Brent Hazelton

site updated 7.5.19

Hello--and thanks for visiting!

I'm Brent Hazelton.  I'm a theater maker: an institutional leader and administrator, a director and producer, a dramaturg and developer of new plays, a playwright, and an educator--and I'm in love with the work.

On December 17th, 2018, I was appointed Incoming Producing Artistic Director at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre. Milwaukee’s second-oldest theater company (in its 45th season) and largest SPT institution, Chamber stages five productions each season in both venues in the Third Ward’s Broadway Theatre Center. I’ll spend the 2019/20 season learning the institution from incumbent Artistic Director C. Michael Wright before taking over full-time following Michael’s well-earned retirement on June 30th, 2019. After spending the past 20 seasons at Milwaukee Repertory Theater—most recently for a decade as Associate Artistic Director and Director of New Play Development—I am proud and honored to have the opportunity to collaborate with Managing Director Kirsten Finn to lead this storied organization, and humbled to continue an artistic conversation via Chamber with my fellow Milwaukeeans.

My directing work, one example of which was also my playwrighting debut, has set sales records in two of Milwaukee Repertory Theater's three core performances spaces. Playwrights tell me that mine is the most useful dramaturgical feedback that they have received in their careers.  And audiences, critics, and colleagues regularly and effusively comment on the clarity, intelligence, and deep emotional impact of the projects on which I collaborate. 

Theater is the most engaging form of discourse that I know.  It is active democracy in living, breathing art.  We that make it have an obligation to create beautiful, intellectually stimulating, emotionally resonant entertainment of such fundamental and revelatory power that barriers preventing understanding are destroyed, new connections are forged, and communities are unified.

It is the pursuit of this result that gets me out of bed every morning, and I am incapable of chasing it with less than my full being.  To offer anything else is to disrespect the form and the craft, and to shortchange the theater maker's responsibility as civic catalyst.

IN PERFORMANCE

More to come in 2020!

WORK IN PROGRESS