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Brooke Ciardelli was the founding artistic director of Northern Stage, a regional nonprofit theater located on the border of Vermont and New Hampshire, where she directed over sixty productions. Brooke has been honored by the New England Theatre Conference's Moss Hart Awards for Excellence in Theater three times, for All My Sons (2004), Les Misérables (2008), and Hamlet (2009). She directed a staged reading of Arthur Miller's then-unpublished Resurrection Blues with the playwright himself in residence. She has directed Patrick Stewart and Lisa Harrow in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and worked with playwright Sonja Linden on the American Premiere of The Strange Passenger.
Ciardelli has also directed regional premieres of Wit, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Pride's Crossing, and No Orchids For Miss Blandish, as well as a significant number of large-scale musicals. As a creator, Ciardelli has adapted a number of classical pieces for the stage including Ovid's Metamorphoses, O Myths, and The Shrew Tamer by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. She is working on a stage adaptation of Boccaccio's Decameron for international production.
Ciardelli received the Miller Estate's permission to create and direct a Muslim/Syrian version of A View from the Bridge. The production received its world premiere in a staged reading on Saturday evening, October 17, 2015, at the Arthur Miller Centennial Conference at St. Francis College. This interview took place February 6, 2015.
Stephen Marino: Welcome. On behalf of the readership of The Arthur Miller Journal, I would like to thank you for your willingness to be here today to discuss your insight in directing Miller plays, particularly this exciting, new version of A View from the Bridge.
I would like to start with your experiences as the founding artistic director at Northern Stage. You certainly cast a wide net in the plays you selected up there. I don't know if eclectic is quite the right word, but you staged classic tragedies from Agamemnon to Macbeth; many other plays are drawn from the twentieth-century dramatic repertoire, and you have done a fair share of musicals. I would like to know how, as an artistic director, you select those plays. Then how does that affect your work as a director working in such a mixture of styles and genres?
Brooke Ciardelli: I...