Directors Frank Galati and Robert Falls now have more in common than Chicago's Goodman Theatre, where Falls is artistic director and Galati is an artistic associate. Northwestern University of Evanston, IL, has just appointed Falls artistic director of its MFA program in directing. Galati has been a professor at Northwestern's performance studies branch for many years.
Falls will begin his duties in September, said a Northwestern spokesperson.
It's going to be a busy year for Falls. He recently brought his Goodman production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, starring Brian Dennehy, to Broadway. Later this year, he will mount a new Chicago production of the Disney musical Aida, which may hit New York during the year 2000.
Falls made his name in the Windy City, first as artistic director of the adventurous (and now defunct) Wisdom Bridge Theatre company. There, he staged noted productions of In the Belly of the Beast, Mother Courage and Hamlet. In the latter, the show's star, a then- unknown Aidan Quinn, notoriously spray-painted on a wall the "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy.
At the Goodman, Fall has directed grandiose versions of Steve Tesich's The Speed of Darkness and On the Open Road, O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet and The Iceman Cometh and Brecht's Galileo. The last three all starred his frequent collaborator, Dennehy. In New York, Fall's credits include the Broadway production of Horton Foote's The Young Man From Atlanta and Off-Broadway premieres of Nicky Silver's The Food Chain and Eric Bogosian's subUrbia.
Northwestern has one of the most significant theatre programs in the country.
--By Robert Simonson
