Steve Friedman | Denny Partridge

STEVE FRIEDMAN studied at the University of Minnesota and the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Fiction Award and a Best Actor award from the Ann Arbor Civic Theater. His first professional acting was with the Firehouse Theater of Minneapolis, where he appeared in the premieres of plays by Sam Shepard, Megan Terry and Jean-Claude Van Itallie, as well as in classics by Beckett, Ionesco, and others. In 1968 he was hired for the first full-time acting company of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, where he worked for six years, acting in outdoor commedia dell'arte and in original plays, more than 30 of which he wrote. In 1976 he relocated to New York City, where he founded Modern Times Theater with Denny Partridge. For the next ten years he wrote and acted with Modern Times, performing under Off-Broadway Equity contracts and touring to most states of the union on the strength of the New York reviews. Plays include: The Bread and Roses Play; Hibakusha; Homeland (with Selaelo Maredi); and Freedom Days.

Friedman has received a National Endowment for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, a New York Foundation CAPS Playwriting Fellowship, an AUDELCO Award, and a Ford Foundation/Asian Cultural Council grant to create original work in Taiwan. His plays have been performed at The New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater (Dr. Monopoly's Cold War Cavalcade); the San Diego Rep (Animal Nation); the Magic Theater of San Francisco (Trouble); Sweden's Unga Klara (1950); and Theatre Workshop Edinburgh, where he won a 2001 Fringe First nomination for The Lear Lesson, also performed at PS 122's Spaghetti Dinner.

In 2003 Friedman's play The Jaipur Hamlet premiered in Rajasthan, India. From 2004-06 he toured in his solo version of Delmore Schwartz's story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," with performances in Paris, Moscow, and Jerusalem, and in Manhattan at the Knitting Factory and the Bowery Poetry Club. Friedman's play Freedom Days, about the Civil Rights Movement, has been performed throughout the US for the past two decades in school and community productions. It was published by Baker's Plays in 1994.

Friedman has taught theater at CalArts, NYU, Antioch, and Barnard/Columbia (from which he retired as a Senior Lecturer in 2006). He has also taught at several New York State maximum- and medium-security correctional facilities, the National Theater Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

DENNY PARTRIDGE began her directing career with the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1970, where her work included The Dragon Lady's Revenge and The Independent Female, Or A Man Has His Pride, the first nation-wide hit of the emerging women's movement. She went on to co-found New York City's off-Broadway ensemble Modern Times Theater in 1976, where she directed and designed new plays and musicals for more than a decade. Under her leadership, Modern Times became the first Equity theater company to perform under a contract in which the actors and directors served as the company's producers.

Ms. Partridge has won two Fulbright Fellowships, one in 1989, to participate in Bangladesh's emerging theater movement, and the second in 1998, to Taiwan, where she co-directed, with Steve Friedman, a new Chinese translation of The Good Person Of Setzuan. Other grants and prizes include an OBIE Award with the San Francisco Mime Troupe; a Villager Award with Modern Times; multiple NEA and New York State Council for the Arts grants for touring and new play development; five American College Theater Festival Awards for collaborative work with her students; and a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for research in Paris.

Partridge earned a BFA with distinction from Boston University and an MFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, where she was an NEA Directing Fellow. She has been on the faculties of Antioch, Vassar, Cal Arts, and NYU; and since 1994 she has been the Alice B. Pels Chair in the Arts at Barnard College and a tenured Professor of Theater at Columbia University. Memorable teaching for Partridge includes a month-long workshop series in Chiapas, Mexico, with FOMMA ("Strength of the Mayan Woman") the first indigenous Mayan Women's Theater, and a stint as the Sir Edward Youde Distinguished Lecturer at Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts.

Recent directing work includes a giant puppet-and-mask version of Ubu The King at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide with inmates at Bayview Correctional Facility in Manhattan; and What You Need, a play about sexual abuse, created in workshop and chosen by the Kennedy Center/ACTF as one of the ten best short plays of 2005.