CASTORF, FRANK

(1951- )

   Director, intendant. Castorf is, in the minds of many, the best director (certainly among the most decorated) born after World War II currently working in the German theater. The influential monthly Theater Heute has named him Germany's "director of the year" five times; he has also received the Schiller Prize, the Nestroy Prize, the Kortner Prize, and the Friedrich Luft Prize, in addition to numerous other citations for his work. Those include a dozen invitations to the Berliner Theatertreffen between 1991 and 2005.

   Castorf completed theater history studies at Humboldt University in East Berlin in 1976 and soon thereafter began directing plays in a series of tiny provincial East German theaters.The regime forbade him from working in East Berlin due to the tenor of his productions and his frequent attempts to stage plays that the regime had forbidden. However, when East Germany disintegrated along with other Warsaw Pact countries in 1989, Castorf found himself in demand throughout former West Germany, perhaps in part because of his well-publicized (in the Western media, at any rate) jousting with the

   East German authorities during the 1980s. He accepted invitations to direct plays in the West, but concentrated on staging formerly "problematic" plays in the former East Germany, almost as if he were testing the historical reality of the Berlin Wall's collapse.

   Castorf became established in Berlin—in the former eastern sector—as principal director of the Deutsches Theater from 1990 to 1992. In 1992 he accepted the position of intendant of the Volksbühne, which likewise is located in what was East Berlin. In that position, he is scheduled to remain at least until 2007. Among his numerous stagings invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen was his 2001 adaptation of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, which he retitled Destination America (a variation on the German title of Streetcar, which is Endstation: Sehnsucht, literally "Destination: Longing").