Director takes unlikely journey to Deep Ellum's Undermain Theatre
An interview with Stan Wojewodski Jr., who will become chair of SMU Theatre Division in fall 2010.
By LAWSON TAITTE
The Dallas Morning News
Stan Wojewodski Jr.'s friends tease him that his career is running backwards.
For the first time, he's teaching undergraduates rather than graduate students. He's also directing in a tiny basement in Deep Ellum.
This is the guy who became artistic director of one of America's leading regional theaters, Baltimore's CenterStage, in his mid-20s. Wojewodski, now 61, went on to become dean of the Yale Drama School and head of Yale Repertory Theatre in 1991 – the double job at the pinnacle of the country's theatrical heap.
Actually, though, Wojewodski is excited to be in Dallas.
After he left Yale in 2002 to resume directing at regional theaters full time, he staged a couple of British comedies at Dallas Theater Center. The theater division at Southern Methodist University's Meadows School of the Arts asked him to give a lecture. Things went so well that the school asked him to become artist in residence – then, in February, chairman of its theater operation, beginning next fall.
"I had no intention of ever being dean, chair, artistic director or chief cook and bottle washer ever again in my life. I said no, no, no and no," Wojewodski says. "But my colleagues are very persuasive. Fortunately, I think SMU has one of the strongest undergraduate programs in the country."
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