Moisés Kaufman

Moisés Kaufman (born November 21, 1963, Caracas, Venezuela) is a Venezuelan-born playwright and director who is best known for perceptive and moving plays often rooted in issues of sexuality. He was cofounder in 1991 of Tectonic Theater Project, a company dedicated to examining the structure and language of theatre as well as addressing contemporary social issues.

Kaufman was born in Venezuela to Orthodox Jewish parents and was of Ukrainian and Romanian descent. He attended a yeshiva (Jewish religious school) as a child and was exposed to broader culture on family trips to New York City. A Caracas theatre festival he attended as a young teenager brought him exposure to the avant-garde plays of such artists as Peter Brook, Tadeusz Kantor, Pina Bausch, and Jerzy Grotowski, whom he cited as his early influences. While attending Metropolitan University in Caracas (B.A. in business administration, 1985), Kaufman joined a touring experimental theatre group as an actor. In 1987 he moved to New York City, where he studied theatre directing at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, meanwhile directing a variety of plays. It was at NYU that he honed his ideas about the purpose and most-effective means of presenting theatrical performances. Four years later Kaufman, together with his partner, Jeffrey LaHoste, established Tectonic Theater Project.

Kaufman’s writing debut, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (performed 1997–98, published 1997), illustrated his concerns as a writer-director. He was especially interested in what he termed “watershed historical moments,” events that reveal the foundations of society’s beliefs. A powerful and moving play that used actual trial testimony, Gross Indecency won an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding Off-Broadway play. Kaufman and his troupe then began work on The Laramie Project (performed 2000, published 2001, television movie 2002), interviewing numerous residents of the small Wyoming city in which gay college student Matthew Shepard had been brutally murdered. The play had particular resonance with Kaufman, who was gay, and it proved popular throughout the world.

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In 2003 Kaufman directed a one-man show, Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife: Studies for a Play About Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (performed 2003–04), the story of a gay transvestite who survived life in Nazi Germany and Soviet East Berlin. It was critically acclaimed and resulted in a Tony Award nomination for Kaufman. In the next several years Kaufman directed a variety of plays, including Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He also directed his own play 33 Variations (first performed 2007), starring Jane Fonda as a musicologist obsessed with Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, and received another Tony nomination. In 2009 Kaufman and other Tectonic members arranged for 150 simultaneous readings in theatres across the globe of a sequel, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. He also directed Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (performed 2011), starring Robin Williams as the title character; a 2012–13 revival of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress, a play based on Henry James’s novel Washington Square; and a revival of Torch Song (2018–19), which was written by Harvey Fierstein. In 2016 Kaufman received the National Medal of Arts.