Jeffrey D. Mason

Professor of Theatre and Dance

Dean, College of Arts and Letters

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Jeffrey D. Mason studied at the Juilliard School--French horn with Ranier DeIntinis, ensemble under Dennis Russell Davies and Per Brevig, and music theory with Jacob Druckman--before earning an A.B. in English and Music at Stanford University, where he also completed an M.A. in Education. After earning an M.A. in Drama at California State University, Sacramento, he finished his postgraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, studying American theatre with Travis Bogard as well as directing with Robert W. Goldsby, and taking a Ph.D. in Dramatic Art.

academic appointments

Mason taught and directed for one year at San Francisco State University before joining the theatre faculty at California State University, Bakersfield, where he taught acting, directing, playwriting, theatre history, modern drama and American theatre. He served as chair of the Department of Fine Arts from 1991 through 1997, and he established the Kern Art Theatre, an independent company that staged classical repertory for local audiences. In 2000, the Arts Council of Kern recognized him for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre.

In 2001, Mason moved to the University of Oregon to become head of the Department of Theatre Arts and teach such courses as political drama, subversions, Latina/o teatro and Asian American theatre, American drama, script analysis, and graduate seminars on staging Shakespeare, American "tragedy," and research methods. He organized a weekend-long symposium in honor of Ken Kesey and a one-day conference entitled "Violence and the Changing Geopolitical Order in Literature and the Arts." He initiated the First Flights program to arrange readings of original, full-length plays submitted by playwrights throughout the nation. During 2003-04, he held an appointment as the Robert F. and Evelyn Nelson Wulf Professor of the Humanities.

He returned to California in January, 2006 as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Sacramento State. In the community, he has served on the boards of the Sacramento Ballet and Capital Public Radio.

creative work

Mason has directed over fifty theatrical productions for academic and professional theatres:

  • Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth
  • classics such as The Trojan Women, Hecuba, The Second Shepherd's Play, Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, and Scapino! (with the Foothill Theatre Company)
  • modern European plays such as Uncle Vanya, Candida, Riders to the Sea, and Deathwatch
  • such American standards as Picnic, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A View From the Bridge, Lone Star, Laundry and Bourbon, and True West
  • British comedies ranging from The Importance of Being Earnest to Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever, Present Laughter, The Real Inspector Hound and The Real Thing
  • on the musical stage, Man of La Mancha; Brigadoon; Hello, Dolly!; You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown; How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Mozart's Bastien and Bastienne

As a playwright, he is the author of The Keeping Room (Lord Leebrick Theatre Company, 2005), Last Dance (FirstStage in Hollywood, 2000) and A Game of Chance (University of California, Berkeley, 1983). He translated and directed La dame aux camélias by Dumas fils, and he directed his adapation of selected stories by Arthur Conan Doyle as Sherlock Holmes: The Legend. He is also the author of a novel entitled Cousin Jack (Fowey, UK: Alexander Associates, 1996).

Mason's acting repertory includes the following roles:

  • Cassius in Julius Caesar (with the Kern Shakespeare Festival)
  • Monostatos in The Magic Flute
  • Robert in Betrayal
  • the Emcee in Cabaret
  • the President in The Madwoman of Chaillot
  • Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing
  • Master Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor (directed by Patrick Godfrey of the Royal Shakespeare Company)
  • "Henry IV" in Pirandello's Henry IV
  • Solyony in The Three Sisters
  • Quixote/Cervantes in Man of La Mancha
  • Danforth in The Crucible

scholarship

Mason's area of expertise is American theatre, especially the performance and staging of American culture, frequently with reference to political strategies and significance. He has also written about social performance in street fairs, small-town parades, Indian pow-wows, Disneyland, and the Bakersfield Business Conference.

His most recent book is Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller, published in October, 2008 by the University of Michigan Press. The work begins with an extensive discussion of Miller's testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and an analysis of his political writings. The text moves on to treat Miller's juxtaposition of the personal with the political, his treatment of the Holocaust, the position of women in his plays, and his staging of violence, all in relation to such plays as The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, The Archbishop's Ceiling, Incident at Vichy, Broken Glass, After the Fall, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan and Resurrection Blues.

His first major publication was a revision of his doctoral dissertation entitled Wisecracks: The Farces of George S. Kaufman (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988). For Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), he won honorable mention for the prestigious Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History. With J. Ellen Gainor of Cornell University, Mason edited Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), a collection of contributed essays which noted theatre scholar Joseph Roach has characterized as "ground-clearing."

Mason has published articles on American theatre and performance in Theatre Journal, TDR, Theatre Annual, Themes in Drama, Pacific Coast Philology, The Arthur Miller Journal, and New Theatre Quarterly. He has also contributed essays to the edited volumes Tom Stoppard: A Casebook (New York: Garland, 1988) and the well-regarded The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, edited by Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991). He has delivered papers at the conferences of the Modern Language Association, the American Society for Theatre Research, the American Literature Association, the Arthur Miller Society, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the Northeast Modern Language Association. He has given guest lectures at Macalester College, the University of Pittsburgh and other institutions. During 2000-01, he published a series of essays on the arts, censorship and public policy on his own Web site, The Millennium Fool, and he later developed his work in an article on the law and nude performance in Las Vegas. From 2001 through 2004, he served as book review editor for Theatre Survey.