Gus Kaikkonen

Gus Kaikkonen Biography

Gus Kaikkonen’s plays and translations have been produced at Playwrights Horizons, the Mint Theatre, the Production Company, and the Juilliard School in New York; at the New End Theatre and the Theatre Museum in London, and the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England; and at Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Peterborough Players and numerous regional theatres across the US. Awards include the Lecomte du Nouys Playwriting Award, a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS Playwriting grant, a Michigan Arts Council Award, and a MacDowell Fellowship. The American Theatre Critics Association selected his play, Time Steps, produced at the BoarsHead Theatre, as one of the ten best plays to open outside of New York. His musical Cindy Reilly won Michigan’s Thespie Award for Best New Play. His musical People Like Us, written with Todd Almond, won the 2002 New Hampshire Theatre Award for best new play. He was chosen the 1995 James Thurber Playwriting Fellow by the Ohio State University and the 2002 Murphy Foundation Visiting Fellow at Hendrix College. He has taught playwriting and acting at NYU, OSU, Hendrix, Connecticut College, the University of Houston and Louisiana College. For the last eight years he has been a visiting artist at Julliard’s School of Drama.

He made his Broadway acting debut in the original cast of Equus. Other New York acting credits include Tommy Tune’s American premiere production of Cloud 9, The Country Girl with Hal Holbrook and two plays at the NY Shakespeare Festival. On television he co-starred in the PBS production of Willa Cather’s Paul's Case with Eric Roberts, and has had continuing roles on ABC’s All My Children and One Life To Live. He has performed at the Long Wharf, Folger, Goodman, Asolo, GeVa, Arden, American Heartland, Aspen and BoarsHead Theatres, and the Coconut Grove Playhouse, where he was nominated for a Carbonell Award by the Southeastern Theatre Critics Association. He received Vermont’s 2000 Bessie Award for Best Actor for his performance as Richard III at the Lost Nation Theatre.

2011-12 directing credits include THE PHILANDERER for the Pearl at City Center, ART for the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, a workshop of LINCOLN IN LOVE at the York, THIS VERSE BUSINESS starring Gordon Clapp at Merrimack Rep, THE CRUCIBLE and WILD OATS at the University of Houston, JANIE CONDON: RAW AND UNCHAINED at St. Luke’s Theatre Off Broadway, IVANOV at Juilliard. He received the New Hampshire Theatre Award for Best Direction for FREUD’S LAST SESSION and again for MEASURE FOR MEASURE at Peterborough.

2010 directing credits include his new translation of Jules Romains’ Dr. Knock Off Broadway at the Mint Theatre, David Friedman and Peter Kellogg’s new musical Lincoln in Love at Goodspeed, The Merchant of Venice at Juilliard, and the world premieres of Andrew Dolan’s This Verse Business starring Gordon Clapp, and his own new verse translation of Tartuffe, both at Peterborough. Highlights of regional work include Trying starring James Whitmore at Ford’s Theatre in DC, 12th Night at the Asolo (2002 Sarasota Magazine and Handy Awards as Best Production), Theodore Bikel in About Time at the Coconut Grove Playhouse and A Streetcar Named Desire at GeVa. Off Broadway directing credits include productions of Barker’s The Madras House with Roberta Maxwell and George Morfogen, Macbeth with Stephen McHattie, Candida with Laurie Kennedy, Richard III with Austin Pendleton, the New York premieres of Wycherly’s The Gentleman Dancing Master at the Pearl, and of Harley Granville-Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance and St. John Hankin’s The Charity That Began At Home both at the Mint. He has also directed at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival, BoarsHead Theatre, Cohoes Music Hall, the Springer Opera House, and Glassboro Summer Theatre. From 1990-93 he was the Artistic Director of Riverside Shakespeare Company in NYC, during which time he produced three seasons of works by Shakespeare and Shaw, as well as the world premiere of Iron Bars, Arpad Goncz, the President of Hungary. Since 1996 he has been the Artistic Director of the Peterborough Players, a 77-year-old theatre in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

In 1998 he produced and directed a tribute to Louis Armstrong starring Wynton Marsalis at the Colden Center, Queens College for First Lady Hillary Clinton and the White House Millenium Council. In his 16 seasons at Peterborough he has staged over 50 plays, including the American premiere of David Hare’s The Breath of Life, Mary Beth Hurt in Six Degrees Of Separation, James Rebhorn in Later Life, and James Whitmore in Our Town, About Time, The Man Who Came to Dinner, About Time and You Can't Take It With You.

When not on the road, he lives in Greenwich Village.