Works I Have Adapted or Directed

Gretchen Minton’s long-term interest in the relationship between words on the page and the realization of those words in performance has given rise to several directorial projects as well as several adaptations.

Directing

September 2019: Timon of Anaconda, adapted from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, and directed by Gretchen Minton.

June 2020 through Present: Nine site-specific plays for Montana InSite Theatre, including Oguta Island, Shakespeare’s Walking Story, Shakespeare for the Birds, Sonnets in the Snow, Walking the Water Way, A Piece of Work: Shakespeare on the Rise, and Leaf-Taking: Shakespeare on the Rise .

November 2023: Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, for Bozeman Actors Theatre.

December 2023: Salt Waves Fresh, adapted from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and co-directed by Gretchen Minton, for Montana InSite Theatre.

Special Projects and Adaptations

Fulbright project in Australia, Jan-May, 2023

Gretchen Minton is hosted by James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, where she is adapting Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night into an eco-drama set on the North Queensland coast.

Partners in this work include Dr. Claire Hansen (Australian National University), The Blue Humanities Lab (Cairns Institute), and TheatreiNQ (Townsville).

(More information can be found HERE)

See the categories below for a selection of works I have been reading. These authors are providing important context and insights as I develop this adaptation.

  • Blumenberg, Hans. Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. MIT Press, 1996.

    Carson, Rachel. The Sea around Us. Oxford UP, 1951.

    Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green. U of Minnesota P, 2014.

    Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. U of Chicago P, 2021.

    Gillis, John R. The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History. U of Chicago P, 2012.

    Head, Lesley. Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Re-conceptualising human–nature relations. Routledge, 2016.

    Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford UP, 2008.

    Jowitt, Clare, Craig Lambert and Steve Mentz. The Routledge companion to marine and maritime worlds 1400-1800. Routledge, 2022.

    Mentz, Steve. “A poetics of planetary water: The blue humanities after John Gillis.” Coastal Studies and Society, 2022.

    Mentz, Steve. Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization 1550-1790. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

    Rozwadowski, Helen M. “Ocean literacy and public humanities”, Parks Stewardship Forum 36.3 (2020): 365–373.

    Schaberg, Christopher. Searching for the Anthropocene: A Journey into the Environmental Humanities. Bloomsbury, 2020.

  • Hansen, Claire. Tropic of Shakespeare: What studying Macbeth in Queensland could teach us about place and shipwrecks. The Conversation, 11 October 2019.

    Holmes, Katie and Heather Goodall. Telling Environmental Histories: Intersections of Memory, Narrative and Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

    Lloyd, Rohan. Saving the Reef: The human story behind one of Australia’s greatest environmental treasures. University of Queensland P, 2022.

    Lloyd, Rohan, Patrick White, and Claire Brennan. “Escaping Water: Living Against Floods in Townsville, North Queensland, from Settlement to 2019”. In McKinnon and Cook.

    McCalman, Iain. The Reef: A Passionate History. Viking, 2013.

    McKinnon, Scott and Margaret Cook. Disasters in Australia and New Zealand. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

    Reynolds, Henry, ed. Race Relations in North Queensland. James Cook U, 1993.

    Woods, Cindy, Caryn West, Petra Buettner, and Kim Usher. “‘‘Out of our control’’: Living through Cyclone Yasi”. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being, 2014.

    Warren, Raymond John. Wildflower: The Barbara Crawford Thompson Story. 2008.

  • Brayton, Dan. Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration. U of Virginia P, 2012.

    Campana, Joseph. “Shakespeare, as the Waters Rise”. Studies in English Literature, 59.2 (2019).

    Eklund, Hillary. “Shakespeare’s Littoral and the Dramas of Loss and Store” Studies in English Literature, 59.2 (2019).

    Harlan, Susan. “Illyria’s Memorials: Space, memory, and genre in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”. In The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Lina Perkins Wilder. Routledge, 2018.

    Mentz, Steve. At the bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. A&C Black, 2009.

    Schafer, Elizabeth. “Unsettling AustrIllyria: Twelfth Night, Exotic Englishness and Empire.” Contemporary Theatre Review, 19:3 (2009), 342-352

    Smith, Emma. “Not at Home: Emma Smith on Twelfth Night.” London Review of Books, Feb. 2023.

  • Beer, Tanja. Introduction to Ecoscenography: An Introduction to Ecological Design for Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

    Benner, Saffron. “Driving ‘Transformational Change’: Using Ecodramaturgy to Develop a More Sustainable Theatre Ecosystem.” Australiasian Drama Studies 80 (2022).

    Birch, Anna and Joanne Tompkins. Performing Site-specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

    Martin, Randall and Evelyn O’Malley. “Eco-Shakespeare in Performance.” Shakespeare Bulletin 36.3 (2018).

    Woynarsky, Lisa. Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance, and Climate Change. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

  • Donne, John. Meditation XVII.

    Griffiths, Tom. “The Planet is Alive: Radical Histories for Uncanny Times.” Griffith Review 16 (2019).

    Solnit, Rebecca. “Seashell to Ear,” in Unraveling the Ripple, ed. Helen Douglas (Edinburgh Pocketbooks, 2001).

    Townsend, Ian. The Devil’s Eye. Fourth Estate, 2008.

    Walcott, Derek. “The Sea is History”.

    Wright, Judith. Collected Poems 1942-1970. Angus and Robertson, 1971.

See Montana InSite Theatre (MIST) for more details about some of the projects Minton has directed and adapted for site-specific, environmentally focused theatre.

Videos of Minton’s adaptations

Here is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, set in Nigeria. Oguta Island was produced in 2020:

Oguta Island, an abbreviated adaptation of The Tempest, was created by Nnamdi Kanaga of Nigeria under the direction and guidance of Gretchen Minton. This 19 minute piece begins with a brief introduction by Minton and Kanaga.

Salt Waves Fresh was written in 2023 in Australia. This 6 minute video is a compilation of several short out-takes of a dramatic reading on location in a flood-prone part of Australia. This adaptation is based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and looks at environmental catastrophes brought on by climate change.

This video clip, part of Minton’s presentation at the 2025 Globe4Globe conference, is from her No Winter’s Tale adaptation.

Here is a staged reading of the ending of the first act of No Winter’s Tale, a scene between a literal bear and Shakespeare’s metaphorical character, “Time”.