The Maryland Stage Company

Xerxes Mehta is the founder (1987) and artistic director of the Maryland Stage Company, the professional theatre in residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A professional director, he was educated at Cornell University and the New York University School of the Arts, where he received his training from Olympia Dukakis, Kristin Linklater, Carl Weber, Peter Kass and Lloyd Richards. He has directed over seventy productions at professional and university theatres, including the Cubiculo, The Playwright's Unit (Albee-Barr-Wilder), and St. Clement's (all in NYC); The Theatre Project in Baltimore; Cornell University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Fordham University, New York University School of the Arts, University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His first production, an outdoor Julius Caesar at Cornell, was reviewed by The New York Times. Since then his work has received notice from The Washington Post; The Sun, The Evening Sun and The News American (Baltimore); The Village Voice and TheaterWeek (New York), Theatre Journal; Western European Stages, The Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting, and WTTG (Channel 5), Washington, D.C. He has directed opera, as well as major works from the Greeks to the present.

Mr. Mehta is widely known as a director of Beckett. His chapter on directing Beckett's late, short plays was published in Directing Beckett (L. Oppenheim, Michigan, 1994), and his production of five Beckett plays was honored by the American College Theatre Festival during its performances at the Kennedy Center in 1979. He directed The Maryland Stage Company in A Tribute to Samuel Beckett (Not I, Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu) in Baltimore in 1990, and his MSC production of Not I, That Time and Ohio Impromptu was seen at the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Strasbourg, France in 1996. In 1981, he staged the world premiere of Richard Wilbur's new translation of Racine's Andromache, and in 1986, the American premiere of Louise Page's Beauty and the Beast. In 1983, he was Observer-in-Residence with the Citizens Theatre (Glasgow) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (Stratford-upon-Avon). His productions have won awards and, in Maryland, have three times been voted "Best of the Year"--Beckett by Maryland Public Television; Tartuffe (1985) by The Evening Sun; and The Balcony (1988) by the Patuxent Publishing Company (13 newspapers).

Xerxes Mehta has taught acting at NYUSOA and privately in New York and Berkeley (1969-76). He has spoken at national and international conferences, published in the field s major periodicals--including Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Theatre Three, Theater (formerly yale/theatre), the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, the Journal of Beckett Studies, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism--and served as an advisor to journals, publishers, and the State of Maryland. He has received many fellowships, grants, and contracts, and was a member of the advisory board of the Baltimore International Theatre Festival (1979-81). Mr. Mehta is an associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he was chair of the Department of Theatre from 1976 to 1980.

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