Best Director

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Todd Bates

Best Director

There were times last season when it seemed that everything on every Bay area stage was directed by Karla Hartley. How the producing artistic director at Stageworks can afford to take on so many projects — and stage them so well — is a question not easily answered (something about sheer talent, no doubt). But consider her production of Inventing Van Gogh at Jobsite Theater earlier this year — a deeply passionate, theatrically dazzling instance of magic realism — followed only a week later by her glossy modern version of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage for American Stage — a hard-edged, precisely-sculpted study of modern adults whose carefully crafted personalities melt down under stress into an angry, antagonistic mess. What will she do next?