Karin Coonrod

Karin Coonrod is an American theater director and writer who is on the faculty of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. Coonrod is known for her modern adaptations of classic plays by William Shakespeare and other playwrights. She often chooses to direct plays produced from unusual sources such as lesser-known works by notable playwrights, creating/devising adaptations from non-dramatic sources, and the writings of notable figures in history.

Coonrod founded two theater companies: Arden Party (1987–1997) and Compagnia de' Colombari (2004–present). She has also directed several productions presented by Theatre for a New Audience. Her plays have been staged at several notable theaters including the Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Ohio Theater, American Repertory Theatre, and Folger Theatre.

Early life

Born to an Italian mother from Florence and an American father from Michigan City, Indiana, Coonrod grew up living between her parents' native homes in Europe and the Midwestern United States. She earned her undergraduate degree in English from Gordon College.

Career

Coonrod began her career as a teacher at an all-boys Catholic school in Monmouth County, New Jersey where she also ran the school's theater program. She later enrolled in a graduate theater program at Columbia University. First based in an old movie theater in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, Arden Party gained wider notoriety when, in 1988, the company moved to the Ohio Theater, then located in SoHo, Manhattan. By 1996, Coonrod had staged more than 20 adaptations of classic plays. She also directed other uncommon plays by lesser-known European playwrights and adaptations from atypical sources. —made up of an international company of theater makers with whom she produces the majority of her later plays. Her experimental theatrical style sometimes calls for the musicians and stage crew to operate in full view of the audience, serving as part of the ensemble cast, called "Black Angels". Her plays often break the fourth wall to include the audience.

Coonrod describes her trade as "staging sculpture" because it combines two of her artistic interests—visual depiction and the narrative form. The play was a critical success.

2000–2005, Theatre for a New Audience Coonrod later directed Shakespeare's King John, presented by the Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA), which opened on January 30, 2000, at The American Place Theatre. The following year, Coonrod's 2001 dramatization of the triptych of short stories Everything That Rises Must Converge unconventionally follows the text "word for word." This included "the attributions—he said, she said—and often the [narrator]'s omniscient intrusions that reveal a character's mind." The author Flannery O'Connor died in 1964, and her estate made strict adherence to the words in the text a precondition for allowing the dramatization to be staged. According to The Village Voice, "the constraints benefited the production, freeing the actors for more "conceptual interpretations of the action."

Coonrod directed Julius Caesar which opened in January 2003 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre and was presented by the TFANA. She adapts the play for modern viewers and alludes to present day politics by costuming the actors in Western-style business suit and tie. According to Weber, "Coonrod has encouraged a weaselly aspect from the performers… making the usurping senators seem like gossip mongers in the halls of Enron or lackeys in a Karl Rove strategy session" with "a conspiracy more venal than noble. And it works very well at first." Weber notes, as the play approaches the assassination in the finale, it "very quickly descends into bombastic melodrama."

Coonrod directed her third play for the Theater for a New Audience when she staged a production of Coriolanus by Shakespeare at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College in 2005. The play was given a stripped-down industrial-chic motif on an almost bare stage. The New York Times Charles Isherwood was critical of the play's lack of vivid presentation which he asserted Coriolanus needs "to come fully to life". John Heilpern's review for The New York Observer was more receptive, crediting Coonrod for "refusing to talk down to Shakespeare (and therefore to audiences)." Heilpern noted:

Compagnia de' Colombari For 2010's More Or Less I Am, Coonrod drew inspiration from Walt Whitman's 1855 poem "Song of Myself". The play was performed publicly at several locations in New York including Grant's Tomb and Joe's Pub at The Public Theatre. The production is a mixture of "dance, music, and spoken word." The play was produced again at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York in 2012.

In 2014, Coonrod directed one of Shakespeare's later plays, Tempest, staged at the La MaMa. The audience for this production were arranged in seats on three sides of the unadorned stage designed by Riccardo Hernandez but with "a layered soundscape of whistles, echoes, coos, breaths" coming from all around them and Christopher Akerlind's ominous lighting production. The first of three productions of the play at La MaMa that year, the play was two hours long with no intermissions. The New York Times described it as "a beautiful production" even though it takes "time to find a momentum it can sustain. It's not until the appearance of Stephano that things get going." Coonrod's other 2014 production, Orfeo in Orvieto, based on Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo,

In texts&beheadings/ElizabethR (2015), Coonrod "deconstructs to reconstruct" the public image and cultural depictions of Queen Elizabeth I. The script compiled by Coonrod consists of the queen's own words written "in personal and public letters, prayers and state speeches." The play is divided into four elements: Strategy, Survival, Prayers, and Sovereignty; each representing a force of influence on the queen's life and represented by a different actress inhabiting the central role of the protagonist. Coonrod produced the play with Compagnia de' Colombari and staged it, in 2015, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, In 2017, The Merchant of Venice, under its original title and again with Coonrod's direction, was staged at Montclair State University's Alexander Kasser Theater. In her adaptations of this Shakespearean play, Coonrod chose to split the role of Shylock among five actors, male and female. According to The New York Times, the production shows how Coonrod is not particularly interested in realism. Unlike the 1987 Danish feature film Babette's Feast, the director forgoes the culinary elements of the play and lets the audience imagine the preparation for the banquet.

Personal life Coonrod is married to Jonathan Geballe.