MICHAEL M. DONAHUE ’05

According to director Michael M. Donahue ’05, “The sort of thing that has been most exciting for me is that each time I work on a project it feels completely different than what I did last time.”

Donahue’s enthusiasm, complemented by a long list of theater credits, has been recognized by the Office for the Arts at Harvard (OFA). He is one of two recipients of the 2004-2005 Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts, which recognizes “outstanding artistic talent and achievement in the composition or performance of music, drama, dance, or the visual arts…in the sum of a student’s artistic activities at Harvard.”

Performances owed to Donahue’s directorial skills include Patrick Marber’s “Closer,” Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” and Moliere’s “Tartuffe” and an adaptation of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s “The Physicists.”

In addition to directing plays, Donahue co-founded the 24-Hour Plays Festival, which consists of writers, directors, and actors uniting during reading period to create productions with only 24 hours of preparation.

Donahue has also pursued directing on an academic level by designing a special concentration. This past January, Donahue traveled to Berlin to study experimental performances, directors, and actors and used his experience for course credit in an independent study.

“The theater that I saw there was so much more spontaneous and engaged than what I’ve seen here,” he says. “The theater is much more topical, exciting, and political. They were so much more creative and complex, taking bigger chances and risks on stage,” he adds.

After working at the St. Louis Municipal Theatre, or Muny, for the past three years—which puts on considerably more conservative productions—Donahue was particularly sensitive to the division between the two ends of the spectrum; he compares the performances at the Muny to those he had seen in Berlin as well as at the American Repertoire Theatre here at Harvard.

“It was frustrating to me that there was such a divide between the two theaters,” Donahue says. “I would love to find elements of both and to not have to confine myself to a commercial, mainstream or explicitly art theatre, but to be able to work with elements of both.”

Donahue has brought his outside experiences to his senior thesis project, a production of “The Oresteia,” based on the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, which will continue through May 27 on the Loeb Mainstage.

“Working on my current play has been most exciting because I am currently trying to make my work more physically and politically orientated than it has been in the past,” Donahue says. “It’s been a very liberating experience.”

Donahue will continue integrating the conservative and the cutting-edge through a personal approach to directing when he heads to the Yale School of Drama this fall to complete a three-year graduate school program.

“It’s really about why exactly I make theatre, what I think is important about theatre, what I want theatre to do and what I want the relationship between actors and spectators to be,” he says.

—Samantha A. Papadakis