Carey Perloff

Carey Perloff iis a director, playwright, producer and educator who served as Artistic Director of the Classic Stage Company in New York from 1986- 1992 and the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco from 1992- 2018, where she staged dozens of classical and contemporary plays and nurtured a three-decade collaboration with Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, resulting in her new book Pinter and Stoppard: A Director's View. Originally trained as a classicist, Perloff is known for her work on Greek tragedy, often in collaboration with Olympia Dukakis; ancient plays she has directed include Elektra, Hecuba, Antigone, Helen, Ion, Medea, and ongoing work on the Oedipus plays with John Douglas Thompson. She is also a distinguished teacher who helped lead the MFA program at A.C.T. and has guest taught at Columbia, SF State, UC Berkeley, Yale, Princeton and numerous other universities. Perloff’s recent directing work includes Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt (Huntington Theater and Shakespeare Theater, DC), As You Like It (Santa Cruz Shakespeare), The Lehman Trilogy (Huntington Theater and Repertory Theater of St. Louis), Hend Ayoub’s Home? (Voices Festival Productions, D.C.), Ibsen’s Ghosts (Seattle Rep and Williamstown), Pale Fire by Colm Toibin (Gate Theatre, Dublin), Merchant of Venice starring Seana McKenna at the Shakespeare Company, Calgary, and A Thousand Splendid Suns at Arena Stage. Perloff has staged numerous plays at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and at theaters across Canada.  Upcoming: Waste (adaptor and director), Marin Theatre), The Oedipus Project (Red Bull Theater, NYC), Iphigenia in Tauris (Legion of Honor, SF).

As a playwright, Perloff’s work includes Vienna, Vienna, Vienna (Finalist, 2023 Jewish Plays Project prize), If God Were Blue (written during a residency at the Bogliasco Foundation, 2018, developed at New York Stage and Film and Playmaker’s Rep, featured play Colorado New Play Summit 2025), Edgardo or White Fire (Williamstown Theater Festival commission, Finalist O’Neill Playwrights Conference 2022, workshop at Writers Theatre 2023), Higher (Winner, 2011 Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Theater Visions Award, produced at A.C.T.), Luminescence Dating (Sloane Foundation Commission, produced at Ensemble Studio Theater NY and Magic Theater SF, Bay Area Theater Critics Best Original Script), Kinship (premiered at the Theatre de Paris starring Isabelle Adjani and then at WTF starring Cynthia Nixon) and The Fit (SF Playhouse 2019).

Perloff is the author of Beautiful Chaos: A Life in the Theater (City Lights Press 2015) and Pinter and Stoppard: A Director's View (Bloomsbury Methuen 2022), as well as numerous articles and speeches on the theater. She is currently working on a book about her exploration of the Oedipus cycle with actor John Douglas Thompson and composer David Coulter (upcoming workshop at Red Bull Theater , NYC, April 2025) and the relationship of that seminal work to contemporary theater. In 2007, Perloff was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and has been awarded honorary degrees from University of San Francisco and A.C.T. She has recently created her own digital theater platform, Tiny Theatricals, to share open online rehearsals of great plays with artists-in-training and with the general public.