Directors Lab

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The LCT Lab is an intensive six day a week, ten hours a day, three week program of workshops, shared sessions, rehearsals, investigations, theater-going and discussions with master artists that 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. The Lab is 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. The Lab also seeks 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 directors apply in early January, and the plays they suggest and their mentors /teachers and the artists they admire, as well as the concerns and challenges they face, form the content of each year's summer Lab. This 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, based on the stories and the ideas they write 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 Honor, 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 history of theater. The Lab has also accepted more women than men every single year since 1995. The goal of the Lab is to be an agent for change in the world.

​The 2020 Directors Lab, the Lab's 25th Anniversary gathering, was planned as an evaluation of the accomplishments of the Lab and a discussion between past participants (who had applied to join us) as well as members of the theater community from directing and other disciplines, to take stock of the past and look to the future. In a week-long evaluation, we hoped to contemplate past successes and challenges, but more importantly (just as we did when the Lab first emerged from a series of similar meeting before 1995) look to the future. Does the theater need a directing program anymore? Is there something else that is more urgent, or that is overlooked, or needs attention? What should change? How do we deal with the international directors who once came to the US so freely? Can we share equally and speak openly in our new time?