Richard Schechner received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1956, a Master's degree from the University of Iowa two years later, and a Ph.D. from Tulane University in 1962. He edited The Drama Review, formerly the Tulane Drama Review, from 1962–1969; and again from 1986 to the present. Schechner went on to become one of the founders of the Performance Studies department of the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He founded The Performance Group of New York in 1967 and was its artistic director until 1980, when TPG changed its name to The Wooster Group. The home of both TPG and TWG is the Performing Garage in New York'sSoHo district, a building acquired by Schechner in 1968. That year Schechner signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. In 1992, Schechner founded East Coast Artists, of which he was the artistic director until 2009. He additionally writes for journals worldwide. In the 1990s, Schechner originated "rasaboxes," a technique of emotional training for performers and others. Beginning in 2007, the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies at the Shanghai Theatre Academy began publishing the bi-annual TDR/China.
Published works
Books
Public Domain
Environmental Theater
Theatres, Spaces, and Environments
Essays on Performance Theory
The End of Humanism
From the Ramlila to the Avantgarde
Between Theater and Anthropology
The Engleburt Stories
The Future of Ritual
Performance Theory
Performance Studies—An Introduction
Over, Under, and Around
Performed Imaginaries
Edited works
Dionysus in '69
Ritual, Play, and Performance
By Means of Performance
The Grotowski Sourcebook.
Theatrical/directorial works
In March 2005, the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies was inaugurated as part of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, where Schechner is an Honorary Professor. With The Performance Group Schechner directed many productions including Dionysus in 69 based on Euripides' The Bacchae, Makbeth based on Shakespeare's Macbeth, Commune group devised piece, Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, David Gaard's The Marilyn Project, Seneca's Oedipus, Terry Curtis Fox's Cops, and Jean Genet's The Balcony. With East Coast Artists, Schechner has directed Faust/gastronome, Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, William Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Schechner's and Saviana Stanescu's YokastaS, Lian Amaris's Swimming to Spalding, Imagining O. Schechner has also directed in Asia and Africa: Anton Chekhov's Cherry ka Baghicha in New Delhi, Sun Huizhu's Mingri Jiuyao Chu Shan August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at the Grahamstown Festival, South Africa, Aeschylus's The Oresteia, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. While in New Orleans from 1960–67, Schechner was a producing director with John O'Neal and Gilbert Moses of the Free Southern Theater and a founding director with Franklin Adams and Paul Epstein of the New Orleans Group. Schechner was instrumental in identifying many exceptional writers, including Sam Shepard, Jean-Claude VanItallie, Murray Mednick, Ronald Tavel and Canadian-trained Megan Terry, whose techniques he compared to Shakespeare. He described Terry's "Viet Rock" as "Elizabethan in scope and tone." Plays, Schechner maintained, should be "wrought" rather than "written" - and he implied that Shakespeare "wrought" large at the turn of the seventeenth century by working closely with London's burgeoning theatrical companies. Schechner sought to emulate this technique in the late sixties with his Performance Group. Schechner is currently editor of the Enactments series published by Seagull Books and editor of the Worlds of Performance series published by Routledge.
