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.[1]
This article is about the American director. For the British actor, see Peter Sellers. For the British-American astronaut, see Piers Sellers.
Peter Sellars
Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
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.[2]
Career[edit]
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.[3] The Andy Warhol Robot would then be able to read Warhol's diaries as a theatrical production.[4] Warhol was quoted as saying, "I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?"[5] Sellars planned to show the Andy Warhol Robot at the Kennedy Center and American National Theater and Academy.[6]
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.[7]
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."[8]
Reception[edit]
Sellars was criticized for straying too far from composers' intentions in 1997 by György Ligeti.[25]
In 1998, Sellars was awarded the Erasmus Prize for "combining in his original creations the European and American cultural traditions".[26] In 2001, he was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal.[27] In 2005, Sellars was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, given annually to "a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind's enjoyment and understanding of life."[28] In 2014, alongside Chuck Berry, Sellars was awarded the Polar Music Prize.[29]
The German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf said of Sellars, "I have seen what he has done, and it is criminal. As my husband used to say, so far no one has dared go into the Louvre Museum to spray graffiti on the Mona Lisa, but some opera directors are spraying graffiti over masterpieces."[30]
Sellars's long-time collaborator John Adams has called him an "intensely serious and sophisticated artist with the moral zeal of an abolitionist."[31]
The Palestinian-American academic, literary critic and political activist Edward Said described Sellars as an "extraordinarily gifted man". In a 1989 review of Sellars's productions of Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte and The Marriage of Figaro, Said wrote that the "turns that Sellars rings on Mozart's courtly operas make you wonder why wooden delicacy and affectations of authenticity have satisfied us for so long. We learn through Sellars that they never did satisfy us, not just because their silly conventions leave Mozart untouched but also because they protect the laziness and incompetence of most opera companies." In 1996, Said characterized Sellars's Covent Garden staging of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler as "compelling and brilliant in conception" and "deliberately uncompromising in its appeal to a late-twentieth-century audience".[32]
Notes
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