Emily Mann: The Humanist Code of Theater

The theater is essential to the health of a nation – of any democracy. And perhaps we are so impoverished right now is because of our inability to communicate with each other and see anyone else’s point of view other than our own is that we are theater starved. This is where one gets the whole package of the humanist code is in the theater. This is where the big ideas of the day are truly debated, and this has been going on since the Greeks! 

A good play doesn’t give you resolutions — a good play sends you out with a myriad of questions to talk about. ~Emily Mann

Emily Mann is a playwright, screenwriter, director, mentor, and McCarter Theater’s Artistic Director and Resident Playwright Emerita, dedicated to creating and supporting theater that impels conversation, debate, and empathy in an increasingly polarized world.

Emily Mann is a Tony nominated director and playwright and a Tony winning Artistic Director. In her thirty years as Artistic Director and Resident Playwright at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, she wrote fifteen new plays and adaptations, directed over fifty productions, produced 180 plays and musicals, and supported and directed the work of emerging and legendary playwrights including Ntozake Shange, Athol Fugard, Edward Albee, Chris Durang, Nilo Cruz and Danai Gurira and is known for her productions of Williams, Lorca, Chekhov, and Shakespeare. On Broadway, she directed her own plays Execution of Justice and Having Our Say, Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Her other plays include: Still Life; Annulla, An Autobiography; Greensboro (A Requiem); Meshugah; Mrs. Packard, Gloria,A Life which aired on PBS’ Great Performances and The Pianist, a play with music Her adaptations include: Baby Doll, Scenes from a Marriage, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, A Seagull in the Hamptons, The House of Bernarda Alba, and Antigone. Awards include: Peabody, Guggenheim, Hull Warriner, NAACP, 6 Obies; Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, WGA nominations; Princeton University Honorary Doctorate of Arts; Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwrights’ Award; Margo Jones Award; TCG Visionary Leadership Award; The Lilly and Gordon Davidson Awards for Lifetime Achievement in the Theater, and The Dramatists Guild Award for Lifetime Achievement in Playwriting. She has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and The American Theater Hall of Fame.

Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater by Alexis Greene is the story of a remarkable American playwright, director, and artistic director. It is the story of a woman who defied the American theater’s sexism, a traumatic assault, and illness to create unique documentary plays and to lead the McCarter Theatre Center, for thirty seasons, to a place of national recognition.

The book traces and describes Emily Mann’s family life; her coming-of-age in Chicago during the exuberant, rebellious, and often violent 1960s; how sexual violence touched her personally; and how she fell in love with theater and began learning her craft at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while a student at Radcliffe.

Mann’s evolution as a professional director and playwright is explored, first at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where she received an MFA from the University of Minnesota, then on and off Broadway and at regional theaters. Mann’s leadership of the McCarter is examined, along with her battles to overcome multiple sclerosis and to conquer—personally and artistically—the memories of the violence she experienced when a teenager.

Finally, the book discusses her retirement from the McCarter, while amplifying her ongoing journey as a theater artist of sensitivity and originality.

“Alexis Greene’s authoritative biography of playwright/director Emily Mann narrates the life and artistic story of one of the most important people in contemporary American theatre since the Civil Rights era. Mann, the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, was the first woman to direct on the stage of the Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theatre, the first to become the artistic director of Princeton, NJ’s, McCarter Theatre, and the first to write plays that became known as “theatre of testimony.” The book chronicles her career in the American theatre at a historical moment when movements for racial, gender, and social justice, in Mann’s vision, gave it purpose and energy.”