About Jesse Berger - Artistic Director

As founding artistic director of Red Bull Theater, Jesse Berger has adapted and directed productions of Pericles, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Edward the Second, Women Beware Women, The Duchess of Malfi and The Witch of Edmonton.  All six productions received critically-acclaimed extended Off Broadway runs.  Jesse’s adaptations of The Revenger’s Tragedy and Women Beware Women are published by Dramatists Play Service.  Red Bull Theater continues to produce an eclectic variety of classical and contemporary work under Jesse’s leadership, including In-The-Raw play development workshops, Bull Session symposiums, Direct Address education and outreach initiatives, and the OBIE Award-Winning Revelation Reading Series.

Jesse has also directed in New York and across the country at such theaters as Denver Center Theatre Company (Richard III) The Old Globe (Othello), Pittsburgh Public Theatre (The Laramie Project, I Am My Own Wife, Life X 3, A Number, Circle Mirror Transformation), New York Theater Workshop, SoHo Rep, Lincoln Center Theater Director’s Lab at Here, Theaterworks, Pearl Theatre, Urban Stages, Barrington Stage (Sleuth, Absurd Person Singular), Great Lakes Theater Festival, Dorset Theatre Festival, Theatre J, the Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Hamptons, and St. Louis Shakespeare Festivals, the Asolo Theatre Company, Washington Shakespeare Company (Marat/Sade), among others, including directing Michael Learned in All's Well That Ends Well. Jesse has also helped develop new plays at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and the Playwright’s Center.  He was nominated for the SDC Joe A. Callaway Award for excellence in directing for The Witch of Edmonton, and he received a Helen Hayes Award for his direction of Marat/Sade.

Jesse was associate director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC for three seasons, working with Michael Kahn, Patrick Stewart, Kelly McGillis, Elizabeth Ashley and others on 20 productions, as well as staging King Lear and Merry Wives of Windsor for the Shakespeare Theatre Company at the 4,000-seat outdoor Carter Barron Amphitheater. Jesse assistant directed the revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man on Broadway in 2000, and was the 1999 US Directing Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where he assisted Tim Carroll and Mark Rylance. Jesse began his professional career as an apprentice to Garland Wright at The Guthrie Theater and was his assistant director on productions of The Tempest, Old Times, Babes in Arms, and King Lear.

Jesse has taught and directed at the Juilliard School of Drama, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, the Shakespeare Theatre Academy for Classical Acting, University of Texas-Austin, the Guthrie Theater/University of Minnesota, Bard College, New School/Lang College, Virginia Commonwealth University, Michael Howard Studios, and the American Academy of Dramatic Art.

Jesse trained at Central College in London and Southern Utah University, home of the Utah Shakespearean Festival. A recipient of the NEA/TCG Directors grant and a nominee for the Alan Schneider Award, Jesse is a member of Lincoln Center Theatre Director’s Lab, the Society of Directors and Choreographers, and New York Theatre Workshop’s Usual Suspects.  Jesse also sits on the National Advisory Board of Southern Utah University College of Performing and Visual Arts, and the Drama League Directors Project's National Advisory Council.