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“[King John] moves through waves of self-appraisal. He becomes self-aware and conscious. He has been found to be the illegitimate son of Richard the Lionhearted, and is a Plantagenet, therefore he has access to a world of privilege. This knowledge gives him the change to step back and imagine himself in new scenarios, to see what he might become. And he vows to fit in, to be part of the world in a new way: He will court commodity, or as we translated it, self-interest.” Brighde Mullins, playwright
Playwright
Brighde Mullins
Brighde Mullins’s plays include Rare Bird; Those Who Can, Do; Monkey in the Middle; Fire Eater; Topographical Eden and Pathological Venus.
Her awards include a Guggenheim, a United States Artists Fellowship and a Whiting. She has held residencies at Lincoln Center, New York Stage and Film, Mabou Mines, and is a Usual Suspect at NYTW. She teaches at U.S.C. and lives in Los Angeles.
Dramaturg
Drew Barr
Drew Barr has directed productions of new, modern, and classical plays and musicals for theaters across the United States and around the world. He directed the Dutch-language premiere of the National Theatre of London’s War Horse, which opened the 2013 Holland Festival at Amsterdam’s Royal Carré Theatre before a year-long tour of the Netherlands and Belgium. For the National Theatre, he also directed the Australian premiere of War Horse, which ran in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. He was the Resident Director for War Horse on Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater. Also on Broadway, Drew served as associate director for Simon McBurney’s acclaimed revival of All My Sons by Arthur Miller, as well as Nicholas Hytner’s productions of Sweet Smell of Success and Twelfth Night. He recently served as associate director/dramaturg for the Simon McBurney and James Yeatman stage adaptation of Robert Evan’s autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture, which played a sold-out run at London’s Royal Court Theatre.
Drew’s other New York directing credits include the premiere of Neal Brennan’s one-man show, 3 Mics, which played at the Lynn Redgrave Theater and was recently filmed for Netflix. He directed revivals of Brian Friel’s Lovers and Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George for The Actors Company Theater (TACT) at the Clurman Theater, as well as the Off-Broadway premieres of Adam Bock’s The Typographer’s Dream and Karl Gajdusek’s Greedy, for Clubbed Thumb.
Regionally, Drew has directed for such companies as Great Lakes Theater, Idaho Shakespeare Festival, PlayMakers Repertory Company, Portland Stage Company, Perseverance Theatre, Boise Contemporary Theater, The Actors Company Theater, Clubbed Thumb and Page 73.
In addition to work as a private coach, Drew has directed and guest taught for many of the country’s leading actor training programs, including the Juilliard School, NYU’s Graduate Acting Program, SUNY Purchase, the University of Delaware’s PTTP, the University of Washington’s School of Drama and the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Degrees, Studies and Affiliations: M.F.A. Graduate Acting Program of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts; A.B., Drama (with Honors), Stanford University; SDC, AEA.
Katie Peterson
Katie Peterson is the author of three collections of poetry, This One Tree, Permission, and The Accounts. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely. Recently, she contributed a poem to the Boston Review’s 2017 anthology, Poems for Political Disaster. She has received fellowships to support her work from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With her partner Young Suh, she has made and shown multimedia work in film, sculpture, and artist’s books; last year Mills College Museum of Art presented a show of their collaborative work entitled “Can We Live Here? Stories from a Difficult World.” Peterson is Associate Professor of English at the University of California Davis where she teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program. She often teaches on a short term basis at Deep Springs College in rural Inyo County, California, where she is a member of the Board of Trustees.
In Print
King John
A rousing contemporary translation of Shakespeare’s classic exploration of early English monarchy.
In this modern take on Shakespeare’s King John, Brighde Mullins navigates the political twists and turns of early English monarchy. Mullins’s translation parses Shakespeare’s language carefully, with a focus on its sonic qualities. Her version focuses on the listener, developing the play for the immense pleasure of it—the fortuitous juxtapositions of the fates of these characters.
