Emily Mann (director)


Emily Betsy Mann is an American director, playwright and screenwriter. She served as the artistic director and resident playwright of the McCarter Theatre from 1990 to 2020.

Career

As the McCarter Theatre Center's Artistic Director and Resident Playwright from 1990 to 2020, Mann oversaw more than 160 productions, including more than 40 world premieres. During her tenure, the theater won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, and Mann herself was twice nominated for Tony Awards as a playwright and director. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2019.
Her other personal awards include the Peabody Award, the Hull-Warriner Award from the Dramatists Guild, awards from the NAACP, eight Obie awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2011 Person of the Year Award from the National Theater Conference, as well as the Margo Jones Award, given to a "citizen-of-the-theatre who has demonstrated a lifetime commitment to the encouragement of the living theatre everywhere" and the 2021 Gordon Davidson Award from the foundation of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. Mann also received an honorary Doctorate of Arts from Princeton University.
In January 2019, McCarter Theatre announced that Mann would retire from the position following the 2019–2020 season. The McCarter Theatre will honor Mann with the Inaugural Roger S. Berlind Award in June 2026.
Mann's nearly 50 McCarter directing credits include productions by William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, and Tennessee Williams and the world premieres of Christopher Durang's Turning Off the Morning News; Ken Ludwig's adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express; Danai Gurira's The Convert; Rachel Bonds' Five Mile Lake; Sarah Treem's The How and the Why; Christopher Durang's Miss Witherspoon; and Edward Albee's Me, Myself and I. She has also directed Broadway shows A Streetcar Named Desire, Anna in the Tropics, Execution of Justice, and Having Our Say.
Her plays include: Having Our Say, adapted from the book by Sarah Louise Delany and Annie Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth; Execution of Justice; Still Life; Annulla, An Autobiography; Greensboro ; Meshugah; Mrs. Packard and Hoodwinked .
Her play, Gloria: A Life, about the legacy of Gloria Steinem played off-Broadway at the Daryl Roth Theatre from October 2018 through March 2019.. The play aired on PBS Great Performances in June 2020.
She directed adaptations of Baby Doll, Scenes from a Marriage, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, A Seagull in the Hamptons, The House of Bernarda Alba, Antigone. In 2023 she developed a new adaptation of The Pianist which ran regionally at the George Street Playhouse.
Mann grew up in Chicago, where her father taught history. She completed her BA in English literature at Harvard University in 1974 and her MFA in Directing from the University of Minnesota in 1976.
Mann was married to the actor Gerry Bamman, with whom she shares a son, Nicholas. She is now married to Gary Mailman, an attorney. Mann and Mailman live in Princeton, New Jersey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1994.
A biography of Mann, "Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater," by Alexis Greene was published in November 2021 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books.

Works

Directing

Some of her McCarter directing credits include:

Writing