Professor Schvey has lectured and published extensively in the areas of modern European, British and American drama. His most significant writings include an interdisciplinary study of the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka.
Henry I. Schvey is Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature, and was chair of the Performing Arts Department from 1987-2007. Prior to his arrival at Washington University, he taught and directed for fourteen years at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he was a professor of English and American literature. He has lectured and published extensively in the areas of modern European, British and American drama. Among his most significant writings are an interdisciplinary study of the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright, a collection of essays on contemporary American drama and published essays on such American playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet. In addition to his research, he founded the Leiden English Speaking Theatre in the Netherlands and was Artistic Director of this touring Dutch company from 1975 until coming to St. Louis.
He has directed numerous plays in both Europe and the United States, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, The Tempest, Twelfth Night by Shakespeare. In 1992 he started the Shakespeare’s Globe Summer Program, an intensive four-week summer acting program operated in conjunction with The Globe Theatre in London. In addition to directing Shakespeare, he has directed a great many modern plays, including such twentieth century classics as Albee’ The Zoo Story, Peter Shaffer’s Equus, Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, and Ansky’s The Dybbuk. Among the world premieres he has directed are Richard Selzer’s The Black Swan and Jim Leonard Jr.’s Gray’s Anatomy. He is currently directing the Midwest premiere of Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol’s Shooting Magda.
More recently, he has turned his attention to writing. His first play, Hannah’s Shawl, first commissioned by the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center in 1999, was performed on Holocaust Remembrance Day before more than one thousand people. A revised, two-act version of Hannah’s Shawl, under the direction of Annamaria Pileggi, was staged at Washington University in 2000. He has also completed a novel, The Poison Tree, and an original stage adaptation of Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening, which was performed in the fall of 2004. This past summer, he participated in the inaugural Playwriting Workshop sponsored by the American College Theatre Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
He has been married to his wife Patty for thirty-three years, and has two daughters, Jerusha and Natasha, a son Aram, and far too many dogs and cats to mention by name. Although born in New York, he has been a rabid Cardinals fan since 1968.
