Vincent Paul Murphy

Vincent Murphy was a welfare kid from Boston whose career includes staging plays, musicals, adaptations, and opera, while acting across the USA, Canada, and Europe. He danced, choreographed, and designed award winning sets for over four decades he was an artistic producing director of three acclaimed theaters, with a professional career of collaboration on more than 200 productions in the US, Canada, South America, and Europe. He worked at several leading regional theaters abroad and in the United States, including the American Repertory Theatre, Sundance Play Lab, The Actor’s Center of London, The Ojai play lab, The Alliance Theatre, The Cultural Olympics, New Dramatist, and The Actors Theatre Louisville. Murphy has devoted much of his career to championing the development of new plays and adaptations. At Theater Emory, where he was a full professor in the arts, he developed a biennial Brave New Works series for locally, nationally and internationally prominent writers. He created the Playwriting Center of Theater Emory, where over one hundred new plays and adaptations went on to productions around the world. Murphy initiated and produced festivals with residencies with several leading writers including Athol Fugard, Frank Manley, Naomi Wallace and Wole Soyinka. His seminal book on adaptation PAGE TO STAGE was published by the Univ. of Michigan Press to great reviews and he has plays published by Smith & Krause. He taught adaptation workshops for professionals and students at several theaters and play labs in the USA, Canada, and Europe, and won the Crystal Apple teaching award at Emory University. His former students who became leaders in the field include Snehal Desai, Robert O’Hara, Lauren Gunderson, Hank Azaria, Ariel Fristoe, Turner Scott Schoefield, Adam Richmond and Justine Shapiro.