Nancy Jones

Nancy Jones is a Professor of Theatre in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Kentucky. Her research has been published in Comparative Drama Journal, Theatre Journal, Sorbonne Université Presses, Harold Pinter Review, and Shakespeare Bulletin, et.al. As a practicing Theatre Director, her work has been featured in New York at the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, the New York International Fringe Festival, La MaMa Experimental Theatre, the American Living Room Festival at HERE, Immigrant’s Theatre Project, New York Performance Works, New Dramatists, and the Actors Theatre of Louisville 24-Hour Play Festival. She is a former board member for the National Association of Schools of Theatre and was Chair of the UK theatre department for twelve years. Her current research project explores feminist reinterpretations of Molière’s Don Juan in the twenty-first century.

The project

Title: From Libertine to Liberated: Women Directors Reclaim and Reinterpret Molière’s Don Juan in the Twenty-First Century

"For nearly four centuries Molière’s Don Juan, 1665, originally titled Le Festin de Pierre has been a battleground of ideas, critiqueing libertinism and hypocrisy while simultaneously valorizing masculine power and transgressive ideologies. Written as a direct retort to those who criticized Tartuffe (1664), the play provoked controversy and ran for only fifteen performances, yet its legacy has endured. Across hundreds of adaptations, Don Juan remained the domain of male directors in theatre and film, whose interpretations reinforced its patriarchal assumptions, a dynamic landscape that has begun to shift in the twenty-first century. My project poses the question: what happens when a woman directs Don Juan, a comic play whose central character is a notorious and unfaithful seducer? It then examines the ways in which women’s reinterpretations shift and reframe the play’s meaning, and challenge its treatment of gender, morality, and power. The book project explores these questions through the productions of four women theatre directors: Brigitte Jaques (Odéon Theatre, Paris, 2000); Lorraine Pintal (Stratford Festival, 2006); Ashley Tata (Bard Summerscape, 2020); and Macha Makeïeff (Odéon Theatre, 2024). Each of these theatre artists reclaims and reinterprets Don Juan through a twenty-first century lens, disrupting centuries of male interpretive dominance."

Selective Bibliography

• « Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview: Affect in Three Acts, »  Comparative Drama Journal, June 2025
• « Last Laugh of the Medusa: Cixousian écriture féminine in March Norman’s ‘night Mother and Sarah Kane’s Blasted » International Journal of the Humanities, Winter 2026.
• « Imaginary Voyage : Constructed Reality in Eric Overmyer’s On the Verge, or the Geography of Yearning, » in Victorians : A Journal of Culture and Literature, 2024.
• « Federal Theatre Project in Cincinnati » in Contexte et enjeu, Sorbonne University Press, 2023
• « Betty Shamieh’s The Black Eyed: An Arab-American Playwright Inverts and Subverts Orientalism, » Athens Journal of Arts and Humanities, Vol. 10, Issue 2, February 2023
• « A Horse is a Horse: Theatre of the Absurd and 1960s Fantasy Sitcoms, » Harold Pinter Review, Summer 2022