The Lab Community

Ethan Heard is a director, producer, and teacher who makes theater to build community and foster love. He is Associate Artistic Director of Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, where he has directed “The Bridges of Madison County”, “Pacific Overtures”, and “Which Way to the Stage”. He co-founded Heartbeat Opera and led the company for its first eight seasons, growing it into “an enterprise that, while small and still young, has already contributed more to opera’s vitality than most major American companies” (NYTimes). With Heartbeat, his radical adaptation of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” (NYTimes Critic’s Pick), reenvisioned through the lens of Black Lives Matter, featured more than 100 incarcerated singers from six prison choirs. Confronting other urgent issues such as Asian erasure (“Butterfly”) and climate collapse (“Hot Mama: Singing Gays Saving Gaia”), his operatic work is “incisive and inspired” (Opera News) and has been presented at BAM, The Met Museum, and The Kennedy Center. He has also reimagined classic musicals and plays, casting Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors” as a lip-syncing drag queen and the mob in “Julius Caesar” as social media users caught in a dangerous echo chamber. His interpretation of Sondheim (“Woods”, “Merrily”, “Sunday”) has been praised for its “emotional eloquence” (Boston Globe), and he has shepherded new works by Marisa Michelson, Mark Campbell, and Daniel Schlosberg that explode traditional ideas of genre. Ethan taught at Yale for six years, where he earned his BA and MFA and began the beloved tradition of Yale School of Drag. ethanheard.com