BACKGROUND
John Hadden was born in Berlin in 1953 to CIA parents, on the eve of the June riots that year. He spent his childhood overseas, including four years in Israel, until the second day of the Six-Day War in 1967. His book Conversations with a Masked Man: My Father, the CIA, and Me (Arcade, 2016) combines his own memories of those years with sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying conversations with his father, who died in 2013.
John has worked as a theater-maker consistently here and abroad for 40 years. He was a founding member and associate artistic director of Shakespeare & Co, Lenox, MA, artistic director of the Hubbard Hall Theater Company, Cambridge, NY, associate artist with We Players, San Francisco, and artistic director/co-founder of Counterpoint Theater, Boston. During his long stint with S&Co, his roles included Romeo, Hamlet, Iago, Richard II, Leontes, the Merchant, the Bastard, and the Fool; other acting credits include The Seagull, USSR; Othello, Alliance; Scrooge, Portland Stage; Salieri and Lear at Hubbard Hall, Macbeth and Lear at We Players—and roles on film, radio and TV. Among his roughly sixty directing projects are Syncopation, Portland Stage; ChaChaCha, Cologne; Graveyard Shift, Berkshire Fringe; Hadrian VII, The Madwoman of Chaillot , The Night of the Iguana at Hubbard Hall, a score of Shakespeare plays, and a dozen original pieces.
His own plays—stray dogs, Hard Rain, King Fool, Women at War, and his one-acts—have won awards and have been seen at Ensemble Studio Theater, PS 122, LaMama ETC, the National Arts Club (NYC), Arsenal Arts (Boston), Wharton Salon (Lenox, MA), Berkshire Theater Group, Oldcastle Theater (Bennnington, VT), Firehouse 13 (Providence), Northampton Center for the Arts, Shakespeare & Co, Gloucester Stage, Hubbard Hall, We Players, The Theater Project (Brunswick, ME), and Mixed Company (Great Barrington, MA), and he has been published in The Good Ear Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and American Letters & Commentary.
He has taught students of every age and level of experience in schools, communities, theater companies, and at ten universities. He founded and led the S&Co Summer Training Institute for three years and founded a devised theater program, also for three years, at the Lenox, MA high school BCD2S. He is a juried teaching artist with the Vermont Arts Council, and he has strong associations with Vermont theater companies and schools. He is a member of Creative Ground and Actors Equity. He holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase and a MFA from Goddard College.
His solo show, Travels with a Masked Man, derived from his book, toured extensively in 2016-2017.
Awards include a 2009 Boston International Film Festival award for Best Short (Taken, acting and directing), three Berkshire Critics Assn ("Berkie") awards and one nomination for acting in 2016-2018, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for the play Hard Rain.
He lives on a flower farm near the end of a dirt road on a high hilltop surrounded by the Green Mountains of Vermont, spending his leisure time with his two granddaughters, walking in the woods, building things, writing a novel (working title Talia), and doing projects in the local schools and arts organizations.