Rick Davis is Artistic Director of Theater of the First Amendment (TFA) and the Center for the Arts at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, as well as Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education, a position he assumed in August, 2007 after serving as Associate Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts from 2001-2007. Under his leadership TFA, Mason’s resident Equity theater, has been nominated for more than thirty Helen Hayes Awards and has won the award twelve times, including outstanding resident production and outstanding new play.
Prior to coming to Mason in 1991, Rick worked for six seasons at Baltimore’s Center Stage, as Resident Dramaturg and Associate Artistic Director. His directing work includes classics, new plays, and operas for TFA, Center Stage, SummerArts in Flagstaff, the Kennedy Center, Delaware Theatre Company, Players Theatre Columbus, Lake George Opera, Opera Idaho, Capital City Opera (at the Kennedy Center), the IN Series (D.C.), Unseam’d Shakespeare Company and the American Ibsen Theater in Pittsburgh, and other companies, as well as dozens of productions in college and university theaters. He is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.
He has served on multiple occasions as a National Endowment for the Arts panelist for playwright fellowships and professional theater companies, and has been a site visitor for the Endowment for nearly twenty years. He has also done panel service for the Maryland State Arts Council, the Virginia Commission on the Arts, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour, and other agencies.
Rick’s volume of translations and commentaries, Calderón de la Barca: Four Great Plays of the Golden Age, will be published in 2008. He is also the co-author of three books, Ibsen: Four Major Plays (1994) and Ibsen in an Hour (scheduled for publication in 2009) with Brian Johnston and Writing About Theatre (1999) with Christopher Thaiss. He is the librettist for an opera-in-progress, Love’s Comedy, with composer Kim D. Sherman. He and Ms. Sherman wrote “The Songbird and the Eagle,” a concert oratorio, premiered in December, 2006 by the San Jose Chamber Orchestra. His co-translations of Ibsen (A Doll House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler, John Gabriel Borkman) have been performed at leading regional theaters such as The Shakespeare Theatre (Washington, DC), Berkeley Rep, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Center Stage, Alliance Theatre, and at many colleges and universities. He has contributed a number of articles and reviews to publications such as American Theatre, Theater, The Journal of Social History, and Theater Three, and is the author of three entries in the new Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama and a major article in the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World.
Rick has also taught at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, served as an adjunct faculty member at Goucher College and The Johns Hopkins University, and guest lectured at institutions such as NYU, Carnegie Mellon, and Yale School of Drama. He has been a speaker or panelist at conferences such as the International Federation for Theatre Research, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, Ibsen Society of America, National Ibsen Symposium, and the East-Central Theatre Conference.
At Mason he teaches directing, dramatic literature, and theater history, as well as courses in the Master of Arts Management program, and directs both theater and opera. He serves as host and Associate Producer for Studio A, a televised series of conversations with notable filmmakers for GMU TV and the Film and Video Studies program. In 1997 he was honored with Mason’s Teaching Excellence Award and was named the Alumni Association “Distinguished Faculty Member of the Year” in 2006. He was educated at Lawrence University (BA) and the Yale School of Drama (MFA, DFA).
ABOUT THIS WEBSITE -- A WORK IN PROGRESS
As pages are added, here you will find links to some of Rick’s writing and production work, as well as course information, and various odds and ends having to do with his interests in aviation, amateur (ham) radio, and sundry subjects. The picture above was taken in spring 2006 on top of the Corolla Light, at the northern end of North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
