Profile for Nic Barilar

Brief biography

Dr. Nic Barilar is a theatre historian, teacher, director, and actor specializing in Irish theatre and drama, transnational histories, censorship studies, and performance theory and practices. Nic joined the department in 2022, teaching courses in theatre history, dramatic literature, and performance and directing productions in UWL's season of shows. This year, Nic will be directing of Puffs, Or Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic and the musical Cabaret.

Nic holds a PhD in theatre and performance studies from the University of Pittsburgh. His research is broadly interested in exploring transnational issues in theatre history - how ideas, texts, people, and performances move across and and go beyond national borders. For instance, in a forthcoming book chapter, Nic explores the ways that the censorship of James Joyce's novel Ulysses moved beyond the times and places of its multiple bannings across the globe to inform the production and reception of the performance of a dramatic adaptation of the novel in Dublin in 1962. The chapter asks, in short, "How does the knowledge that a play has been banned potentially change how audiences interpret that play?" Another recent publication re-situates the so-called "theatre of the absurd" within the context of France's decolonial wars in Africa and Asia. Co-authored with the University of Edinburgh's Hannah Simpson, this project points out how Martin's Esslin's famous book The Theatre of the Absurd obscures and overlooks critiques and references to colonial and imperial violence in the plays he examined in order to arrive at "universal" interpretations of those plays -- interpretations that problematically evacuate political and historical specificity in the dramatic texts themselves.

As an artist, Nic has performed a number of production roles across theatre's many disciplines. In 2019, he produced, directed, co-coached the dialects, and choreographed the intimacy for the North American premiere of Máiréad Ní Ghráda's 1964 Irish classic, On Trial -- an experimental drama about the historical abuse and neglect single mothers in Ireland faced in the mid-twentieth century. A proud member of Actors' Equity Association (AEA), the union of professional stage actors, Nic has also worked as an actor and singer at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Center (Midland, PA), the Pittsburgh Festival Opera (Pittsburgh, PA), the Virginia Samford Theatre (Birmingham, AL), and the Barn Theatre (Augusta, MI). Past directing projects at UWL include Last Train to Nibroc, Dragons Love Tacos, Dr. Faustus, and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. He has also coached dialects and accents for several of these shows as well as Murder on the Orient Express, A Christmas Carol, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.