Emily Mann — the visionary artistic director of McCarter Theater from 1990 to 2020 and the writer of more than a dozen stage works — is now herself the subject of a new biography.
“Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater” is Alexis Greene’s newly released biography, published by Hal Leonard. The 408-page work spans Mann’s life from her Chicago upbringing to her retirement from McCarter for what she called her “third act” in a February, 2020, interview with U.S. 1 Newspaper.
Greene and Mann appear together in a hybrid event hosted by Labyrinth Books on Thursday, December 16, at 6 p.m. The event is free, with registration for the livestream available via Crowdcast.
Greene begins documenting Mann’s life and impact, as well as her approach to sharing it, in her preface:
I first met Emily Mann in 1983, during a theater conference in Minneapolis. She would sit in the audience, at any of numerous panels, a serious and attentive expression on her face beneath her head of dark-brown curls. She would listen and then she would ask challenging, in-your-face questions.
Already, by virtue of her art and her drive, she had made a statement in an American theater that was abysmally short on women seeing their plays produced or being hired to direct on the country’s main stages. The Guthrie Theater, where Mann had worked her way from assistant stage manager to resident director, had begun life in Minneapolis in 1963. But no woman had directed on its glorious thrust stage until 1979, when Alvin Epstein, momentarily the Guthrie’s artistic director, offered twenty-seven-year-old Emily Mann the chance to conceive a revelatory production of “The Glass Menagerie.” By the time she was twenty-eight, Mann had written a groundbreaking play, “Still Life.” An unvarnished expression of the human damage caused by the Vietnam War, “Still Life” brough Mann international recognition, and in the opinion of the revered South African director Barney Simon, had introduced a form of documentary theater that became known as theater of testimony.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Mann was not alone on the front lines as a woman intent on making a career in the professional theater. She was particularly determined, however, to bring both her directorial skills and her dramatist’s voice to American theater’s most prominent stages, including Broadway, and she succeeded. In 1990 she became the first woman to lead the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, and for three decades she would be one of a minority of women heading a League of Resident Theaters (LORT) stage. The arc of her career is notable for challenging the patriarchal structure of American theater.
In the years since I first saw Mann in Minneapolis, I often interviewed her for books I was writing or editing and for feature articles, and during the course of writing a profile for the July/August 2015 issue of American Theatre magazine, I suggested embarking on a biography. Mann invited me to delve into her myriad private files, and that exploration informs this book, combined with background research, numerous conversations with Mann herself, and interviews with more than one hundred of her colleagues, friends, and family.
Events and political movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have coursed through Mann’s life and inspired the content of her plays. While a youngster, she learned about the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement in America. She came of age during the irreverent and often physically violent 1960s, and the Women’s Liberation Movement that thrived during the late 1960s and the 1970s. As a director, playwright, the leader of an arts center, and especially as a woman, she has responded to and participated in waves of feminism and, since 2018, to the expanding Me Too movement, activated by women speaking up loudly and publicly about the sexual objectification and harassment they have endured. My approach as a biographer has been to integrate historic events and political movements with descriptions and discussion of Emily Mann’s life, her playwriting, her leadership of the McCarter, and examples from among the nearly one hundred productions she has directed.
But a biography is not solely a scholarly enterprise. It is a personal journey for both biographer and subject. From 2015 through 2019, I met and talked with Mann for close to one hundred hours, often for two hours at a time, and usually sitting at the round table in her miniature office at the McCarter, surrounded by photographs of her family and posters of her productions. Occasionally, in early summer, we met at her home, where she could recline on a chaise in her screened-in porch and look out at her lawn and its luxuriant trees. This is not an authorized biography. No topic was off limits, and she’s had no approval of what I’ve written.
One of my goals in writing a biography of Emily Mann has been to show that resistance can reside in defying preconceived assumptions of what a woman of the theater can stage or write or, finally, achieve. I also hope to show how Mann’s art and career can contribute to the discourse in the public square, a role that has become essential for American theater as it aims to be part of the cultural changes enveloping the country.
My chief goal, however, has been to write the life of a woman who has created unique art and along the way has wrestled with, learned from, and overcome personal trauma and illness. For centuries, the lives of women have been hidden: buried in diaries, letters, and in the day-to-day tasks that women undertook but few observed. This biography of Emily Mann brings one more woman’s life into the light.
Alexis Greene & Emily Mann, Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street. Thursday, December 16, 6 p.m. Free. Register to info@labyrinthbooks.com; masks and proof of vaccination required. Livestream also available. Register via Crowdcast. 609-497-1600 or www.labyrinthbooks.com.
Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater, by Alexis Greene, published by Hal Leonard, 408 pages. $29.95.
‘Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater’ is Alexis Greene’s new biography of the long-time artistic director of McCarter Theater. Mann and Greene appear together at Labyrinth Books on Thursday, December 16.,
