David Chambers is a director, writer, and producer of theatre, opera, film, and television. His stage work has been seen on and off Broadway, at major regional theatres around the U.S., and theatres in Europe. He has staged numerous U.S. premieres of American, Canadian, British, and European plays and original translations at theatres such as Broadway’s ANTA, Circle in the Square, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Tyrone Guthrie Theater, the Goodman Theatre, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and the Manhattan Theatre Club (of which he was an early co-founder). He has also directed half the Shakespeare canon and the major plays of Molière, as well as numerous other classical and modern plays. He has enjoyed long-term artistic relationships with South Coast Repertory in California where he was an Artistic Associate, Washington DC’s famed Arena Stage, where he served as Associate Producing Director and later as Producer, and the Yale Repertory Theatre as a resident director. In opera he has directed in venues including PS 122, the New Haven Festival of Arts and Ideas, Bard Summerscape, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and The Prague National Theatre. Chambers is a Professor of Directing at Yale School of Drama; since 1987 he has taught everything from Shakespeare in performance for actors and directors to intensive text analysis of Chekhov to devised contemporary theatre. In addition, he founded The Meyerhold Project, a co-venture between Yale School of Drama and the Saint Petersburg Academy of Theater Arts. This project, which spanned several years, ultimately created an independent production about revolutionary director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1926 landmark staging of Gogol’sInspector General. The performance, complete with biomechanics, digital media, and internet rehearsing was presented in Russia, Holland, and the US. Continuing his pursuit of practical Russian theatre techniques Chambers is currently writing a book for London's Routledge Press about Analysis Through Action, a directing and acting technique barely known in the west which is based on the last experiments of Stanislavksi and generationally revised up to today's leading Russian avant-garde directors. In film he worked closely with producer/director Robert DeNiro on The Good Shepherd starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, and was the Producing Director of Shakespeare Now, a project of The Documentary Group in New York and LA. He has written book and lyrics for musicals, librettos for operas, and translation/adaptations of plays by Ibsen and Molière. During the 2015-16 academic year he will be teaching and directing at Harvard University, The New School in New York, and Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in London.
