JOSH HECHT
Josh Hecht is a Drama Desk Award-winning director of new plays. His productions have been seen in New York at The Duke on 42nd (Wearing Lorca’s Bowtie, a devised piece), New World Stages (Bradford Louryk's Christine Jorgensen Reveals – Drama Desk Award, GLAAD Media nomination), Culture Project (Drew Larimore's Out of Iceland), MCC Theater (Bob Morris's Assisted Loving), The Cherry Lane (Megan Mostyn-Brown's Girl), 13P (Winter Miller's The Penetration Play), the DR2 (Anna Ziegler's BFF), PS 122 (Joseph Keckler's Jobz), Ars Nova (The Gay Agenda), NYMF, Partial Comfort, Joe's Pub, the Ontological, and others. Upcoming: Jake Jeppson's The Clearing (Axial) and Amandine (Dixon Place).
Regional productions at the Humana Festival (Allison Moore's Slasher), The Guthrie Theater (Megan Mostyn-Brown's Lizards…), The Berkshire Theatre Festival (Rachel Schroeder's Heliantha), The Kennedy Center (Ping Chong and Co's Inside/Out – writer/performer), the Boston Center for the Arts (Christine Jorgensen – IRNE nomination), Axial Theater Company (Howard Meyer's Welcome), and Half Moon (Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation). Christine Jorgensen also played internationally at the Dublin Arts Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Fringe First). Inside/Out has also been presented at the Flynn Center in Burlington, VT; The Round House Theater in Bethesda, MD; and the Amaryllis Theater in Philadelphia, PA.
He develops between one and two dozen plays a year in readings and workshops at such theaters and development organizations as MCC, NYTW (where he is a Usual Suspect), Playwrights Horizons, Primary Stages, The Kennedy Center, The Public Theater, Rattlestick, LAByrinth, New Georges, The Geva, New Dramatists, New York Stage and Film, the O'Neill, the Playwrights Center, the New Harmony Project, the Orchard Project, Voice and Vision, P73, JAW at Portland Center Stage, and many others.
For 5 years, he was the Director of Playwright Development at MCC Theater, where he helped found and run the Playwrights Coalition, initiating a spectrum of development programs for emerging writers. While there, he worked with some of today's most honored playwrights including Brooke Berman, Julia Jordan, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Adam Rapp, Stephen Belber, Itamar Moses, Cusi Cram, and many others. For the mainstage, he initiated new plays by Richard Greenberg, John Guare, Tim Blake Nelson, Peter Hedges, Theresa Rebeck, Terrance McNally, and others. More recently, he was the Director of New Play Development at WET, developing new plays by Kate Robin, Melissa James Gibson, Cusi Cram, and Zakiyyah Alexander. He is an alumnus of the SoHo Rep Writers/Directors Lab and the LCT Directors Lab.
He has taught playwriting at New Dramatists, ESPA/Primary Stages, The Field, the Play Development Collective, and at World InterPlay and the Queen's Street Studio in Sydney Australia. He has taught directing at the National Theater Institute at the O'Neill Center, was for two years on the faculty of the MFA program at the New School for Drama (where he created the course Co-Lab III, a thesis requirement for graduating 3rd years), and is currently on faculty at the SUNY Purchase BFA program and at ESPA. Other work in educational environments includes directing the University of Minnesota’s BFA Acting thesis productions, presentations of Carnegie Mellon’s MFA playwriting theses, and mentoring and directing the work of teenage writers at Young Playwrights, Inc. and the MCC Theater Youth Company.
The Rewrite
