Kestutis Nakas is a performer, writer, and director whose work has been presented at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Yale Rep, La Mama, Dixon Place, P.S. 122, St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, 8BC, The Kitchen, Highways, Prop Theatre and numerous other national and regional venues. Performance works and plays include RIP, No Bees for Bridgeport, Railroad Backward, Remembrance of Things Pontiac, My Heart, My President, Hunger and Lightning, and The Andrew Carnegie Story.
In the 1980s, he was active in New York’s East Village performance scene. In 1983, he directed a legendary production of Titus Andronicus at New York City’s Pyramid Cocktail Lounge. Titus featured East Village luminaries like Ann Magnuson, Bill Rice, Tom Rubnitz, John Sex, John Kelly, and Steve Buscemi . His Gates of Dawn performance space showcased New York performers. He has taught at NYU, UCLA, CUNY, the University of New Mexico and is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at The Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
His performance text about urban beekeeping, No Bees for Bridgeport, was published in Animal Acts, Performing Species Today, an anthology of new performance edited by Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes, University of Michigan Press. A bilingual edition of his tragi-comic cycle When Lithuania Ruled The World was published by Aukso Zuvys publishers, Vilnius , in February 2017.
In December 2017, his new solo piece Channel D debuted at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. In June 2018, in honor of the centennial of Lithuanian independence, he presented a staged reading of all four parts of When Lithuania Ruled the World at HOWL Happening, New York City. In September 2021, at Pangea in NYC, he performed his newest show, Velvet’s Republic, incorporating ventriloquism. In December of 2021 he was named Playwright in Residence at Chicago Dramatists. Kestutis Nakas lives in Chicago with his wife and son. His most recent play, Down on Willie’s Farm, a new America adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, received its first staged reading at Chicago Dramatist in February of 2023.
LINKS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kęstutis_Nakas
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/23/movies/review-theater-weird-epic-of-history-and-myth.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l85h4Qm8DbA
Emeritus Professor of Theatre, Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University
knakas@roosevelt.edu (312) 307 5194