Profile for Nic Barilar

Brief biography

Nic is entering his third year at UWL and is thrilled to be back to work teaching UWL's students! In addition to teaching courses, Nic will be directing this season's productions of Puffs, Or Seven Increasingly Dangerous Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic and the musical Cabaret.

Nic is a theatre historian, teacher, and artist specializing in Irish theatre and drama, censorship history, and performance theory and practices. He 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 crystalize beyond national borders. For instance, Nic's book project follows the performances of banned Irish plays from the 1950s and '60s to their eventual performances within and beyond Ireland. Drawing on extensive archival research, the project recreates performances of these plays and examines how their censorship in Ireland continued to circulate and impact cultural formations within and beyond Ireland. In addition to his research on mobile censorship, Nic is also recently completed two projects that will be published as book chapters in edited collections: one that 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); and another on the transnational movement of censorship in the 1962 performance of a banned play in Dublin. 

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), 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.