LPTW Lucille Lortel Award 2002 - Cara Reichel

CARA REICHEL, Founder, Prospect Theatre Company

Cara Reichel, Producing Artistic Director, was born in Oxford, Mississippi, and grew up in Rome, Georgia. Since the Prospect’s founding in 1998, Cara has worked to establish the company as a vital presence in NYC’s theater community. She has directed numerous company productions including The Book of the Dun Cow, The House of Bernarda Alba, DIDO (& Aeneas), Danton’s Death, Twelfth Night, Everyman, and others. Through Prospect, she has collaborated frequently with composer and lyricist Peter Mills, as well as other emerging and established writers. Together with Mills, she has created Honor, The Rockae, The Pursuit of Persephone, The Taxi Cabaret, The Flood, Illyria, Lonely Rhymes, and The Alchemists, new musical theater works which have been recognized by organizations such as ASCAP, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, and the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation. She also recently collaborated with Susan DiLallo, Peter Mills, and Stephen Weiner on Iron Curtain, a new musical which was developed in July 2008 at the O’Neill Theatre Center, which received the 2006 Innovative Theatre Award for “Outstanding Production of a Musical,” and for which she also received an “Outstanding Director” nomination. Cara has also recently directed for the Village Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals, Oberon Theatre Ensemble, PASSAJ Productions, GMT Productions (Rome, GA), the Goodwill Theatre (Binghamton, NY) and the Gallery Players. She was honored to receive the 2002 “Lucille Lortel Award” for Emerging Women Artists from the League of Professional Theatre Women, an organization for which she now serves on the Board of Directors. And, she was selected to receive 2004 and 2007 “New Directors / New Works” Grants from the Drama League. Cara was educated at Princeton University, from which she graduated in 1996 with an A.B. in Anthropology and a Certificate in Theater, and in the M.F.A. Program for Directing at Brooklyn College, where she was named 2006 “Alumna of the Year.” She has worked at such notable NYC non-profits as Manhattan Theatre Club, American Ballet Theatre, and HERE Arts Center. Cara has also published a children’s book, A Stone Promise, which she wrote and illustrated (Landmark Editions Inc., 1991). She is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, the League of Professional Theatre Women, the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and is a Trustee of the Princeton Triangle Club.