•
Mark Jackson is an award-winning playwright, director, performer,
and teacher. He was Artistic Director of Art Street Theatre, San Francisco,
from 1995 to 2004, during which time he wrote, directed, and performed
in numerous productions for the company. Mark has also written and/or
directed for Shotgun Players, Aurora Theatre Company, Encore Theater
Company, Potrzebie Dance Project, EXIT Theatre, and
the American Conservatory Theater MFA Program, among others. His plays have been developed
at EXIT Theater, Playwrights Foundation, American Conservatory
Theater, Z-Space Studio, Capital Stage, and Magic Theatre.
Recent directorial projects include Yes, Yes to Moscow, which played at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Germany, and the San Francisco International Arts Festival; Don Juan at San Francisco State University, American $uicide for Encore Theatre Company and The Forest War for Shotgun Players, all of which he also wrote; Oscar Wilde’s Salome at Aurora Theatre Company; and both Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Orphan Muses and Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle for the American Conservatory Theater MFA Program. The Death of Meyerhold, written and directed by Mark at Shotgun Players in 2003, was subsequently produced by The Studio Theatre ( Washington DC) in 2005. Mark’s backstage farce, BANG, originally produced by Art Street in 1999, was produced by The Play Café at the 2004 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
In June 2003, Mark was the resident playwright of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, where he was awarded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Honorary Fellowship. He is a 2004 German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which took him to Berlin, Germany, for the 04/05 season to work with Mime Centrum Berlin, a practical research center for physical theater. Other awards and honors include two Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Awards, three SFBG Upstage/Downstage Awards, and the Theater Bay Area CA$H Grant. Mark’s writing has benefited three times from the generosity of the Tournesol Project, a granting program for the development of new work.
Mark graduated magna cum laude from San Francisco State University, where he was awarded the Theatre Arts Department Award for Outstanding Achievement in Directing. He has studied extensively with the Saratoga International Theater Institute, as well as Master Biomechanics instructor Gennadi Bogdanov. Mark has led workshops for actors at theaters and schools, and served on the faculties of Universities, in both California and Berlin, Germany, and was a Conservatory Associate at the American Conservatory Theater from 1999 to 2004. In addition to his work as a director and playwright, he continues to teach theater courses on a freelance basis at San Francisco State University, the American Conservatory Theater, and other organizations.
For
a more complete list of credits, download Mark’s CV.
I strive to create clear, dynamic storytelling images that are as specific as they are open to possibility. I’m drawn to theater that can only happen in the theater, and performances that are at once truthful and theatrical.
My influences in this regard are varied, but include Meyerhold, Stanislavski, Steven Berkoff, Bob Fosse, Ariane Mnouchkine and Théâtre du Soleil, SITI Company, architecture, modern art, modern dance, Buto, Kabuki, Shakespeare, the Bugs Bunny Road Runner Hour, American films from the 1920s to 40s, and twelve summers of making plays with forty kids out in the woods at the Sugarloaf Fine Arts Camp.
Don
Juan
Yes,
Yes to Moscow
American
$uicide
The
Forest War
Salome
The
Caucasion Chalk Circle
The
Death of Meyerhold
Io
Princess of Argos
I
Am Hamlet
The
Lost Plays of
Jacques du Bon Temps
Jacques du Bon Temps
Messenger
#1
Brave
| • San Francisco Chronicle on Yes, Yes to Moscow, May 2008: | |
| “In their wry, allusive, funny and surprisingly touching Yes, Yes to Moscow, Mark Jackson and his international collaborators use dance, reiterated passages from Three Sisters, song, clinical inquiry and sharply focused acting to probe the sisters' futures within their eternal present… It's a strangely absorbing piece that leaves an afterglow.” | |
| • KQED's Spark, episode featuring my work on American $uicide and The Forest War, May 2007: | |
| Click on this link to go to the KQED Spark
website and view the video: http://www.kqed.org/arts/people/spark/profile.jsp?id=16480 |
|
| • San Francisco Magazine, feature article, December 2006: | |
| “Even in a region with many excellent directors, Jackson’s smart, intensely physical work stands out. His plays are notable for their electricity and the elegant intelligence of his writing and staging; Jackson draws out the best in his collaborators and then forges their contributions into a coherent and affecting whole.” | |
| • San Francisco Bay Guardian on The Forest War, December 2006: | |
| “The Shakespearean plotline comes refracted startlingly, Akira Kurosawa–style, through a highly stylized lens — a fairly stunning mise-en-scène that astutely combines elements of Kabuki and Noh theater into a visual banquet with a palpitating dramatic energy behind it, all operating with a precise economy of movement, gesture, and sign… Jackson directs his actors beautifully, extracting performances that breathe individually and expansively inside the productively strict choreography and caricature demanded.” | |
| • San Francisco Chronicle on Oscar Wilde’s Salome, September 2006: | |
| “Mark Jackson's staging of Wilde's fairly rarely seen Salome, the Aurora Theatre's season opener, is a riveting experiment in creative tension between artistic, emotional and spiritual/fleshly extremes. Fierce and funny, as broadly caricatured as it is densely poetic, the show that opened Thursday inverts and subverts expectations to infuse uncommon life into a difficult text…” | |
| • Washington Post on The Death of Meyerhold, January 2005: | |
| “Mark Jackson's The Death of Meyerhold is a play on the march, a bristling, witty phalanx of old Russian poses advancing, at its best, with the force of a tank… It’s fast and funny… Anything is possible in this show… The Death of Meyerhold has more than its share of ambition and brio. The writing is expansive and sophisticated, with humor that keeps pompousness at bay.” | |
| • Back Stage West on The Death of Meyerhold, December 2003: | |
| “An ambitious new work by brilliant local playwright/director Mark Jackson… In three acts that are alternately funny, chilling, poignant, and starkly dramatic – and never less than consummately entertaining – Jackson traces the theatrical life of Vsevolod Meyerhold. …Stunning, and a must see.” | |
| • SF Weekly on I Am Hamlet, March 2002: | |
| “A hilarious show with flashes of brilliance. Jackson shapes his speeches and scenes (as both writer and performer) like an expert craftsman; his movement is careful and choreographed, and he knows how to carry the audience from a meditative sample of Shakespeare into wild rants about Stanislavski, the Yale School of Drama, and theater in San Francisco… I haven’t seen a performer on the edge of restraint (in an original script, where I had no idea what would happen) in far too long.” | |
| • Back Stage West on Messenger #1, March 2000: | |
| “Veering from word-drunk paeans of justice to sharp one-liners, Jackson knows how to weave the poignant and the scatological, the contemporary and the classical, together in an accessible and entertaining way that adds to the power of the original [Oresteia] in a sometimes startling manner.” | |
| • San Francisco Bay Guardian on R&J, October 1997: | |
| “This hallucinatory response to Romeo & Juliet is an inspired piece of work… Under Mark Jackson’s direction, the piece merges a distinctive theatrical grammar with music, movement, and Shakespeare’s text. …A rich meditation on a magical story and the nature of love, bristling with imagination and intelligence.” | |
• Summaries of plays – including production histories, cast requirements, running times, etcetera.
The list also includes some as-of-yet unproduced plays.
Here are the first twenty pages of several of my scripts. For full copies of any script, or to inquire about other titles not listed here, just email me with your request. For a complete list of plays available for production, download the Summaries PDF above.
•Megan’s
Baby (2005)
•Don
Juan (2004)
•The
Inspector (2003)
•The
Death of Meyerhold (2003)
•I
Am Hamlet (2002)
•Io
Princess of Argos (2001)
•Messenger
#1 (2000)
•Megan
and the Magic Compass (1999)
•BANG
(1999)
•Brave
(1998)
•Little
Extremes (1995)