Stephen
Mitchell
Eckert

Theatre Director

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.

Résumé/CV Contact

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.

Workshop Gallery

Revised and premiered during the coronavirus pandemic for Instagram Live.