Theater News

Drama League Expands Annual DirectorFest Event

The event will take place throughout Manhattan this January.

DirectorFest participants Flordelino Lagundino, Ilana Ransom Toeplitz, Matt Dickson, Bonnie Gabel, Laura Brandel, and Rebecca Martinez.
DirectorFest participants Flordelino Lagundino, Ilana Ransom Toeplitz, Matt Dickson, Bonnie Gabel, Laura Brandel, and Rebecca Martinez.
(© Catalin Stelian-Shanks)

The Drama League will expand its annual DirectorFest event into a multi-week, city-wide festival focusing on the art of contemporary stage directing. For its 34th year, the festival will include five fully staged productions, a showcase evening of new musicals, staged readings, discussion panels, books signings, workshops, and conversations with America's most notable directors.

Taking place over two weeks in venues across Manhattan, highlights of the festival include rarely seen plays by David Henry Hwang and Enda Walsh, new works by Gabrielle Reisman and Alejandro Ricaño, and more, all directed by 2017 Drama League Directors Project Fellows Laura Brandel, Bonnie Gabel, Matt Dickson, Flordelino Lagundino, and Rebecca Martinez.

The festival will also include Alex Rubin's new play Group, featuring Jenn Colella, in a staged reading directed by Directors Project alumna Ilana Ransom Toeplitz. UpClose, a series of conversations with America's foremost contemporary directors, will feature Anne Bogart, Anne Kauffman, Damon Kiely, Robert O'Hara, Kimberly Senior, and George C. Wolfe.

DirectorFest will take place at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, the Drama League Theatre Center, and the Drama Book Shop from January 13-22, 2018.

For more information, click here.