David Herskovits is the Founding Artistic Director of Target Margin Theater. For Target Margin he has directed a broad range of work, classics and neglected older work, new opera and music-theater, and adaptations of history and literature for the stage. His Target Margin works have won multiple OBIEs and been presented nationally and internationally. David has most recently been working on live (physically present) performance adapted for pandemic conditions, and he has continued adapting stories from the 1001 Nights tradition, its many versions, variants, and history. In 2017 David directed a major production of Eugene O’Neill’s MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA (at The Abrons Arts Center), after three years of development. Other notable TMT credits include: Gertrude Stein’s REREAD ANOTHER (Bushwick Starr); a two-year program of Yiddish theater from 2012 to 2014 featuring URIEL ACOSTA: I WANT THAT MAN! (Chocolate Factory); THE TEMPEST (HERE); THE REALLY BIG ONCE (Ontological); FAUST Parts I and II (Classic Stage Company); MAMBA’S DAUGHTERS (HERE and Spoleto USA); THE ARGUMENT AND DINNER PARTY (The Kitchen); YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN (LaMama); and TITUS ANDRONICUS (nada) and many other Shakespeare productions.
Outside of TMT, David recently directed a major new production of PORGY AND BESS for the 2016 Spoleto Festival, Edmund Thornton Jenkins’ long lost operetta AFRAM, and a new production of Michael Gordon’s new opera VAN GOGH with Bang on A Can. Other notable productions include opera by composers Pascal Dusapin, Thomas Cabaniss, Nick Brooke, Phillip Johnston, and David Soldier, and plays by Chikamatsu, O’Neill, Kleist and Marlowe. He has directed at Lincoln Center Festival, The Spoleto Festival USA, The Bonn Biennale, The Prototype Festival, Theatre for A New Audience, Institut Internationale de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mezieres, France, Cleveland Public Theater, The Kitchen, Mass MoCA, and others.
David was a 2011 Fellow of The American Academy in Jerusalem; held the 2010 Gruber Lectureship at Muhlenberg College, and he has taught and lectured at The American Repertory Theatre Institute, The Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, The Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard, Yale, NYU, Columbia, Wesleyan, The University of Nebraska, The School of Visual Art in Jerusalem, Juilliard, and other Universities and drama schools. He has written for The New York Times, American Theatre, Theatre Magazine, and Performing Arts Journal, among others, and his work has appeared in book form in the collections “Epic Plays,” “Imagination First,” and “Innovation in Five Acts.”