John R. Camera

John Camera is an actor, director, dramaturg and theatre historian. John has appeared in over forty productions in a wide range of classical, modern and contemporary plays on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in leading regional theatres across the country, including sixteen of Shakespeare's plays and in the American premières of the complete "Peer Gynt" and the complete "Faust." Experience in film and theatre has lead to "A Players Workbook" that explores how changes in the social and cultural world during six major eras over three thousand years of Western theatre that has caused changes in performance styles on stage and in early film. The Workbook is John's unique and proven approach to performance, a how-to guide to performance techniques during those eras and how those techniques resulted in what many actors today call emotional realism.

His first book on theatre history, "A Players Almanac: An Anecdotal History" covers the years from 1833 to 1893 from the founding of Gramercy Park the same year Edwin Booth was born. The second, in process, is "Women of a Certain Age, 1792 to 1920," a preliminary socio-archeological search for the evolution of the social and cultural roles of women from Homer, to Roman England to England's Middle Ages, to William Godwin, to Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 publication of "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" and Mary Godwin Shelley's 1818 publication of "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus." Both publications are regarded as among the first true feminist treatises that drove women's emancipation in the U. S. and winning the vote in 1920. "Women of a Certain Age" also contains short biographies of women actors of the nineteenth century who on stage, off stage and in the wings used their celebrity and growing wealth to support and drive women’s emancipation, many of whom became nurses during the First World War and established the format for going abroad to entertain the soldiers on the front lines.

John has had two plays produced, "Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places," a contemporary version of Arthur Schnitzler’s "La Ronde," and "Five Friends," a story of loves lost and won in contemporary New York City. Monographs and papers for dramaturgical and literary colloquia and conferences include “Feasting with Panthers: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” “The African-Globe Theatre: African-American Realism,” “Ballet and the Neoclassical Ideal in the Court of Louis XIV,” and individual presentations on the works of Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Maurice Maeterlinck and Robert Wilson. A current project is a screenplay about Bertolt Brecht in Hollywood. John holds a BFA, an MS, an MFA from Columbia, City University, Hunter College, the National Shakespeare Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company and is a member of Edwin Booth’s The Players, AEA, the LMDA, MLA, DL and the NCTE.