Mary Lou Rosato teaches 2nd Year Acting at DGSD at Yale. She is an actress, director, and teacher in New York City whose career has spanned 50 years. She trained at the Juilliard School Drama Division from 1968 to 1972 (in Group 1) under John Houseman and Michel Saint-Denis, and went on to become a founding member of The Acting Company. With them, in a collaboration that continues to this day, she has performed major roles in a wide range of plays including The Three Sisters, The Time of Your Life, Beggars Opera, Measure for Measure, King Lear, The School for Scandal (Drama Desk Award), Women Beware Women, The Lower Depths, The Robber Bridegroom (Drama Desk nomination), Mother Courage, The Cradle Will Rock, Ten By Tennessee, and many others in New York (on and off Broadway), on tour across the US, and around the world.
In New York she has been seen in plays and musicals from The Suicide with Derek Jacobi, to the Broadway revival of Once Upon A Mattress (in the role of Queen Aggravain) starring Sarah Jessica Parker. She was in The Inspector General directed by Liviu Ciulei at Circle in the Square, Henry the Fifth at TFNA starring Mark Rylance in his New York debut, The Misanthrope with Roger Rees and Uma Thurman, and in The Winter’s Tale at the Classic Stage Company. She performed the role The Shadow in the Lincoln Center Festival’s production of My Life as a Fairy Tale with Fiona Shaw as Hans Christian Anderson, directed by Chen Shi Zheng and music by Stephin Merritt.
Outside New York, her musical roles have included the Old Lady in Candide (Guthrie), Madame Arcati in High Spirits (Berkshire Theater Festival), both Meg and Miss Gilchrist in separate productions of The Hostage, and The Peach Blossom Fan (another collaboration with Chen Shi Zheng and Stephin Merritt at REDCAT in Los Angeles).
She has performed in plays at major theaters throughout the US and internationally, among them the Yale Rep (The Alchemist, and Elizabeth: Almost By Chance a Woman), the Guthrie (Candide), American Repertory Theater (The Miser), Shakespeare Theater in Washington (The Witch of Edmonton and King Lear), Seattle Repertory (The Misanthrope), McCarter (Triumph of Love, Changes of Heart, Mirandolina), the Old Globe in San Diego (The Hostage), South Coast Repertory (The Clean House), Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park (Medea), the Williamstown Theatre Festival (Camino Real), as well as the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, REDCAT, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the Old Vic in London, the Taganka Theatre in Moscow, the Aarhus Theatre Festival in Denmark, Teatre Bourgogne in Dijon, France and La Compagnia De’ Colombari in Orvieto and Forli, Italy. She won a Joseph Jefferson Award in Chicago for Best Actress in a Musical for her role in The Curse Of An Aching Heart at the St. Nicholas Theater Company, and was nominated for an LA Drama Critics Award for her performance in Changes of Heart at the Mark Taper Forum. She has attended the Playwrights Lab at Sundance. In the course of her career, she has performed in a wide range of classical and modern plays by Shakespeare, Euripides, Middleton, Moliere, Goldoni, Congreve, Marivaux, Chekhov, Shaw, Anouilh, Feydeau, Williams, Wesker, Saroyan, Coward, Wilder, Rhul, Jenkins, and many others.
Her film credits include Quiz Show, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Wedding Banquet, Two Bits, Spike of Bensonhurst, and Illuminata. TV appearances include Warehouse 13, Titus , Law and Order: SVU, Miami Vice, Michael Hayes, Caroline in the City, The Lot, a PBS special – New Actor’s for the Classics, CBS-TV drama Stone Pillow with Lucille Ball, A Festival at Ford’s Theater, and the 51st Annual Tony Awards.
A member of SDC, her directing credits include The Beaux Stratagem (Pearl Theater), As You Like It (The Juilliard School) and her original adaptation of Henry V: Crispian’s Day at the Boars Head (The Acting Company), California Institute of the Arts productions: The House of Bernarda Alba, As You Like It, Il Ventalio (The Fan), Trojan Women, Henry V: Crispian’s Day at the Boars Head (2001), Henry the Fifth, Way of the World, The Time of Your Life, Death of a Poet (her original devised piece using Lorca’s plays and writings), Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s Richard II for the Creative Pulse Company (LA), and Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth, for the Quisqueya Company (NYC).
Since returning to New York in 2016, she has performed in The Skin of Our Teeth (TFNA), in the Government Inspector (Red Bull), in The Bridge of the San Luis Rey (Two River Theater Company), which she reprised at Miami New Drama in the fall of 2019 (Carbonell Award Nomination). In June 2019, she performed in New York downtown in Clubbed Thumb’s new play festival in King Philip’s Head is Still in That Pike Just Down the Road. She also joined the graduating class of 2018 at Juilliard in their fall production of Everybody by Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins playing the role of Death directed by Danya Taymor.
Throughout her career, she has taught actors. From 1998 to May 2016 Mary Lou was on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts, in 2009 becoming Co-Head of its BFA Acting Program with Nataki Garrett, a position she held till her return to NYC in 2016.