Mark E. Lord

Mark Lord is a native of Springfield, PA, in Delaware County. During his teenage years, he frequently did juvenile roles with the newly founded classical summer theater at Villanova University, performing the Player Queen in a production of Hamlet. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1984, and received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama in 1987.

Returning to the Philly area, and at the age of only 26 was hired as Professor of Theater at Bryn Mawr College. There taught courses in acting, directing, playwriting and performance theory, as well as providing direction and guidance to students in the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Theater Program productions. He has published many insightful journal articles and provocative magazine essays on modern American theater productions and contemporary world theater practice.

Lord himself has worked as a director or dramaturg at many leading non-profit regional theaters, including the Actors Theatre of Louisville and Philadelphia's Wilma Theater. As well as his many years at Bryn Mawr and Haverford, he also taught at the Yale School of Drama, the Curtis Institute and the University of the Arts. He has recently taken Emeritus status at Bryn Mawr and retired from active teaching, but he continues to live in Philadelphia.

As a director, Mark created many works based on the writing of Samuel Beckett as well as a number of previously unstaged pieces by Gertrude Stein. He also directed plays by Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg.

Starting in 1992, he led a succession of small independent producing organizations, including Potlatch and Big House (plays and spectacles), a small professional theater company he founded with his friend and colleague, designer Hiroshi Iwasaki. Other local companies he was involved with included Headlong Dance Theater and the Arden Theatre.

Lord had an abiding interest in the creation of site-specific theater, both at Bryn Mawr and throughout the Philadelphia area - staging plays that traveled throughout theaters, that wandered through rooms of Rittenhouse Square mansions, that brought audiences to watch plays staged in abandoned industrial sites, into old prisons, under bridges, beside hotel swimming pools - even around the dinner tables of small private houses.