Harlan Epstein is a queer multi-disciplinarian working primarily in and around theater. Brought up in London by American parents, Harlan has a natural affinity for the liminal, with work that often blurs the line between the external and the internal, the real and the imagined. With the ready accessibility of London theater and an irreverent nature, Harlan grew to have both a fondness for and disillusionment with the stagnation of ‘the western canon’. Harlan’s work is often in dialog with the mainstream of theater, from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Ibsen to Irving Berlin, with approaches that range from interrogation and adaptation to outright destruction.

 

A graduate of CalArts, Harlan is looking for funding* and collaborators to develop a new musical adaptation of Sullivan’s Travels, Preston Sturges’ 1941 screwball comedy turned social commentary; a minimal, experimental revival of Nine, the 1982 Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit musical based on Fellini’s classic of existential surrealism, 8 1/2; and an anti-racist meta-production of Othello that looks to pick apart what it is that draws mainstream western (white) theater back to it again and again.

 

*…and just funding in general, to be honest