Eric Rosen, co-founder and artistic director of About Face Theatre, will leave Chicago before the close of the 2007-2008 season to become artistic director of the 44-year-old Kansas City Repertory Theatre in Missouri. The Nov. 6 announcement took the theater and LGBT communities by surprise.
Rosen, 37, co-founded About Face with Kyle Hall in 1995 as a troupe to focus on themes of gender and sexual identity. Under Rosen, About Face has achieved a national profile through its own work, much of it original and self-developed, and through its co-ventures with other theater companies that resulted in such national successes as Clay; Winesburg, Ohio; and I Am My Own Wife, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award.
About Face will conduct a national search for Rosen’s successor, although Rosen will return to Chicago to develop new work and direct on a regular basis at About Face. Chicago-Kansas City co-productions also are a possibility.
The appointment is a dramatic change for Rosen. The Kansas City Rep (KC Rep) is much older, larger and more middle-of-the-road than About Face. Known for most of its life as the Missouri Repertory Theatre, the KC Rep has a multi-million dollar annual budget and operates two playhouses yet, arguably, lacks the national profile of About Face. The company does not have a reputation either for new work or alternative fare. Perhaps that’s the challenge drawing Rosen to the job. As a guest director, Rosen has staged Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful and Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses at the KC Rep.
In other theater news, Victory Gardens Theater Company has announced the addition of gay authors Nilo Cruz and Joel Drake Johnson to its distinguished Playwrights Ensemble. Cruz, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Anna in the Tropics, authored the current show at Victory Gardens, A Park in Our House. Chicagoan Johnson’s plays have been produced at Steppenwolf as well as Victory Gardens, which will stage his new play, Four Places, next spring.