Meet Elyse Singer - Director, Writer, Producer
Elyse Singer is a director/writer/producer and the Founding Artistic Director of the OBIE-winning theatre company Hourglass Group. Her play Frequency Hopping won the International STAGE Playwriting Competition, ran at 3LD, and was featured in Bombshell, the American Masters program about Hedy Lamarr. Off-Broadway directing credits include: Horseplay at LaMaMa; Trouble in Paradise; the first NYC revivals of Mae West's plays SEX and Pleasure Man; and Red Frogs at P.S. 122. Other original works include Love in the Void, Care-less: Eva Tanguay, and Private Property. Recent projects include Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure (with Taylor Mac), Derek Bermel and Nate Smith's Half & Half, and Shana Moulton and Nick Hallett's multimedia opera Whispering Pines 10 (featured on PBS's Art21). She has premiered new work by playwrights including Naomi Iizuka, Kirsten Greenidge, Carson Kreitzer, Ruth Margraff, and Jake-ann Jones at theatres including the Cherry Lane, the Public Theater, and BAM. As producer: Beebo Brinker Chronicles Off-Broadway, winner of the GLAAD Media Award. New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect, LPTW Member, Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, New Georges Affiliated Artist, and recipient of Yaddo and Huntington Fellowships. She is a proud member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.
Singer received a B.A. from Yale College in American Studies (Literature and Film), an M.A. in Theater from Hunter College, and a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance, with Certificate in Film and Media Cultures, from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Singer's theater and cinema scholarship has been published in Faces on Screen: New Approaches (EUP), Feminist Media Histories, and Domitor's Crafts, Trades, and Techniques of Early Cinema. She has work forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Performance and Science and Cinematic explorations of the mind: European film cultures in neurology and psychiatry, 1900-1970s (MUP). She has taught in the Department of Dramatic Writing and Department of Drama at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, at the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema (Brooklyn College, CUNY), and the City College of New York.
Professor Singer will be teaching THEA 1: Introduction to Theater at 12 (MWF 12:50-1:55, Tu 1:20-2:10) in Reed 103 this Fall. She will also THEA 16: Theater and Society II in the Winter and THEA 17: Theater and Society III this Spring.
In the Winter, she will be offering a new course, THEA 10.40: Madness Onstage and Across Media.
This course explores the history of representing "madness" on the stage and across media with a special focus on evolving techniques for performing female mental distress. We will look at patterns in global depictions of hysteria and neuropathological diseases, as well as how dramatic and filmic techniques developed to convey the subjective experience of mania. A question central to this class is: how has madness been framed or performed differently across stage and screen genres—including horror, comedy, musicals and non-theatrical media—and newer digital platforms including XR? In what ways have national discourses or ideologies surrounding mental illness and disability found their way into live and mediated performances, and how have scholars and ethicists responded? We will engage with theories of disability, sexuality, race, psychoanalysis, and gesture as well as archival materials in our examination of the changing face of madness across media.
Please email Catherine Jacobs with any questions.