Joseph Haj, Artistic Director of The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and a leading figure in the American theater, will be featured in a special live-streamed event,“Shakespeare’s Place in America: An Interview with Joseph Haj” on Thursday, March 17, 5:00-6:30. The event, sponsored by ShakespeareAmerica, is free to the public.

Livestream link here: https://youtu.be/IX6MVu3RYJE

David McCandless, Director of Shakespeare Studies at Southern Oregon University, will conduct the interview. According to McCandless, Haj is the perfect person to handle queries about Shakespeare’s relevance in contemporary American theater.
“Joe Haj is an eloquent advocate for the classics in general and Shakespeare in particular,’ McCandless notes, “but, at the same time, he embraces an emphatically inclusive vision of how Shakespeare should (continue to) be performed.”

Haj is no stranger to local audiences, having helmed three productions at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Henry V (2012), with actor john Tufts blending heroism and savagery in the title role; Pericles (2014), one of the festival’s most popular
productions of the last decade, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2020), a richly musical, outward-looking production cut short by the Covid crisis. Haj began his professional theatrical career as an actor, working with such luminous directors as Peter Sellars, Anne Bogart, Garland Wright, and Sir Peter Hall.

In 2006, he became the Artistic Director of PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a position he held until 2015, when he succeeded Joe Dowling to become the Guthrie’s Eighth Artistic Director. In his relatively short tenure at the Guthrie, Haj has already directed two Shakespeare plays, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare America is an SOU-OSF consortium, founded by David Humphrey, Director of the Oregon Center for the Arts at SOU, and Paul Nicholson, Executive Director Emeritus at OSF. Past events have included special interviews with Oskar Eustis, Bill Rauch, and Peter Sellars, and panel discussions on the subjects of “African-American Shakespeare,” “Directing Shakespeare in the 21st Century,” and
“The Woman’s Part in Shakespeare.”