If all the world’s a stage, Joseph Haj is directing
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In his office at the Guthrie Theater, several posters from past shows line Joseph Haj’s walls. One from a production of “Angels in America” that he starred in while in Venice in 1995. Another from a production of “The Skin of Our Teeth,” which he did at the Guthrie in 1990. And on the far side of his office, behind his desk are the scripts from the plays he’s directed over the last 10 years at the Guthrie.
“I do storyboard, especially if they're big-scale plays,” Haj said of his directorial process.
“Storyboard is probably an extravagant term because it suggests that I can draw, which I can't,” Haj said in his usual self-effacing tone.
Haj is more than a resident director, though. He holds a role many covet—artistic director of one of the nation’s leading regional theaters. The role oversees one of the founding companies in the nonprofit American regional theater movement. A theater that over the last 62 years has been a beacon of artistic excellence and has drawn in talent from across the world.
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For the last ten seasons, Haj has been at the helm of this Argo—upholding the standard of art the theater is known for and correcting course when the financial winds get blustery. In some ways, his time at the Guthrie has mirrored that of the first play he ever directed for the company—“Pericles, Prince of Tyre.”
“I was so proud of that production,” Haj said. “I thought it was some of my very strongest work.”
It’s an obscure play in William Shakespeare’s canon; a swashbuckling adventure about a Phoenician prince, faced with solving the catastrophes that lie before him—like a famine and a devastating shipwreck. Like Pericles, Haj has weathered mighty storms.
Act I: The measure of a man
Ask Haj about leadership, and he’ll point to art.
“Everything I do, I view through the lens of an artist,” Haj said.
The moments Haj comes to life are when he is able to talk about the craft with other theater makers. When he was directing “Somewhere” in the fall of 2025, a conversation with the playwright Matthew Lopez had him as light as a feather and as merry as a schoolboy.
Haj, however, has a hard time with being labeled a particular kind of artist.
“I think artists get frustrated when people put them in boxes,” said Haj. “But I think as artists we put ourselves in boxes more often than we would like… I squirm at being overly defined as an artist.”
“He is really, really interested in how language moves a play forward, and how to craft the spoken text in a way that is meaningful,” said Addie Gorlin-Han, an associate producer at the Guthrie Theater who was mentored by Haj early in her directing career.
This love for language comes through in Haj’s self-professed favorite shows, which include many of Shakespeare’s plays, Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”—which Haj is directing this fall. That interest in language started in his youth. He grew up in Miami, the son of Palestinian immigrants.
“I remember actively learning English,” Haj said, noting his first language is Arabic. “The way words felt in my mouth, the way language resonated for me, the miracle of language. I mean, you know, it's 26 letters and some punctuation, and the fact that whole worlds are built around it felt then—and feels now—as somewhat miraculous.”
His appreciation for language was also aided by his father, who was blind. Due to this, Haj would often read to his father—sometimes these were high-level materials connected to his father’s postdoctoral work as an educator. That experience also plays into how Haj approaches his work as an artist, according to Gorlin-Han.
“I think that has really been a big part of how he understands equity and responsibility to make all audiences feel welcome and create accessible opportunities into the art,” she said.
Despite having educators for parents, Haj wasn’t a star student. By his own admission, he flunked out of most of his classes senior year. However, there was one subject he loved—theater.
“I had no skill or talent, but I wanted it so badly. For whatever reason, it just vibrated with me in a particular way,” Haj said.
While he didn’t complete his senior year, Haj was able to fake some transcripts, with the help of a friend, to attend community college.
Haj admits he was a bit queasy to admit his actions, even now. “Not that it’s untrue…I just want to make sure I’m not getting anybody in trouble.”
He eventually transferred to Florida International University and went on to attend graduate school at the University of North Carolina for acting, before launching a career as an actor and director.
As a theater maker, he performed and directed across the country—including as an original member of Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, and as a member of the Guthrie's standing acting company in 1989-1990 season. He was also involved with projects inside prisons and in Palestine. Across his career, Joseph Haj has always looked for a new challenge to face—and his interests would eventually turn to artistic leadership.
Act II: The early voyages of Joseph Haj
Haj’s first job as the head of a theater was as the producing artistic director of PlayMakers Repertory Company, a well-regarded company that’s affiliated with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s theater school—his alma mater.
“There's no training to be an artistic director,” Haj said. “So we all come into it idiosyncratically based on our own experiences. And my experience… was as somebody who's been a practicing artist.”
At PlayMakers, Haj’s tenure included turning the theater’s finances around. He also began programming more plays, some of them quite extravagant. One season, he produced “Amadeus” in collaboration with a full orchestra to play the music of Mozart that is central to the show. In another, he directed a seven-and-a-half hour version of Charles Dickens’ “Nicholas Nickleby.”
“It was truly epic,” said Jeff Cornell, an actor and longtime associate of PlayMakers. “[It was] 25 actors, playing over 150 parts. And [Haj] was asking this company to do more than it perhaps thought it could do.”
That style of ambitious theater became a signature for Haj over his nine years with the company. He would produce and direct massive productions of “The Tempest” and "Metamorphoses," as well as both plays in the “Angels in America” cycle. However, according to Adam Versényi, the resident dramaturg at PlayMakers and former department chair at UNC, those big shows proved to be a strain on a theater the size of PlayMakers.
“While we were very proud of the scale of those productions and the quality of them, they did overtax the company,” Versényi said.
While Haj loved his position in North Carolina, a larger theater with opportunities to tackle new challenges waited just beyond the horizon.
Act III: Arriving on the beaches of Minneapolis
Haj was announced as the new artistic director of the Guthrie in the winter of 2015, only the 8th person to ever hold the title. At the time, he was something of a dark horse candidate for the job. He didn’t even appear on some media outlets’ shortlist of possible replacements for outgoing artistic director Joe Dowling. Some had speculated—and hoped—that Oskar Eustis, a major figure in American theater who grew up in Minnesota, would take the reins.
A fable told by Guthrie staff is that when Haj was first introduced, he remarked how he was not who people were expecting.
“I wish I could remember the exact words,” Haj said, confirming the story by saying he said something to the effect of ‘I know you’re all sad it’s not Oskar Eustis.’
Coming into the job, Haj was determined to take on managing a theater with an operating budget of nearly $30 million—ten times the budget he was working with at PlayMakers. His history as an actor at the Guthrie was noted at the time of his hiring, however, he had yet to direct a mainstage production. To make clear who he was, Haj turned to Shakespeare’s “Pericles.”
“I think it's a very great play,” said Haj. “It is a play filled with wisdom…this is one of Shakespeare's last four or five plays that he ever wrote. He's writing at the very pinnacle of his significant gifts.”
Haj had a long history with the Shakespeare play. He acted in a production in New York, had directed a version of it for PlayMakers in 2008, and then directed it again at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, before it transferred to the Folger Theater in D.C. In the usual grandness of Haj’s productions, the show had a spectacular set.
“He's not afraid to make a bold design choice if we can afford it,” said Jan Chambers, who designed most of Haj's versions of Pericles over the years.
“Sometimes we couldn't afford it,” said Chambers.
Haj remounted “Pericles” for his Guthrie debut. In Minneapolis, Addie Gorlin-Han served as his assistant director. She remembers being mentored by Haj during the process, but also being treated like a colleague. She recalls offering suggestions to him, which she said he would take into consideration.
“He took them seriously, which he did not have to do, and not all directors do,” Gorlin-Han said. She also remembers that the weight of the moment hit Haj on opening night.
“He turned to me and he's like, ‘This is a night I will never forget,’ because it was the first night of his work on the Guthrie stage as a director,” said Gorlin-Han.
Similarly, Jan Chambers admires Haj for the doors he opened for her when he hired her to work on several projects with him.
“I had been designing for a number of years in academia and occasionally freelancing,” Chambers said. “He really opened up a whole new world for me, professionally. I owe him that for sure.”
Act IV: The making of a king
Aside from his artistic feats at the Guthrie, Haj has had to navigate the theater through similar challenges as his royal Phoenician counterpart. A major round of layoffs took place in 2020 in the wake of the pandemic, and like many arts organizations post-pandemic, the Guthrie Theater was facing significant financial headwinds. A $4 million deficit was announced in 2024. However, unlike other institutions, the Guthrie turned around its situation in two years and announced a modest surplus in 2026.
Trisha Kirk is the Guthrie Theater’s managing director—a role that oversees more of the operational elements of the organization, and reports to Joseph Haj. In her opinion, without Haj’s leadership, the financial turnaround would not have been as quick.
“It wasn't easy. It was making sacrifices all over the place that Joe and I and the team spent a lot of time trying to figure out,” Kirk added.
The solutions Haj, Kirk and the company came up with ranged from small changes—such as reducing the size of show programs to save on printing costs—to larger ones, like producing one less show each season.
Haj’s collaborative style of leadership started long before the financial crisis, however. Coming out of the pandemic, Haj expanded the roster of his inner circle, and created a “senior leadership team,” consisting of subject matter experts who could provide the best insights to different aspects of the theater’s operations. Kirk can’t remember there being another formal committee like that in her 40 years at the Guthrie.
“I think [what] you really see in Joe as a leader, [is] that he is looking to hear from people,” said Kirk.
Kirk also highlighted Haj’s leadership in the area of diversity, equity and inclusion. In January 2020, the theater created its “Native Advisory Council,” to strengthen its ties to Minneapolis’ Native community.
For all the praise his coworkers give him, however, Haj has a hard time claiming any sort of glory in his leadership.
“I would love to tell a story of brilliant and heroic leadership, but it's not like that at all,” Haj said. “One tries to make the very best decisions one can, sometimes under uncommonly difficult circumstances.”
That kind of humbleness comes through in many aspects of his personality. During the lead up to the premiere of "The History Plays” in 2024, when asked how he felt that his multi-year magnum opus was coming to a fruition, he said “Some of us get much more than we deserve.”
For Haj, the story is less about him as a singular talent and more about the Guthrie as an institution.
“Your kid's been admitted to Princeton,” he said. “The parent doesn't say, ‘Hey, pump the brakes… who's the president of Princeton right now?’ Nobody says this. Princeton is the story.”
Ten seasons into Haj’s tenure, he would say the same of the Guthrie.
