Stephen Kennedy Murphy

                                                                                                                            skm@eugeneoneill.net

"A director of opera and theater with a powerful voice..."

                           - The New York Times

Mr. Murphy has directed performances in venues on Broadway, 

Off-Broadway and at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and Yale University.

Before Breakfast by Eugene O'Neill

Scenic Design by Roger Hanna    Lighting Design by Matthew Adelson

Before and After Breakfast, Murphy's pairing of the play and operatic adaptations of Eugene O'Neill's Before Breakfast was developed at The Juilliard School and presented Off-Broadway and also at Yale University, where he taught and directed for ten years.

He started directing as an apprentice to Frank Corsaro at Juilliard and at The Actors Studio.  He began his career working with Placido Domingo on Madama Butterfly.

Murphy continues to direct both opera and O'Neill.  He has worked on the directing staff of New York City Opera and in the U.S. has  directed Carmen, Rigoletto, Dialogues of the Carmelites, Die Fledermaus, Dido and Aeneas, Faust and Alcina. He staged his adaptation of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale  at Alice Tully Hall. He directed Mozart's The Impresario in Siena, Italy.  His opera project, Playwrights Opera, is the musical wing of Playwrights Theater of NY, of which he is artistic director. Stephen is also the founder of the Eugene O'Neill Studios at Yale and in NYC. Through Playwrights Theater he has staged nineteen O'Neill plays through an ongoing series of the Nobel Prize-winning dramatist's canon that have included three world premiers: Bread and Butter, The Personal Equation and Now I Ask You. 

For seven years he was artist-in-residence at The Monte Cristo Cottage, O'Neill's boyhood home in New London, Conn. For 20 years he provided research and support for preeminent O'Neill biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb. 

His writing has appeared in The New Yorker.  He is also the author of The Eugene O'Neill Revue, a musical lecture in which in which the story of O'Neill's early life is told through a combining of his poems, letters and songs that are heard in his plays. The Revue debuted at Lincoln Center's Bruno Walter Auditorium and has since been performed at Yale University, New York University and Columbia University with Murphy accompanying at the piano. 

Recent projects include Tosca at Symphony Space, Die Fledermaus (with orchestra) at Lincoln Center and two Mozart Gala at Carnegie Hall's Weill Hall and Le nozze di Figaro at The National Opera Center. 

DIE FLEDERMAUS, BRUNO WALTER AUDITORIUM, LINCOLN CENTER