Professor Emeritus, Theatre Arts
Professor Emeritus Geoff Proehl taught, directed, and dramaturged in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Puget Sound from 1994 to 2019, serving as its first chair from 2003 to 2007. At Puget Sound he directed numerous productions – most with long-term designer/collaborator Kurt Walls: Angels in America (Part I), The Sea Gull, Three Sisters, Trip to Bountiful, Our Town, Skin of Our Teeth, As You Like It, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Twelfth Night. With Grace Livingston he dramaturged and directed readings and productions of three plays by C. Rosalind Bell: The New Orleans Monologues (featuring Grace Livingston as Elaine Bergeron), 1620 Bank Street, and My Louisiana Project. As the James M. Dolliver National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Professor (2009-13), he led with C. Rosalind Bell, Grace Livingston, and Kurt Walls a series of seminars, classes, and performances under the title of “Engaging Creativity, Criticism, Collaboration, and Community Through the Work of Suzan-Lori Parks and Her Contemporaries.”
Proehl’s book on the relationship between theatre makers and the plays they produce – Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey with DD Kugler, Mark Lamos, and Michael Lupu – received the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education in 2009. He also authored Coming Home Again: American Family Drama and the Figure of the Prodigal (1997) and was co-editor/contributor for Dramaturgy in American Theatre: A Source Book (1997). Professionally, Proehl has worked at People’s Light, the Guthrie Theatre, the New Harmony Project, Arena Stage, Tacoma Actors Guild, and the Museum of Glass.
Beginning with the essays that would become Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility DD Kugler and Proehl have worked together as a dramaturg/writer team on three book-length projects, sharing in the summer of 2015 a residency at Tofte Lake Center (Liz Engelman, director) in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. President of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas from 1998-2000, in 2016 that organization recognized his work in the field of dramaturgy with its highest honor: The Lessing Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Proehl has a PhD in directing and dramatic criticism from Stanford University, an MFA in directing from Wayne State University, and a BA from George Fox College.