Location: Bowdoin / rbechtel

Theater and Dance

Roger K. Bechtel

Associate Professor of Theater and Dance, Chair of Theater and Dance Department

Contact Information

rbechtel@bowdoin.edu
(207) 725-3821
Theater And Dance
THEATER AND DANCE
608 Memorial Hall


Spring 2012

  • Theater History and Theory (THEAT 201)
  • Acting Shakespeare (THEAT 323)
  • Acting Shakespeare (THEAT 323L1)
  • Advanced Independent Study in Theater (THEAT 401)


Roger K. Bechtel: Bowdoin College

Roger Bechtel is active as both an artist and a scholar, and his teaching reaches across the traditional disciplinary boundaries of theater, dance, performance art, film, and visual art. He currently serves as the artistic director of Big Picture Group, an award-winning multimedia performance collective based in Chicago, which creates original works and classical adaptations focusing on our lived experience of contemporary culture. BPG projects include Architecture (Strategies Against), True + False, Sisters 3.0, .duck, and The Good Person of Setzuan. Recently, his full-length play, private, was produced at the Maine Playwrights Festival and at the Last Frontier Playlab in Valdez, Alaska.  Other directing credits, both in New York and regionally, include The Cherry Orchard, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pericles, and several short works by Samuel Beckett. He has also acted both Off-Broadway and regionally, including appearances at Theatre for a New Audience, Yale Repertory Theatre, McCarter Theatre, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Aspen Repertory Theatre, Attic Theatre, and the Phoenix Theatre. He received his M.F.A. in Acting from the Yale School of Drama, and his Ph.D. in Performance Theory and Criticism from Cornell University. Previously, he taught at Miami University, Ohio, where he was the director of graduate studies.

  • Ph.D. Cornell University
  • M.F.A. Yale School of Drama
  • J.D. New York University
  • B.A. DePauw University

Book

Past Performance: American Theatre and the Historical ImaginationPast Performance: American Theatre and the Historical Imagination. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2007.

Book Chapters

“The Rhythms of David Mamet.” Crossings: David Mamet’s Work in Different Genres and Media. Ed. Johan Callens. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming.

“H.M. in the U.S.A.: Hamletmachine and Allegorical History.” The Cultural Politics of Heiner Müller. Ed. Dan Friedman. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007.

“Brutus Jones ‘n the ‘Hood: the Wooster Group, the Provincetown Players, and The Emperor Jones.” The Wooster Group and Its Tradition. Ed. Johan Callens. Brussels and New York: Peter Lang, 2004.

“On the Trail of Henrik Ibsen: Using Cultural Theory to Facilitate Director/Designer Communication.” Tradition and Innovation in Theatre Design. Ed. Anna Wierzchowska. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2001.

Journal Articles

“Acting and the Righteous Man: David Mamet, Bobby Gould, and True and False.” New England Theatre Journal 17 (2006).

“’A Kind of Painful Progress’: The Benjaminian Dialectics of Angels in America.” The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 16:1 (2001).

“P.C. Power Play: Language and Representation in David Mamet’s Oleanna.” Theatre Studies 41 (1996).

“Criminal Law: the Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments.” 59 New York University Law Review 1272 (1984).