(he/him/his)
Director, Mother Road; Director and Adapter, La Comedia of Errors
Bill Rauch became OSF’s fifth artistic director in 2007, after five seasons at the Festival as a guest director. In a total of 17 seasons at OSF, he has directed seven world premieres, Off the Rails, Roe, Fingersmith, The Great Society, All the Way, Equivocation and By the Waters of Babylon, and 19 other plays. By Shakespeare: Othello, Richard II, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Cymbeline, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors. Others: Oklahoma!, Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, The Pirates of Penzance, The Music Man, The Clay Cart, Hedda Gabler, The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler and Handler. Bill has directed several OSF plays at other theatres including Equivocation, All the Way and The Great Society at Seattle Rep; The Pirates of Penzance at Portland Opera; Equivocation and Roe at Arena Stage; Roe at Berkeley Rep; and Othello, Fingersmith and All the Way at the American Repertory Theater (for which he twice won the Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) award for Best Director). All the Way then moved to the Neil Simon Theatre in New York, where it won the Tony Award for Best Play and also earned Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations for directing.
Among his initiatives at OSF, Bill committed to commissioning up to 37 new plays to dramatize moments of change in American history. American Revolutions: the U.S. History Cycle has premiered nine plays at OSF to date, many of which have moved on to other theatres across the country. He initiated the Black Swan Lab for New Work and a community-based format for the Green Show. Classic musicals as well as important plays outside of the Western canon are a more regular part of the OSF season playbill under his artistic leadership. He is known for his passionate dedication to diversifying the company and the audience.
Bill co-founded Cornerstone Theater Company, where he directed more than 40 productions, most of them collaborations with diverse rural and urban communities across the United States, and served as its artistic director from 1986 to 2006. He has directed a number of world premieres, including Naomi Wallace’s Night is a Room at New York’s Signature Theatre; The Body of an American at Portland Center Stage (which, along with All the Way, was co-winner of the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History); The Clean House at Yale Repertory Theatre; and Living Out and For Here or To Go? at the Mark Taper Forum. He also directed the New York premiere of The Clean House at Lincoln Center Theater. Work elsewhere includes productions at South Coast Repertory, Guthrie Theater, Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, Pasadena Playhouse, Great Lakes Theater and En Garde Arts. In 2018 he was named the inaugural Artistic Director of the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center.
Bill has served as an associate artist at Yale Repertory Theatre and South Coast Repertory and as a board member for Theatre Communications Group (TCG), and was Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at University of California, Irvine. In 2018 he received the Ivy Bethune Award from Actors’ Equity Association for diversity and inclusion in hiring, casting and producing. He was named a 2015 Visiting Fellow at the Ford Foundation, received the Zelda Fichandler Award in 2012, and won TCG’s Visionary Leadership Award in 2010 and the Margo Jones Award in 2009. Other honors include a United States Artists Prudential Fellow; Los Angeles Weekly, Garland, Connecticut Critics Circle, Drama-Logue and Helen Hayes awards for direction; Emmy and Ovation nominations and an inaugural “Leadership for a Changing World” award.
Bill graduated from Harvard College.