Peter Sellars

Peter Sellars (born September 27, 1957) is an American theatre director, noted for his unique stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays.

Sellars is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action.

He has been described as a key figure of theatre and opera for the last 50 years.

Sellars was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

He attended Harvard University.

As an undergraduate, he performed a puppet version of Wagner's Ring cycle, and directed a minimalist production of Three Sisters.

Sellars's additional productions included Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in the swimming pool of Harvard's Adams House and a subsequent techno-industrial production of King Lear, which included a Lincoln Continental on stage with music by Robert Rutman's U.S. Steel Cello Ensemble.

In his senior year, Sellars staged a production of Nikolai Gogol's The Inspector-General at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge.

He graduated from Harvard in 1980.

In the summer of 1980, Sellars staged a production in New Hampshire of Don Giovanni, with the cast, costumed and presented to resemble a blaxploitation film as part of the Monadnock Music Festival in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Opera News described it as "an act of artistic vandalism".

In the winter of 1980, Sellars's production of George Frideric Handel's Orlando, again at the American Repertory Theatre, was set in outer space.

Later, Sellars studied theatre and related arts in Japan, China, and India.

In 1981, Sellars worked on a project with Andy Warhol and Lewis Allen that would create a traveling stage show with a life-sized animatronic robot in the exact image of Warhol.

The Andy Warhol Robot would then be able to read Warhol's diaries as a theatrical production.

Warhol was quoted as saying, "I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?"

Sellars planned to show the Andy Warhol Robot at the Kennedy Center and American National Theater and Academy.

Sellars served as director of the Boston Shakespeare Company for the 1983–1984 season.

His productions included Pericles, Prince of Tyre and a staging of The Lighthouse, with music by British composer Peter Maxwell Davies.

In 1983 he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Sellars was the original director of the 1983 Broadway musical My One and Only, a revival of the George & Ira Gershwin show Funny Face.

However, the avant-garde approach of Sellars and librettist Timothy Mayer clashed with the more traditional take of star Tommy Tune, who eventually took over as the director.

As Sellars told The New York Times, it was a struggle "between the forces of Brecht and the forces of The Pajama Game."

In 1984, Sellars was named director and manager of the American National Theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. at the age of 26; he held this post until 1986.

During his time in Washington, Sellars staged a production of The Count of Monte Cristo, in a version by James O'Neill, featuring Richard Thomas, Patti LuPone, and Zakes Mokae.

The production had a set design by George Tsypin, with costumes by Dunya Ramicova, and lighting by James F. Ingalls.

He also directed productions of Idiot's Delight by Robert Sherwood, and Sophocles's Ajax, as adapted by Robert Auletta.

The productions were recorded in Austria by ORF in 1989, subsequently televised by PBS, and later revived at the MC93 Bobigny in Paris and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.

Sellars directed one feature film, The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez, a silent color film starring Joan Cusack, Peter Gallagher, Ron Vawter, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

He co-wrote and was featured in Jean-Luc Godard's film of the Shakespeare play King Lear.

The Salzburg and Glyndebourne Festivals invited Sellars to produce operas, including Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise, Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, John Adams's and Alice Goodman's Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, and Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin.

Sellars also staged Handel's opera Giulio Cesare and oratorio Theodora, and Stravinsky's A Soldier's Tale, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, in addition to I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky and The Peony Pavilion.

Sellars was Artistic Director of the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals.

Sellars produced the three operas by Mozart with libretti by da Ponte, Così fan tutte (set in a diner on Cape Cod), The Marriage of Figaro (set in a luxury apartment in New York City's Trump Tower), and Don Giovanni (set in New York City's Spanish Harlem, cast and costumed as a blaxploitation movie), in collaboration with Emmanuel Music and its Artistic Director, Craig Smith.

He directed an production of The Persians at the Edinburgh Festival in 1993, which presented the play as a response to the Gulf War of 1990–91.

Sellars was the librettist for the opera Doctor Atomic composed by John Adams.

In August 2006, he directed a staged performance of Mozart's unfinished opera Zaide as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in New York.

In late 2006, Sellars organized the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna, Austria as Artistic Director (the festival was part of Vienna Mozart Year 2006).

He directed the premieres of Saariaho's oratorio La Passion de Simone and Adams's opera A Flowering Tree, also in Vienna.

In 2007, Sellars delivered the "State of Cinema" address at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival on April 29.