Loretta Greco Announced as Magic's New Artistic Director

Magic Theatre announced Loretta Greco as its new artistic director.  Ms. Greco comes to the Magic with an acclaimed directing career regionally and in New York, as well as celebrated producing experience as the Producing Artistic Director of Women's Project in NYC and as Associate Director and Staff Producer of McCarter Theatre.  Ms. Greco has strong connections to the Bay Area with a wide range of directing credits including the world premiere of Morbidity & Mortality at the Magic and Speed-the-Plow, Blackbird, and Lackawanna Blues at American Conservatory Theater.  Ms. Greco was appointed after a 4-month national search led by the search firm Albert Hall & Associates and will start her post immediately to begin season planning for Magic Theatre's 2008-09 Season of New Plays.

Her New York premieres include: The Story, Lackawanna Blues, Two Sisters and a Piano (Public Theater); Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen, Touch, Gum (Women's Project); Meshugah (Naked Angels); Mercy (Vineyard Theatre); A Park in Our House (New York Theater Workshop); and Under a Western Sky (INTAR/ Women's Project).  Regional credits include: Romeo and Juliet and Stop Kiss (Oregon Shakespeare Festival); and productions at Long Wharf, South Coast Repertory Theatre, McCarter Theater, Intiman, Williamstown Theater Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Repertory Theatre of St Louis, Coconut Grove Playhouse, Playmakers Repertory Company, and the Cleveland Play House. Greco also directed the national tour of Having Our Say as well as the play's international premiere at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa.  Greco has collaborated with a variety of distinguished contemporary writers including Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz, Tracey Scott Wilson, Emily Mann, Ruben Santiago Hudson, Deb Margolin, Luis Alfaro, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jessica Hagedorn. Greco's own play, Passage: Stories of the Cuban Balseros premiered at Miami's AREA Stage where it ran for six months before transferring to the Coconut Grove Playhouse.  From 2004-2006 Greco served as Producing Artistic Director of NYC's Women's Project where she produced the premieres of Antigone Project written by Karen Hartman, Lynn Nottage, Tanya Barfield, Chiori Miyagawa and Caridad Svich; the rhythm and blues musical, Best of Both Worlds created by Diane Paulus, Randy Weiner and composed by Diedre Murray; Rinne Groff's Inky; Neena Beeber's JumpCut directed by Leigh Silverman; and Lisa D'Amour's The Cataract directed by Katie Pearl. Greco received her MFA from Catholic University and is the recipient of two Drama League Fellowships and a Princess Grace Award.

Founded in 1967, Magic Theatre is one of the most prominent theatres in the nation solely dedicated to development and production of new plays. Magic Theatre plays and playwrights have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, Kennedy Center Award, NAACP Image Award, Obie Awards, Pen-West Awards, Bay Critics Circle Awards and Los Angeles Drama-Logue Awards. The list of playwrights whose works have premiered at the Magic reads like a "Who's Who of American Theatre": David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Paula Vogel, Nilo Cruz, Charles Mee, Anne Bogart and Rebecca Gilman.  In addition to its production calendar, Magic Theatre is also instrumental in the development of works in the Bay Area and beyond, with its Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Initiative (now in its second three-year cycle, the program is developing and commissioning over 25 new works), Magic/Z Space New Works Initiative (also in its second three-year program, a consortium of fourteen Bay Area theatres commissioning, developing and producing 18 new plays), Martha Heasley Cox Raw Play Series, New Voices West Workshop Productions, education programs Young California Writers Project and Launch Pad amongst others. For more information, visit the Magic Theatre website at www.magictheatre.org.