The LCT Directors Lab through the years

After 25 years, in 2022, LCT temporarily closed the Directors Lab. Impossible to maintain during a pandemic, the theater will nonetheless continue its work with new artists. A description of the Lab follows:

The LCT Directors Lab is a developmental program for nurturing stage directors from around the country and around the world. Approximately 70 directors participate each year, and the Lab began in 1995. Over 1500 directors, together with an equal number of actor, playwright, and designer collaborators who have worked in the Lab each year, have taken their wider knowledge and new relationships out into the world to make the theater of the future. The LCT Lab, an intensive six day a week, ten hours a day, three-week program of workshops, shared sessions, rehearsals, investigations, theater going and discussions with accomplished and well-known artists provide the Lab directors with an intensive investigation of their craft while fostering collaborative relationships among a peer community of artists.

The Directors Lab is geared toward professional directors in early career stages, and it is free of charge. Not open to students or those planning to return to school, it is designed for emerging directors who are working professionals who have finished their studies. And studies are not required – many Lab directors are working directors who have never gone to college or graduate school. The Lab also includes directors working in a wide variety of ways: from new play directors, to Broadway AD’s, to directors in experimental theater, classics from world traditions, in church drama ministries, in opera, in devised work, in theme parks and cruise ships, in theaters newly founded in small communities across the world. All are welcome, and all have artistry and role models to share.

The contents of each Lab, outlined below year by year, are suggested by the Lab directors. The Lab is not a teaching initiative: in fact, a core principle of the Lab is that in the history of theater, the important work that has come down to us has been made by artists early in their careers. Lab members are admitted without letters of recommendation, but are accepted based on the stories and the ideas written in their applications, and we accept each Lab based solely on criteria of artistic excellence, in whatever the model or genre.

The LCT Directors Lab has been nominated twice for a Tony Award, and after 25 years, with the inclusion of our sister Lab offshoots around the world, it is the largest, most diverse theater initiative in terms of geography, artistic tradition and ethnicity in the American theater. The chief goal of the Lab is to act as an agent for change in the world.

FOUNDING SUPPORTER:
The Skirball Foundation

SUSTAINING SUPPORTERS:
The Irene Diamond Fund
Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literary Fund at LCT

GENEROUS SUPPORTERS:
Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art
Ford Foundation
Howard Gilman Foundation
The Greenwall Foundation
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
National Endowment for the Arts
New York State Council on the Arts
Stavros Niarchos Foundation
Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater
Charles E. Culpepper/Rockefeller Brothers Fund
The Rockefeller Foundation
John A. Sellon Charitable Residual Trust
Trust for Mutual Understanding