Jonathan Epstein

Jonathan Epstein has performed on and Off-Broadway, in London’s West End, and at dozens of regional theatres across the country, but is best known for his 25-year association as actor, director and teacher with Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. His roles with that company have included everything from kings to clowns – Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, Feste, Touchstone, Dogberry, Puck, Benedick, Bottom and scores of others.

He was text and sonnet teacher in more than 30 of the company’s month-long workshops for professional actors. Directing credits there include Henry V, Coriolanus, Women of Will, The Hollow Crown, The Pretext, and The Verdict among others. He has served as visiting professor in Theatre at MIT and in Rhetoric at Boston University School of Law and has led master classes in Shakespeare performance at such companies as Berkshire Theater Festival, Orlando Shakespeare Festival, The Intiman, Seattle Shakespeare Theatre, Boston Theaterworks as well as at colleges and universities including Harvard , Cornell, Amherst, Dartmouth, Smith, Western Michigan and Wake Forest.

His other performance credits include: Broadway/National Tour: (A Meeting by the River, Man of la Mancha, Dirty Dancing) American Repertory Theatre (Merchant of Venice, Paradise Lost, Phaedra, Picasso at the Lapin Agile), Berkshire Theatre Festival (Amadeus, Cuckoo’s Nest, Caretaker, Via Dolorosa, Rat in the Skull), The Shakespeare Theatre (Taming of the Shrew), Intiman (Cymbeline), Theatre for a New Audience (Merchant of Venice), Orlando Shakespeare Theater (King Lear, Titus Andronicus), The Young Vic (Faust). He holds an AB from Harvard University, where he studied Elizabethan and Jacobean drama under Gwynn Blakemore Evans, William Alfred, and Harry Levin.