American theatre directors

Thomas Newton Hill, Jr. (June 2, 1927 – April 20, 2009) was an Indian-born American character actor and director on stage for decades before starting in film in the mid-1960s and on television in the 1980s.

Caroline Flora Burke (née Berg; July 7, 1913 – December 5, 1964) was an American actress, theater producer, television producer, writer, and art collector. She appeared in several films in the early 1940s before becoming a theater producer in New York City, notably producing several stage productions of Harold Pinter plays and Broadway productions. She also worked as a producer for NBC in the 1950s, and at the time was the company's only female producer.The daughter of a prominent Portland, Oregon businessman, Burke studied art history at Bryn Mawr College before embarking on a short-lived career as an actress. Her first role was a starring part in The Mysterious Rider (1942), which she followed with three minor film appearances before retiring from film acting. In the 1950s, she transitioned into executive and production work for NBC, as well as theatre producing for various Broadway and Off-Broadway productions. In addition to her career in entertainment, Burke also taught television production at Columbia University, and was the founder of the art history department at Reed College. She died of undisclosed causes in 1964 while in the midst of producing a second Harold Pinter stage production, which opened the week following her death.
Burke and her husband, business executive Erwin Swann, owned a significant art collection of modernist paintings and sculpture—including works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, and Auguste Rodin—which has showed at several national art museums. Additionally, the couple's collection of cartoon and caricature artwork is owned by the U.S. Library of Congress.

Lou Tellegen (born Isidor Louis Bernard Edmon van Dommelen; November 26, 1881 or 1883 – October 29, 1934) was a Dutch-born stage and film actor, film director and screenwriter.

Gabriel Barre (born James Gabriel Barre, August 26, 1957) is an American director and actor. Best known for creating original musicals, his work has been seen on Broadway, throughout the United States, and across four continents internationally.

Nancy Hamilton (July 27, 1908 - February 18, 1985) was an American actress, playwright, lyricist, director and producer.

Davey Marlin-Jones (May 8, 1932 – March 2, 2004) was an American stage director, as well as a local television personality. He was born in Winchester, Indiana, and was known as a tireless advocate for the local stage and theatrical scene in the many places he lived during his long career.
From 1970 to 1987, he was a film and arts critic for WUSA-TV (formerly WTOP and WDVM), the CBS affiliate in Washington, DC. During much of that time, he also performed the same duties for WDIV-TV in Detroit. He was known for his eccentric on-air style in reviewing films and theatre and cultural events. One example of his style was the use of index cards when he reviewed films, and he would keep or throw away the card depending on whether he liked or hated the film. He enunciated with theatrical bravura and often wore large black-rimmed glasses and sometimes sported an Alpine hat.
After John and Hazel Wentworth, founders of the Washington Theater Club, divorced in the 1960s, he and Hazel Wentworth continued the Club's operations. He directed many of its performances. He was awarded the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (Robert Edwin Lee) Theatre Research Margo Jones Award in 1968.Prior to his death, Marlin-Jones was a Professor of Theater and Playwriting for fifteen years at UNLV. In 1997 he won the "Excellence in Theatre Education Award" from the Board of Governors of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. The American College Theater Festival Respondent's Choice Award has been renamed the "Davey Marlin Jones Respondent's Choice Award."

Martin Magner (March 5, 1900 – January 30, 2002) was a German-American theatre, radio, and television director.
Magner was born in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland); his father was a Lutheran director of a shipping line and his mother a Jewish concert pianist. He acted in the Hamburg Chamber Theatre from the age of 18 and replaced the general director of the company when he left for fear of the Nazis, despite his protest that he was himself Jewish. Four years later, on March 21, 1933, after being ordered to fire the company's remaining Jews, he fled to Vienna.For the following three years he worked there, in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), and in Prague, where he directed operas. During these years he won praise from George Bernard Shaw, who liked his production of his play Too True to Be Good enough to call Magner an exception to his rule that "Youth is wasted on the young", and Sigmund Freud, who offered to train him as a lay psychoanalyst on the strength of a play about a psychiatrist. He declined.In 1936 Magner emigrated to the United States, settling in Chicago, where a Prague friend, Kurt Adler, was doing theatre work. For a while he taught at Northwestern University and again directed opera. In the 1940s he moved to radio and then in 1943 to television, working as a producer and director for 25 years, first for NBC and then from 1950 to 1965 for CBS in New York. His work included pioneering shows like Studio One, The Goldbergs, Lamp Unto My Feet, and Robert Montgomery Presents, and he hired a young Studs Terkel.After having to retire when he reached the age of 65, he moved to California and returned to theatre; he became the artistic director of the Inglewood Playhouse and started the New Theatre Inc. with Hope Summers. He made a practice of celebrating his birthday by directing a challenging play: for his 98th, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Play Strindberg and for his 99th, the West Coast premiere of Thomas Hurlimann's The Envoy. He preferred classics; other examples were Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Ben Jonson's Volpone, Jean Paul Sartre's The Condemned of Altona, Somerset Maugham's The Sacred Flame, and Athol Fugard's Blood Knot. He often used multi-racial casts.The Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle gave him a special award in 1975 and a lifetime achievement award in 1989.Magner enjoyed mountain climbing. He was married for the third time to the photographer Marion Palfi; she died of breast cancer in 1979. He died of cancer in Los Angeles.

Harold I. Hansen (1914-1992) was a major theatre professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) and the director of the Hill Cumorah Pageant from 1937 to 1977, excluding the years during World War II in which it was not held.
Hansen was born in Logan, Utah. Hansen did his undergraduate education at Utah State University. He then received an offer of a graduate assistantship at the University of Idaho to continue studies in drama, but at the urging of David O. McKay he accepted the call he had already received to serve in the Eastern States Mission. Hansen had very much hoped to serve in Denmark. It was while a missionary in the Eastern States mission that Hansen first served as director of the Hill Cumorah Pageant. Although pageants had been produced at the Hill Cumorah the previous two years, 1937 was the first year that H. Wayne Driggs' script, which would be the basis of the pageant until 1987, was used. Thus as the first director Hansen essentially had to figure out the ways to move from the script to actual production that would remain the main outline of the production for the next half-century, or ten years beyond his retirement as director.
It was also there that he met Betty Kotter, also serving as a missionary in the mission, who he later married. They were actually married at the flagpole on the Hill Cumorah on July 16, 1940, just before a production of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, and about a year after Hansen had finished his mission. Harold would later claim this was where he and Betty first met, but she claimed the story he told of their first encounter was largely made up. They were sealed in the Logan Temple the following month.
After his mission Hansen earned a master's degree in drama at Iowa State University. His thesis was on the history of drama as supported by religious institutions in the United States. From 1941 to 1942 Hansen was a seminary and institute instructor with the Church Educational System. He then performed at The Cleveland Play House until 1945 when he joined the faculty of Michigan State University. He then returned to Utah State University where he joined the Drama faculty and earned a Ph.D. in 1949 with the subject of his doctoral dissertation being a history of Mormon Theatre. In 1952 Hansen was recruited by Brigham Young University president Ernest L. Wilkinson to replace T. Earl Pardoe as head of the Drama department. From his start at BYU Hansen was producing cutting edge shows. During his first season he managed to perform both The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman. The reason this was exceptional is that at the time both shows were still running on broadway. In many ways the biggest BYU production done by Hansen was Sand in their Shoes, a musical about the Mormon Pioneers with text by Don Oscarson and music by Crawford Gates.
While head of the BYU Theatre Department Hansen oversaw the implementation of graduate studies in 1960 and the move to suitable space in the Harris Fine Arts Center in 1965. Hansen remained the head of the BYU Theatre Department until 1979.
While working at BYU Hansen was also involved as the co-owner and co-director with Lael Woodbury of the Ledges Theatre in Grand Ledge, Michigan from 1960 to 1967. They had previously from 1947 to 1952 run the Proscenium Players, also in Grand Ledge, from 1947 to 1952. From the end of World War II until 1977 Hansen had also served as director of the Hill Cumorah Pageant. In 1977 Hansen was replaced as director of the Hill Cumorah Pageant by Jack Paul Sederholm, who had studied at BYU and was then chair of the communications art department at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Sederholm had served for 12 years previously as Hansen's chief assistant.In 1967 BYU Press published a book authored by Hansen with the same title as his doctoral dissertation.Hansen and his wife Betty were the parents of four daughters.
The Harris Fine Arts Center has a rehearsal hall named for Hansen.

Donn B. Murphy (July 21, 1930 – April 3, 2022) taught theatre and speech courses at Georgetown University from 1954 to 2000. At the invitation of Jacqueline Kennedy and Letitia Baldrige, he became a theatrical advisor to the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson Administrations for White House dramatic and music presentations in the East Room (1961–1965). He was a founding member of the National Theatre Corporation (1974) and was Vice-President and then President and Executive Director of the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. from 1974 to 2010.

Richard David Barr (September 6, 1917 – January 9, 1989) was an American theater director and producer. He served as the president of the League of American Theatres and Producers from 1967 until his death.