John Shea - Stage Work

Stage Work

Since his Broadway debut in "Yentl" Shea has continued to work in Off-Broadway and Broadway theatre productions, starring in Arthur Kopit's End of the World with Linda Hunt, directed by Hal Prince, Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive with Molly Ringwold, Anne Meara's Down the Garden Paths with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (Joseph Jefferson Award nom., Best Actor), the original production of A. R. Gurney's The Dining Room, Peter Parnell's The Sorrows of Stephen, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Poliakoff's American Days, for which he received a "Best Actor" nomination from the Drama Desk Awards, Romeo and Juliet on Broadway at The Circle in the Square Theatre, Philip Barry's The Animal Kingdom with Sigourney Weaver, Nancy Hasty's The Director, directed by Evan Bergman, and Israel Horowitz's The Secret of Madame Bonnard's Bath in 2007. He is currently the Artistic Director of the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket where he has helped produce over twenty five productions in the past four years and acted in David Harrower's Blackbird, a revival of The Director, Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still, and Orson Welles' Moby Dick Rehearsed; Shea served an apprenticeship at this same theatre while a college student under the direction of an early mentor, Joseph "Mac" Dixon.

Shea made his Carnegie Hall debut playing "The Soldier" in Tom O'Horgan's production of Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, with Pinchas Zukerman and Andre de Shields. In 1986, he made his London West End debut starring in Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart at the Albery Theatre.

Shea is also a regular reader on Selected Shorts for Symphony Space, broadcast nationwide on Public Radio International. His reading of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory won AudioFile Magazine's Earphones Award in 1999, as part of the anthology Selected Shorts: Classic Tales, Vol. XII. For his work reading Ted Bell's international thriller "Assassin," Shea received an Audie Award-nomination as "Best Male Narrator." He has also performed Bell's other novels: "Hawke", "Spy", "Pirate", "Czar", "Warlord", Phantom, "Nick of Time", and "The Time Pirate" among other audio books, including Jonathan Tropper's One Last Thing Before I Go.