Michael Bloom

Michael Bloom is the eighth Artistic Director of the Cleveland Play House, the oldest regional theatre in the country. Recently at The Play House he directed Lost In Yonkers, Heavens My Destination, A Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Lincolnesque, Rabbit Hole, and Well. He has directed at many of the country’s major theatres, including American Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Old Globe Theatre, South Coast Rep, Seattle Rep, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Manhattan Theatre Club, Alley Theatre, Alliance Theatre Company, Cleveland Playhouse, Long Wharf Theatre, and the Sundance Playwright’s Institute. His productions have also been seen throughout Japan and in Tokyo at the Aoyama Theatre and Theatre Cocoon. His Off-Broadway production of Sight Unseen garnered three Obie Awards, and he himself received a Drama Desk nomination for direction. Other productions include the American premiere of A Young Lady From Rwanda, Gross Indecency (for which we won the Elliott Norton Award for Best Directing in 1998), the world premiere of Dinner With Friends at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the world premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Spring Storm.

Among the many  playwrights he’s worked with are: John Robin Baitz,  Stephen Belber, Don DeLillo, John Guare, David Hare, Arthur Kopit, Neil LaBute, David Lodge, Donald Margulies, David Mamet, and Wallace Shawn.

He served as Associate Director at American Repertory Theatre, and  taught at NYU, Harvard University, University of Texas, and Scripps College.  His articles on theatre have appeared in American Theatre Magazine and the New York Times, and his book Thinking Like A Director was published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in 2001. His adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, produced at The Play House in 2010, is published by Samuel French.