Director
SELECTED WORK
Nick Tash is an Indiana-based director interested in the productive intersection of the traditional and the avant-garde. From 2016 to 2020, Nick served as the Artistic Director of the Fort Wayne theatre company, Shakespearemachine. His specialities include Shakespeare and his contemporaries, mask work, and movement-based devising.
You can find his instant photography work HERE.
CONTACT
nicholasrtash@gmail.com
260-403-6686
Photo courtesy of Kennedy Crissinger CURRICULUM VITAE
Complete C.V. available HERE
Education
Indiana Purdue University Fort Wayne
2010-2013
Emphasis in Directing
John O’Connell, Advisor
Employment Founder and Co-Artistic Director
Shakespearemachine
April 2016 - January2020
WorkFalstaff
Fort Wayne Philharmonic
2024
Macbeth
Shakespearemachine
2018
Faustus
Shakespearemachine
2017
As You Like It
Shakespearemachine
2017
Coriolanus
Shakespearemachine
2016
Comedy of Errors
Shakespearemachine
2016
Moonlight and Magnolias
Different Stages at the Huntington
2014
The Sound of Music
Different Stages at the Huntington
2014
Actor, “Master Shallow”
Director/Designer
Director/Designer
Director/Designer
Director/Designer
Director/Designer
Actor, “Ben Hecht”
Actor, “Admiral Von Schreiber/Baron Elberfeld”
ReferencesUpon Request
Skills
Direction
Stage Management
Administration (Excel skills)
Data analysis (Excel and SQL)
Lighting design
Light board programming (ETC)
Set design
Press
‘Tackling the Bard’s Weighty Works” by Michele DeVinney
Whatzup Magazine
November 2018
https://whatzup.com/shakespearmachine-tackling-the-bards-weighty-works/
‘Review of Faustus’ by Manuel Antonio Jacquez
Shakespeare Bulletin
Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 36, Number 3, Fall 2018
‘Bringing the Bard Home’ by Michele DeVinney
Fort Wayne Magazine
August 2016
https://www.fortwayne.com/arts-culture/bringing-the-bard-home/
arts IN focus - ‘Artist Alex Hall and Shakespearemachine’
Season 3, Episode 6
PBS39 Fort Wayne
October 2016
https://www.pbs.org/video/wfwa-arts-focus-arts-focus-306/
‘Budding Theatre Collective Adds Modern Twists To Shakespeare's Classic Works’
89.1 WBOI
May 2016
https://www.wboi.org/arts-culture/2016-05-18/budding-theatre-collective-adds-modern-twists-to-shakespeares-classic-works
CurLacdsfdfdst Updated 24.10.31 SELECTED WORK
1. MACBETH by William Shakespeare
Direction, Set and Lighting Design
Shakespearemachine
Parkview Physicians Group Artslab
November 2018
“It’s a hard world for little things...”
-Rachel Cooper, Night of the Hunter
Inspired by the birth of my children, this production of Macbeth was an attempt at an excavation of certain subterranean themes in Shakespeare’s work, namely the fate of the Macbeth’s unseen child. It was also an exploration of the ways young innocents in the play come to various types of harm, this being a preoccupation of mine as a new father.
The world of the tragedy was reimagined as a stark, sculptural world where innocence meets brutality. A landscape stripped to its essentials: cold light, open space, and bodies caked in mud. Macbeth dons modern armor and a paper crown, a symbol of the precarity of his reign. The Weird Sisters, bearing strong resemblances to baby dolls pulled from the muck and the Grady Twins from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, weave lines of fate in red threed pulled from the entrails of dead soldiers. Past and present blurred as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, both haunted by the loss of their child and by the phantoms of their victims, unraveled in a duet of ambition and fear.
Poster art courtesy of Nick Ferran.
2. FAUSTUS by Christopher Marlowe
Direction, Set and Lighting Design
Shakespearemachine
Parkview Physician’s Group ArtsLab
Jan 2018
Inspired by the work of Jan Svankmajer, this adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was set entirely in the confines of Faustus’ study. This was to emphasize the illusionary nature of Faustus’ bargain. He believes that he has gained the secrets of the universe and all the earthly pleasures, whereas, in fact, this is all a dumbshow performed for him by a troupe of grotesquely blank-faced demons.
Accompanied by a chugging doom metal score, performed live by local guitarist Alex Volz,
Faustus presented a surreal, hermetic dreamscape where alchemy, puppetry, and masks would collide. Set inside a chalk-covered chamber of symbols, Faustus’s pact is not a grand spectacle but a fevered descent into a cosmos arrayed against him. Darkly playful, Faustus transformed Marlowe’s tragedy into a tactile, unsettling fable about desire, overreach, and the monstrous worlds we conjure for ourselves.
Poster art courtesy of Adam Johnson.
3. CORIOLANUS by William Shakespeare
Direction and Set Design
Shakespearemachine
Parkview Physicians Group ArtsLab
October 2016
Rome, just after the fall of the Tarquin kings. A new republic. Not a city of marble, but of dirt.
Bread riots and civil war. This is a Rome just on the edge of barbarism, teetering on the brink of collapse.
The production thrust Shakespeare’s political tragedy into the heart of an uprising. Citizens and soldiers clash in a volatile fight for power, exposing the brutal cost of pride, loyalty, and rebellion. Staged in a traverse configuration to allow for maximum confrontation between opposing parties: first, the patricians and the plebeians of Rome, then the Romans and the Volscians, and finally Aufidius and Coriolanus himself.
Coriolanus was the second production of Shakespearemachine, staged the same year as The Comedy of Errors and featured masks designed by members of the Shakespearemachine resident company.
Poster art courtesy of Ryan Pickard.
4. COMEDY OF ERRORS by William Shakespeare
Direction and Set Design
Shakespearemachine
Parkview Physicians Group ArtsLab
May 2016
The Comedy of Errors was the first production mounted by Shakespearemachine.
Conceived as a Kafkaesque slapstick farce, the action took place in an arena meant to evoke the main ring of a circus. Traditional commedia dell’arte masks were used in this production to emphasize the link between that tradition and the stock types of Shakespeare’s earliest comedy.
This production of The Comedy of Errors emphasized the carnivalesque dimension. It was a world of exaggerated characters, toy-like props, and vaudevillian movement. Performers leapt, tumbled, and collided through a story where logic dissolves and play rules the stage. A riot of physical comedy, this Comedy of Errors transformed confusion into pure theatrical delight.
Poster art courtesy of Ryan Pickard.
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