Fellowship / Fellows

Lee Breuer

  • 2005–2006
  • Arts
  • Mabou Mines Theatre Company
Headshot of Lee Breuer
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Lee Breuer is primarily interested in reinventing choral narrative for the contemporary stage. He approaches this goal from two perspectives: the acting and movement storytelling, as in his series The Animation, and musical storytelling, as in the Gospel at Colonus. He is exploring a project in Greece based on Aeschylus that intentionally combines all three choral disciplines—acting, singing, and dancing—to find the equation between Eastern narrative theater and Western psychological theater forms.

During his year at Radcliffe, Breuer will simultaneously complete a book-length trilogy of comic epic poems—“La Divinia Caricatura,” his Swiftian spin on Dante—and adapt the entire work for musical theater. This trilogy of musicals, which could be staged on three successive nights, proposes to reinvent the language of the modern American musical in postmodern terms. The text and lyrics are written to be performed not only by actors, singers, dancers, and puppets, but also by computer-animated cartoons.

Breuer is best known as an adapter and director of postmodern productions: the Pulitzer- and Tony-nominated Gospel at Colonus starring Morgan Freeman and the “Best Production” OBIE Award–winning stagings of Peter and Wendy and Mabou Mines DollHouse. He has directed twelve OBIE Award?winning performances and has himself been awarded OBIEs for “Best Play,” “Best Production,” “Directing,” and “Lifelong Achievement."” Breuer has been awarded playwriting grants and fellowships from CAPS, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and others. He has also received Fulbright and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships.

Lee Breuer’s Search for Catharsis (Harvard Gazette, 12/8/05)

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