Remy Bumppo names Timothy Douglas new artistic director

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The Remy Bumppo Theatre Company's new artistic director is Timothy Douglas.

Updated: November 11, 2010 2:34PM

The Remy Bumppo Theatre Company has found its new artistic director. He is Timothy Douglas, a 49-year-old stage director, actor and educator with extensive credits in both the classics and contemporary repertory.

Douglas will succeed James Bohnen, who co-founded Remy Bumppo in 1996 and has helped nurture the company (whose current hit revival of Tom Stoppard's "Night and Day" is at the Greenhouse Theater Center), making it one of the city's foremost proponents of intensely literate, idea-oriented theater.

With his appointment, Douglas becomes one of the few African-Americans throughout the nation (along with Tazewell Thompson and Kenny Leon) to lead a classically-oriented company that is not black in origin.

Born on Long Island, New York, and educated at Marymount Manhattan College and the Yale School of Drama, Douglas spent 1988-91 working in the Chicago area as an actor at Court and Victory Gardens Theatre, as well as a voice teacher/coach at DePaul University and The Second City. He went on to serve as resident director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles (1994-97), and associate artistic director at Actors' Theatre of Louisville (2001-2004). Since 1986 he also has been a company member with Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass.

Currently in Chicago to direct Robert O'Hara's "The Etiquette of Vigilance" (a sort of sequel to "A Raisin in the Sun") as part of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's upcoming First Look Series, Douglas has a number of directing assignments before officially assuming his new position at Remy Bumppo on July 1, 2011. They include productions of Tarell McCraney's "Marcus: Or the Secret of Sweet" for Washington D.C.'s Studio Theatre Company; Horton Foote's "A Trip To Bountiful" in Cleveland and Washington, D.C., and "Hamlet" at the LA Women's Shakespeare Company.

Before being hired by Remy Bumppo, Douglas led a workshop for the company's seven artistic associates that generated great enthusiasm among these veteran members of the theater's team.

In his formal acceptance letter, Douglas wrote:

"As the stage is being set for my inaugural season, my soul stands erect upon the shoulders of this company's unshakable core of artistic excellence, and I am committed to sustaining the smart, vital, thrilling, clear, provoking, relevant, and entertaining theatre that audiences have come to rely upon with this revered company.

"Further, as Remy Bumppo Theatre Company enters its next chapter, we will lean even further into the events of this complicated world, and reflect its kaleidoscopic tapestry back to our audiences and community by organizing the chaos with skill, purpose, honesty and the inherent healing properties that can only occur through the transforming power of live theatre. We throw open our doors even wider, augmenting our role as an ultimate community center where passionate discourse through the craft of rhetoric and the art of storytelling stakes its claim as the final frontier toward mending, sustaining and growing a civilization of integrity and vision."