Stephen Kitsakos

Stephen Kitsakos is an opera librettist, stage director and teacher. With the American composer, Sheila Silver, he has written opera libretti for A Thousand Splendid Suns, adapted from bestselling novel by Khaled Hosseini, commissioned by the Seattle Opera, The Wooden Sword, (UConn Opera Connecticut) and The White Rooster commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution. With the composer Martin Hennessy he wrote the opera-theatre one-act operas, An Incident in Sutton Place, The Woman in Penthouse and the The Pleasing Recollection, A Cabaret Opera. Other opera & music theater projects include The Other Voice with Robert Starer & Gail Godwin and Ashokan with Greg Allen & The Woodstock Cycle.

Kitsakos is the recipient of grants or commissions from the Seattle Opera, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Commission on the Arts, the Florida Council on the Arts, the Catskill Watershed Commission, the Episcopal Diocese of New York, the Community Foundation of the Florida Keys, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, NYFA and American Opera Projects. 

Between 1999 & 2013 he was a member of the Theater Arts Faculty at SUNY New Paltz teaching courses in theatre studies, musical theater and performance as well as at Shantigar, the spiritual retreat of playwright Jean-Claude van Italie, and at Kripalu. During that time he was a contributing writer for The Sondheim Review and ABC-CLIO’s Music in American Life. Kitsakos has developed a series of theater courses that view their subjects through a socio-cultural lens including Stephen Sondheim & the Reinvention of the American Musical, West Side Story: An American Tragedy, The Americanization of Jewishness through Sholem Aleichem & Fiddler on the Roof, Gender & Sexual Identity in Contemporary Musical Theater and The Wine Dark Sea: Greek Tragedy in the 21st Century.

His work as a stage director concentrates on new works with established and emerging playwrights including Smithtown by Drew Larimore, starring Michael Urie & The Thing About Pipecleaner People by Drew Larimore with Constance Shulman (The Studios of Key West), Anne by Adi Eshman (Bowery Theater, NY), Red Masquerade by Jack Wade (Beckett Theater at Theater Row, NY) and Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry? by Eric Weinberger. (Helmerich Theater, Key West). Since 2018, he has focused on both directing and engaging in scholarly research for the lesser, unknown and experimental one-act plays of Tennessee Williams including Lifeboat Drill, Kingdom of Earth, Green Eyes & The Traveling Companion as an Artistic Associate of the Tennessee Williams Key West Museum.

A graduate of New York University and the BMI Musical Theater Workshop, professional affiliations include librettist membership in Opera America, the Dramatists Guild, and ASCAP.