playwright Janusz Glowacki in this country, and the 2008 Fringe Festival production of Lecture, with Cello by Robert Moulthrop. He staged Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra in an adaption by Overmyer, for the Resonance Ensemble. His documentary film Sanford Meisner—The Theater’s Best Kept Secret was broadcast on PBS, had an extended run at the Public Theater, and was seen at film festivals around the world. Most recently, he directed Off-Broadway the U.S. premiere of McGuinness’s Gates of Gold and the world premiere of the Isaac Bashevis Singer adaptation Sin. A native of Nebraska, Kent is a graduate of Harvard College and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.
