Carey Elizabeth Perloff is an American theater director, playwright, author, and educator. She was the artistic director of American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco from 1992 to June 2018.
Biography
Perloff was born in Washington, D.C., to Marjorie Perloff, a professor and poetry critic, and Joseph K. Perloff, a professor of medicine and pediatrics and cardiologist. She attended Stanford University, where she received a B.A. Phi Beta Kappa in classics and comparative literature. After graduating from Stanford in 1980, Perloff attended St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, as a Fulbright Fellow and spent two summers directing at the Edinburgh Festival, where she met her husband, attorney Anthony Giles. She makes her home in San Francisco and is the mother of two children, Alexandra Perloff-Giles and Nicholas Perloff-Giles, also known as the producer and DJ "Wingtip."
Professional career
Perloff worked as an administrator at the International Theater Institute, then as a casting assistant with Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, while launching her directing career off-off Broadway. In 1986 she was named artistic director of the Off-Broadway Classic Stage Company, where she worked until becoming the artistic director of A.C.T. in 1992. At CSC, Perloff directed the world premiere of Ezra Pound’s Elektra, the American premiere of Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language, and many classic works. Under her leadership, CSC won numerous OBIE Awards, including the 1988 OBIE for artistic excellence. She served on the faculty of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University for seven years. In 1993, Perloff directed the world premiere of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s opera The Cave at the Vienna Festival and Brooklyn Academy of Music. She has also directed a new Elektra, adapted by Timberlake Wertenbaker, for the Getty Villa in Los Angeles in 2010.
American Conservatory Theater
In 1992, Perloff was appointed artistic director of A.C.T., where her first task was to raise $31 million to rebuild the earthquake-damaged Geary Theater, which reopened in January 1996 with Perloff's production of The Tempest, starring David Strathairn. Perloff's tenure at A.C.T. included the creation of a new core company of actors; revitalization of the acclaimed A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program; receipt of the 1996 Jujamcyn Theaters Award, honoring A.C.T.’s efforts to develop creative talent for the theater; a series of international collaborations, including The Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre's multi-media adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, Robert Wilson and Tom Waits’ The Black Rider, Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling's The Overcoat, and Kneehigh Theatre's Brief Encounter; and the American premieres of plays by Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter. Perloff's directorial work for A.C.T. includes: The Tosca Project, Phèdre, Boleros for the Disenchanted, Rock 'n' Roll, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, The Government Inspector, After the War, Travesties, Happy End, A Christmas Carol, The Voysey Inheritance, The Real Thing, A Mother, A Doll's House, Waiting for Godot, The Three Sisters, Night and Day, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, Celebration, The Room, Enrico IV, The Misanthrope, The Invention of Love, The Threepenny Opera, Indian Ink, Old Times, Mary Stuart, Singer's Boy, The Rose Tattoo, The Tempest, Arcadia, Hecuba, Home, Uncle Vanya, Antigone, Bon Appétit, Creditors, Hilda, No for an Answer, her own play The Colossus of Rhodes, Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming and James Fenton’s adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao, starring BD Wong. Perloff will leave after A.C.T.'s 2017-2018 season to pursue her freelance and writing career. Pam MacKinnon will become the next artistic director of A.C.T.
The Strand
In addition to her work at the main A.C.T. theater on Geary Street, Carey Perloff raised 30 million dollars to reinvigorate a theater on Market Street that had been built in 1917 and had many lives, including prior to being shut down as a porn theater. The plan of recreating the Strand was complementary to the A.C.T. mission, in that it could accommodate different types and sizes of plays and performances with greater flexibility than the large theater with its over 1,000 seats.
Plays
Perloff has written several plays that have achieved international acclaim. Perloff’s play The Colossus of Rhodes, which premiered at the White Barn Theatre in Westport, CT, in 2001, was a Susan Smith Blackburn Award finalist. Her play Luminescence Dating premiered in New York at The Ensemble Studio Theatre in 2005; it was coproduced by A.C.T. and Magic Theatre. Her play Waiting for the Flood has received workshops at A.C.T., New York Stage and Film, and Roundabout Theatre Company. Her one-act The Morning After was a finalist for the Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Perloff’s play, Higher, was developed at New York Stage and Film and was presented at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum in November 2010. Her play Kinship was translated into French and performed in Paris in 2014, with Isabelle Adjani, making her return to the theater after a long absence, in the starring role. In a later rendition in 2015, at the Williamstown Theater Festival, Cynthia Nixon starred in Kinship.
Honors
Perloff is a recipient of France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the National Corporate Theatre Fund’s 2007 Artistic Achievement Award. In 2011 Perloff won the Blanche and Irving Laurie Theater Visions Award for her play Higher. In 2019, Perloff was awarded the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle Craig Noel Award for Outstanding Dramatic Production, Direction, Lighting and Scenic Design for the Old Globe's production of "A Thousand Splendid Suns." Perloff commissioned the adaptation of this work, written by Khaled Hosseini, for her 25th season as A.C.T. director and it received critical acclaim both during its initial run in San Francisco, and in subsequent runs in Seattle and San Diego.
Writing
Carey Perloff has written several books focused on discussion or analysis of specific plays. Her book on her experience as a theater director and the challenges of raising a family with the "challenges confronting the American theater," Beautiful Chaos: A Life in the Theater, was published by City Lights in 2015. The book was critically acclaimed, with reviews by such luminaries as Tom Stoppard, Khaled Hosseini, and Armistead Maupin. Martin David's review in the New York Journal of Books praised Perloff's contribution to San Francisco's theater scene, which was chronicled through the book in her anecdotes of building A.C.T. after the 1989 earthquake reduced it to rubble. David stated that "Carey Perloff’s leadership of American Conservatory Theater is one of the reasons San Francisco remains a respected center of the art form in our country.
