"Poetry and audacity are the hallmarks of Pickering's regime."
-- Hedy Weiss, The Chicago Sun-Times

DIRECTOR and CO-ADAPTOR Steve Pickering spent four seasons as Next Theatre's Artistic Director. For the last 12 years, he has worked in the Chicago area as an actor, designer, adaptor and director. He is currently onstage in New York in the Tony award winning version of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman." As an actor, he has appeared in over 36 productions in Chicago, including 23 at the Goodman Theatre. He is Chicago Magazine's "Best Actor in Chicago" for 1997. As a designer, he has received two Jefferson Citations, one for the costume, mask and puppets of Bailiwick's 1987 production of Animal Farm, and one for set design (with Gregg Ballman) for the Organic Theatre's 1992 production of Clive Barker's In The Flesh. He has directed his own adaptations of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and Clive Barker's Son of Celluloid (co-adapted with Charley Sherman). He co-directed Henry V with Kate Buckley in 1995, directed the World Premiere of Keith Reddin's Almost Blue the following year, and last season directed the American Premiere of Clive Barker's The History of the Devil.   CO-ADAPTOR Charley Sherman is from Nottingham, England, and was trained as an actor at the Drama Centre, London in the 1980's. He then spent several years in Chicago where his acting included work at the Goodman Theatre and Next Lab before making his directorial debut with Clive Barker's In the Flesh, which he and Steve Pickering adapted. He then directed The Mayor of Zalamea and The Maids Tragedy for the European Repertory Company and collaborated with Pickering again on the adaptation of Barker's Son of Celluloid for The Next Theatre Co. He has since returned to Britain where, at the Drama Centre, he has directed The Rimers of Eldritch, The Mound Builders, Andorra, and The Pains of Youth. He was married in January, 1998, in Dundee.