CARL MUELLER (June 1950)

Carl R. Mueller (June 1950) was a world famous translator of classic plays in several languages and a revered professor emeritus in the Theater Department of the UCLA School of Theater Film and Television. He attended Northwestern University as an English major, and then put his language skills to work as a U. S. Army liaison officer in Germany in the 1050s. He earned a MA and a PHD in playwriting at UCLA and, after a stint at UC Berkley, joined the Theater Department at UCLA in 1966 where he taught Theater History and Literature, Dramatic Criticism and Playwriting. His research and many publications contributed greatly to the school’s reputation as a leader in the training of theater and performance scholars. He is known to have supervised more PHD dissertations than any other faculty member. Carl’s greatest fame was as an internationally acclaimed translator of works in the modern German theatrical repertoire. Fifteen volumes of his translations from German, Swedish, Italian and ancient Greek are still in print. Over three hundred productions, world wide, were based on his translations. A major accomplishment was his sojourn in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar to explore the “Theater of Brecht” in 1960 and 1961, at Berlin’s Freie Universitat, and his subsequent translations of major works by Buchner, Wedekind, Brecht and Schnitzler. His career was launched in Berlin when he met with members of the Brecht family and obtained the initial permission for his series of authorized, and still definitive, translations of Bertoldt Brecht’s plays, Mueller was a critic and scholar but also a man of the theater, and his translations were created with the needs of performance firmly in mind. He also wrote essays and book reviews for many publications including the Los Angeles Times, the Drama Review, the Theater Journal and the Performance Review while championing innovative and risk-taking interpretations of the classics. Carl Mueller died on January 27^th, 2008 at age seventy six.