John Gould Rubin

Teaches at Primary Stages ESPA

John Gould Rubin (Director) is Artistic Director of The Private Theatre, for which he directed a radical, site-specific Hedda Gabler and Strindberg’s Playing with Fire, graphically produced at The Box, a notorious burlesque house. He just directed Outside Mullingar at The Dorset Summer Theater and, before that, Michael Ricigliano’s play Queen for a Day Off-Broadway; Riding The Midnight Express both Off-Broadway and at the Soho Theater in London; Double Indemnity for the Old Globe. He was also co-Artistic and Executive Director of LAByrinth Theater Company, for which he directed eight shows (including premieres by John Patrick Shanley and Erin Cressida Wilson) and produced Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train(in NY & Europe) and Our Lady of 121st Street (also Off-Broadway). Other recent New York Work includes: Kindertransport, The Cherry Orchard with Ellen Burstyn, Dark of the Moon, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,Caucasian Chalk Circle, Reza De Wet’s Three Sisters Two, Royston Coppenger’s translation of The Seagull, and the Off-Broadway musical The Fartiste; he developed a version of Peer Gynt centered around wheelchair-using British actor Neil Hancock for The International Ibsen Festival in Oslo, and a bilingual workshop of Ximena Escalante’s Electra Despierta at Cal Arts. He wrote and performed in Karole Armitage’s multi-media show The Predators’ Ball, which premièred at The Pergola Theater in Florence and at The Next Wave Festival at BAM. He is devising three large-scale works: one on Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps, and the war in the Dominican Republic; another on the consciousness of American polarization; and another on the idiosyncratic life of Erik Satie. His project about the comedy and activism of Dick Gregory, Turn Me Loose, will premiere at The Culture Project this September with Joe Morton in the title role. He also produced the tour of Stephen Dillane’s one-man Macbeth to London, Sydney, and New Zealand.