Artistic Director

Gus Kaikkonen’s plays have been produced at Playwrights Horizons, the Production Company, the Theatre Off Park, the West Bank Café, and the Juilliard School in New York; at the New End Theatre and the Theatre Museum, Covent Garden in London; and at regional theatres across the US. Awards include a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS Playwriting grant, a Michigan Arts Council Award, the Lecomte du Nouys Playwriting Award, and a MacDowell Fellowship. He is a current member of the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. The American Theatre Critics Association selected his play, Time Steps, produced at the BoarsHead Theatre, as one of the ten best plays to open outside of New York. His musical Cindy Reilly won Michigan’s Thespie Award for Best New Play. His musical People Like Us, written with Todd Almond, won the 2002 New Hampshire Theatre Award for best new play. He was chosen the 1995 James Thurber Playwriting Fellow by the Ohio Stae University and the 2002 Murphy Foundation Visiting Fellow at Hendrix College. He has taught playwriting and acting as a visiting professor at OSU, Hendrix College, Connecticut College and Louisiana College.

He made his Broadway acting debut in the original cast of Equus. Other New York acting credits include Tommy Tune’s American premiere production of Cloud 9, The Country Girl with Hal Holbrook and two plays at the NY Shakespeare Festival. On television he co-starred in the PBS production of Willa Cather’s Paul's Case with Eric Roberts, and has had continuing roles on ABC’s All My Children and One Life To Live. He has performed at the Long Wharf, Folger, Goodman, Asolo, GeVa, Arden, American Heartland, Aspen and BoarsHead Theatres, and the Coconut Grove Playhouse, where he was nominated for a Carbonell Award by the Southeastern Theatre Critics Association. He received Vermont’s 2000 Bessie Award for Best Actor for his performance as Richard III at the Lost Nation Theatre.

This season Kaikkonen directed Peter Pan at the Asolo in Sarasota, and in New York City, I Have Been Here Before at the Pearl, Under the Bed at HB Playwrights, and Golden Boy at the Juilliard School. Previous directing credits include Off Broadway productions of Heartbreak House with George Morfogen and Joanne Camp at the Pearl, Macbeth with Stephen McHattie, Candida with Laurie Kennedy, Richard III with Austin Pendleton, the New York premieres of Harley Granville-Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance with George Morfogen and The Charity That Began At Home with Kristin Griffith, both at the Mint, Andrew John’s Fridays with Henderson Forsythe, and Trish Johnson’s Second Prize: Two Months In Leningrad with J. Smith-Cameron. In the regions, he has directed at the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival, BoarsHead Theatre, Cohoes Music Hall, the Folger, the Springer Opera House, and Glassboro Summer Theatre. For a season he was the resident assistant director for the Washington Opera at the John F. Kennedy Center. From 1990-93 he was the Artistic Director of Riverside Shakespeare Company in NYC, during which time he produced three seasons of works by Shakespeare and Shaw, as well as the world premiere of Iron Bars, Arpad Goncz, the President of Hungary. Since 1996 he has been the Artistic Director of the Peterborough Players, a 71-year-old CORST stock theatre in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

In 1998 he produced and directed a tribute to Louis Armstrong starring Wynton Marsalis at the Colden Center, Queens College for First Lady Hillary Clinton and the White House Millenium Council. In his nine seasons at Peterborough he has staged 35 plays, including Mary Beth Hurt in Six Degrees Of Separation, James Rebhorn in Later Life, and James Whitmore in Our Town, About Time and You Can't Take It With You. He directed a workshop version of the musical Anna Karenina starring Melissa Errico at the York Theatre in May 2001. His adaptation of Harley Granville-Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance enjoyed a very successful run Off Broadway at the Mint Theatre in 2001 and entered the rep at the Asolo Theatre in Sarasota, Florida in 2001. His production of Twelfth Night at the Asolo won the 2002 Sarasota Magazine and Handy Awards as Best Production of the Season. Gus won the 2004 and 2003 New Hampshire Theatre Awards for Best Director for Players productions of You Can't Take It With You and The Cherry Orchard. (2005)