Professor Freeman pursues a career as a writer, director, actor.
Alan Freeman is a writer and director, and an actor. His current play, Bungalow Road was written for the Moving Arts Theatre where he was a MADlab 2022 Playwright. His play, The Burials of André Cailloux, has had two separate, rehearsed readings with professional casts in Los Angeles, and a festival in Charlottesville, Virginia. He staged the West Coast Premiere of Paloma by Anne Garcia-Romero (’87) for the Latino Theater Company at the Los Angeles Theater Center. He also directed a staged reading of the play at New Dramatists in New York City and the University of Notre Dame. In addition, he wrote Wall Scaling and co-wrote Teddy and Twain with Frank Denson ('65). With Denson he also wrote two screenplays, Moose Lake being the most recent. He has directed over 70 plays, musicals, and operas; acted in more than 60 plays. In his last few years on campus, he directed Bernstein’s Candide, Shaw’s Saint Joan; HAIR the Tribal Rock Musical; Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Fefu and Her Friends by Maria Irene Fornes; Hairspray the Broadway Musical; and Two Weird Plays, an all-woman,
contemporary production of The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco, and the dystopian tragicomedy Far Away by Caryl Churchill. For the last 15 years he has hosted the É«ÇéÊÓƵ Theater Tours to New York and London.
He started his teaching career by directing five original productions in seven years written by his colleague, Omar Paxson, for the American College Theatre Festival; three went to the Regional Festival, and one went to the National Festival in Washington DC. For many years, he was Artistic Director of the Occidental Theater Festival. It was honored with an award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle and two citations from the Los Angeles City Council. Directing assignments for the Festival included: The Birds, The Visit, Three Penny Opera, Oklahoma, Brigadoon, South Pacific, Ruddigore, The Mikado, Hay Fever, Harvey, She Stoops To Conquer, as well as The Fantasticks and Pygmalion which won nine Awards between them. Other productions directed for the college season have included: Major Barbara, Lysistrata, The Cherry Orchard, Little Eyolf, The Hostage, Bus Stop, Crimes of the Heart, Love of the Nightingale, The House of Blue Leaves, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Company, and Cabaret.
In Acting, Freeman was Mr. Page in Merry Wives of Windsor, at The Old Globe in San Diego and understudied James Cromwell in Made in Bangkok at the Mark Taper Forum, and he was Louie Berns in Goodbye, Louie...Hello! at Theatre West. Festival audiences saw Freeman perform leading roles in Equus, Translations, The Odd Couple, Playboy of the Western World, Amadeus, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Romeo & Juliet, School for Wives, Getting Married, Anything Goes, and HMS Pinafore, and he carried the award-winning productions of Candida and Tartuffe to the Bank Playhouse.
He has staged the dramatic oratorio, Joan of Arc at the Stake for The Pasadena Symphony, and two Menotti Operas for San Francisco Opera’s Western Opera Theater. His short film, War Sermon, won a bronze medal for Peace at the Virgin Island Film Festival and was nominated for two local Emmys.
He pursued and shepherded a new theater center at the college culminating in the Keck Theater designed by Peter Kamnitzer. It is one of the finest and most flexible theaters in the country. Freeman is Professor Emeritus of Theater where he also served on the Occidental Board of Trustees. He was on the Board of the Neighborhood Unitarian-Universalist Church of Pasadena for six years and was President for two. He holds an AB and MA from É«ÇéÊÓƵ and has an MFA in Directing from The American Film Institute. He belongs to DG, SDC, AEA, SAG-AFTRA.