Artistic Director of Theater J
As Artistic Director of Theater J – a program of the Washington DCJCC with an Actors' Equity Small Professional Theatre Tier 7 Contract and membership in the League of Washington Theatres, TCG, Cultural Alliance, and the Association for Jewish Theatre - Roth has produced over 100 mainstage productions, including 35 world premieres and 150 staged workshops and readings. He has been credited with leading Theater J to “national prominence as a home for edgy, politically charged plays – and for nurturing risky new works” since his arrival there in 1997.
A “rare mix of professional polish, thoughtful dramaturgy and nervy experimentation - all in a spot just far enough off the New York radar for a playwright to relax” has helped to make Theater J the “premier theater for premieres,” host to new plays from Joyce Carol Oates’s The Tattooed Girl and Wendy Wasserstein’s Welcome to My Rash and Third, to Robert Brustein’s Spring Forward, Fall Back, Neena Beber’s Jump/Cut, and Richard Greenberg's Bal Masque.
In addition to creating a hospitable environment for playwrights and embracing provocative subjects in its season offerings, under Roth’s leadership Theater J has become known for its programming Beyond the Stage; Peter Marks has described the Theater J post-show discussion format as “a chance to digest and puzzle out en masse, in an entirely exhilarating way.”
Read more about this topic: Ari Roth
Famous quotes containing the words artistic, director and/or theater:
“Few artists can afford artistic temperament.”
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“When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go. You heard of that market crash in ‘29? I predicted that.... I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said; nerves, I said. Then I asked myself, “What’s General Motors got to be nervous about?” “Overproduction,” I says. “Collapse.””
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“All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)