Rick DesRochers
Email: richard.desrochers@lehman.cuny.edu
Phone: 718-960-7167
Office: Speech/Theatre Building, Room 108
Office hours: By appointment requested through Navigate
Rank: Professor and Director of Theatre
Degrees: B.A., Arizona State University; M.F.A., University of Massachusetts at Amherst; M.A. and Ph.D,. Graduate Center, City University of New York
Dr. Rick DesRochers is Professor of Theatre and Director of the Theatre Program at Lehman College, City University of New York. He has served as the Director of New Play and Musical Development for the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival; the Goodman Theatre; Artistic Director of the New Theatre of Boston; director and dramaturg for the NYC Music Theatre Festival, NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, the Playwrights' Center of Minneapolis, and the Soho Theatre of London. His work is primarily based in devised and immersive theatrical performance, using the physical training techniques of Ecole Jacques Lecoq, including writing and performing his solo multimedia show The Earl of Lear for TheaterLab NYC, and for Lehman College: Shakespeare’s Hamlet; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Brecht’s Life of Galileo; the original devised multimedia production of BUSTED! Degrees: M.F.A. University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Ph.D. Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of The New Humor in the Progressive Era (Palgrave Macmillan); The Comic Offense from Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy (Bloomsbury); and most recently “BUSTED! in the Bronx: Bambaataa, Kafka, and Keaton, and the Sampled Realities of Youth Culture in Vaudeville and Hip-Hop,” in Migrations in American Theater and Drama (Universidad de Sevilla Press).
Selected Publications
- The New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; 2014 Finalist George Freedley Memorial Award for an exemplary work in the field of live theatre or performance)
- The Comic Offense from Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy: Larry David, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Dave Chappelle (Bloomsbury, 2014; named “Outstanding Title in the Performing Arts” by the American Library Association)
- “The Mythology of History, Family and Performance” in Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries, eds. Phillip C. Kolin and Harvey Young (Routledge, 2014)
- Several journal articles for The Drama Review (TDR), The Journal of Popular Culture, and TheatreForum (UCSD).
- “Keaton, Class, and Social Control: Comic Vaudeville in the Progressive Era,” in Performing the Progressive Era, eds. J. Chris Westgate and Max Shulman (University of Iowa Press, 2019).
- “BUSTED! in the Bronx: Bambaataa, Kafka, and Keaton, and the Sampled Realities of Youth Culture in Vaudeville and Hip-Hop,” in Migrations in American Theater and Drama (Universidad de Sevilla Press, 2023).
