![3.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58ef9045e58c6290e6f0263f/1523392810248-YA9DKYRIGQESCTM46Y29/3.jpg)
About
Stephen M. Eckert is a NYC-based theatrical director. Their artistic practice includes collaborating on new plays, musicals, performance pieces, and operas; as well as critical engagement with canonical texts. Critique, subversion, and irreverence are central to both their identity as queer and their interest in creating relevant, unabashedly political work that deconstructs and dismantles entrenched and often invisible white supremacist, patriarchal, and heteronormative artistic and cultural assumptions though the uniquely collaborative nature of performance.
They were the founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning Promethean Theatre Company in New Orleans from 2012-2017, and directed over a dozen productions with the company. Eckert has twice been nominated at New Orleans’ Big Easy Entertainment Awards for Best Director of a Drama for their work on The Flick and Equus, and since 2012 their productions have received a total of 13 nominations and 5 wins. Eckert has directed several premier productions of new work including the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival award-winning production of We Will Not Describe the Conversation, The Trouble with Dead Boyfriends, winner of the Premier Premieres Festival of musical comedy in Chicago, ID, Please at London’s TÊTE À TÊTE new opera festival, and A Small Breach in Protocol at Big Rick’s Rockin’ Skydive Academy at the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival.
Upcoming
The Myth of Sisyphus,
or Why Don’t We uN-aLIVE Ourselves?
or tHE lEGEND OF zELDA: mAJORA’S mASK 100% gLITCHLESS
Based on Albert Camus
In Process
A durational meat space and streaming performance colliding existentialist philosophy and video game speed-running.
Untitled Edward Hopper Opera
Conceived with Josh Brown (music), and Ryan Hudak (libretto)
In Process
A non-narrative opera exploring the work of American realist painter Edward Hopper.
Not Clickbait: An Instagram Live Play
Conceived with Izzi D'Esposito
In Process
An original performance piece exploring questions of trauma, performance, and social media through text, media, and live performance; referencing tools and aesthetic trappings of Youtube makeup vlogging and alien abduction confessions.
Workshopped at the CMU Studio 201 in Summer of 2017 with media designer, Adam J. Thompson and performer, Kennedy McMann.
Revised and premiered during the coronavirus pandemic for Instagram Live.
Directing Work
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
By Bertolt Brecht
Adapted by Stephen M. Eckert
From the Translation by Jennifer Wise
ID, Please
Music by Soosan Lolavar
Libretto by Daniel Hirsch
Edward II
By Christopher Marlowe
Adapted by Stephen M. Eckert & Keaton Shapiro
The Flick
By Annie Baker
Close to Nature
By Joe Necessary
We Will Not Describe the Conversation
By Eugenie Carabatsos
Pterodactyls
By Nicky Silver
Marry Me, a Little
By Stephen Sondheim
Conceived and Developed by Craig Lucas & Norman Rene
Long Day's Journey into Night
By Eugene O'Neill
EQUUS
By Peter Shaffer
The Actor's Nightmare / Titanic
By Christopher Durang