FACULTY
All the World's a Stage
John Blondell began his 37-year career directing “Peter Pan” and ended it with “Wind in the Willows.” Both plays explore the meaning of home, a theme that resonated with the times — and with him.
“I found a home at Westmont,” John says. “No other place would have fostered and cultivated me and allowed me to develop. No one showed me the ropes — I could establish theater as a vital part of the college and a place to engage in serious conversations.
“I love the classics, and I’ve looked for ways to play them as wholly contemporary. Using modern performance practices makes them live today and gives them an urgent meaning. People assume that I’m constrained by teaching at a Christian college, but I have more freedom than I can imagine anywhere else. The opportunity here was an incubator and a lab that allowed me to flourish.”
For his research, John founded Lit Moon Theatre Company and Lit Moon World to pursue alternative theater. They became creative outlets that informed his work with students. John has directed 42 Lit Moon productions and more than 110 productions overall in the United States, Europe and Eurasia.
He completed his doctorate in dramatic art at UC Santa Barbara and asked his adviser about an opening at Westmont. “Don’t go there,” he told John. “They have a postage-stamp stage.” “I’ve mailed a lot of letters from that stage, including 45 college productions,” John says.
In 1990, he directed an innovative production of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” that featured video clips and full-sized cardboard cutouts that besotted characters toted around. It kicked off a series of remarkable Shakespeare productions.
He embraced Global Shakespeare and serves as Artistic Director of Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival. John’s Bitola National Theatre production of “Henry VI Part 3” appeared in the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival, presented by Shakespeare’s Globe London that featured 37 international companies presenting every play.
Attending the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1996 exposed him to international European work, which inspired him to establish the Lit Moon World Theater Festival, which ran from 1998 until 2010. He began traveling with Lit Moon in 2000, taking “The Diary of a Madman” to Bulgaria and productions of “Hamlet” and “Richard II” to Prague and Poland (Gdansk). That quickly led to other invitations to Eastern Europe and to China.
Discovering that Flying A Studios filmed 900 movies in Santa Barbara between 1912 and 1920, John commissioned a comedy about making a silent film. Michael Bernard wrote the script, and John directed “Diamond to Dust: A Flying A Fantasy” in 2023. No “Diamond in the Sky” movies survived, so John filmed his own imagined scene, which he screened at the end of the play.
John’s Westmont production of “The Pirates of Penzance” earned three national awards from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., including Distinguished Production of a Musical and Distinguished Director of a Musical. He has received 13 Independent Theatre Awards for excellence in directing, the 2003 Westmont Faculty Research Award and the 2013 Teacher of the Year in the Humanities. The Santa Barbara Independent named him a “Local Hero” in 2009 for his “tireless devotion” to international theater. Westmont’s Global Ambassador for the Performing Arts, John received an award for Special Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship and Production at Commencement in May.
He’s retiring from Westmont but not from theater. He’ll move to Greece for five years to continue working with artistic communities in Eastern Europe. “I wanted to be an actor, and then I discovered I wanted to spend my time with actors,” John says. He seeks to make audiences feel warm and hopeful instead of shocked and despairing. “I explore the depths of light we can celebrate and enjoy that give hope and radiance. I want audiences to feel more alive when they exit the theater than when they entered.”
This is a story from the Spring 2025 Westmont Magazine