Sara Freeman
Professor, Theatre Arts
Sara Freeman is a Professor of Theatre at the University of Puget Sound. Previously she taught at the University of Oregon, Illinois Wesleyan University, and Columbia College in Chicago. She holds an MA and PhD in Theatre from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her historical scholarship concerns alternative British theatre and contemporary playwrights, and she maintains an active creative practice as a director and dramaturg.
She coedited International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (2008) and Public Theatres and Theatre Publics (2012) and has published chapters in Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor; The British Theatre Company: From Fringe to Mainstream; Decades of Modern British Playwriting: The 1980s, Readings in Performance and Ecology and is contributing a chapter to the forthcoming collection American Ensemble Theatres. She is editor of the annual journal Theatre History Studies, a publication of the Mid America Theatre Conference, and assistant editor to Bloomsbury-Methuen’s new Encyclopedia of Modern Theatre. Her articles appear in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Comparative Drama, and Contemporary Theatre Review. She won the Gerald Kahan Award from the American Society for Theatre Research in 2007 for an article on Joint Stock Theatre Company published in Theatre Survey.
As a director, she most recently staged Mr. Burns: A Post Electric Play by Anne Washburn, The Force of Habit by Guillén de Castro, and In the Next Room (or, the vibrator play) by Sarah Ruhl at Puget Sound. Past favorite directing projects include Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s musical of Spring Awakening, Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Lost, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, Susanna Centlivre’s Bold Stroke for a Wife, and Caryl Churchill’s Blue Heart. Off campus, she collaborates with Northwest Playwrights Alliance for readings, workshops, and festivals focused on new plays.