David Kaplan is an author and theater director who stages plays around the world with professional companies in indigenous languages and settings. He is a former Fellow at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, the repository of Tennessee Williams’s literary estate. He has experience directing Williams’s repertory around the world.

In 2003, Mr. Kaplan staged Tennessee Williams’s The Eccentricities of a Nightingale in Cantonese at the Hong Kong Repertory Theater. Seasons past include directing the first Russian production of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer (the subject of a TASS documentary); a Sufi King Lear in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, performed in the Uzbek language and broadcast on Uzbek television; and Genet’s The Maids in Ulaan Baator, Mongolia, performed in Mongolian. In America, he has staged his own adaptation of The Circus of Dr. Lao in Los Angeles, Tennessee Williams’s The Traveling Companion at West Beth in New York, and Williams’s Frosted Glass Coffins in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival.

David Kaplan is also the author of Five Approaches to Acting (West Broadway Press, Spring 2001, Italian edition, Dino Audino Editore, Roma September 2003 ) and articles on such varied subjects as Eudora Welty and Andres Segovia, the history of Shakespeare productions in Central Asia, the American monologist Ruth Draper, the twenty-first century freaks of Coney Island USA. His translations of Chinese poetry from eighteenth century Japan will appear in the journal Alehouse early 2007.