Director · Devised Theatre · Actor Trainer
Rob
Adler
Great Acting Looks Improvised
What interests me most is helping actors and directors discover how meaning is made collectively — moving ensembles from guarded predictability into shared invention.
Rob Adler is a theatre director, filmmaker, and educator. Since 2017 he has served as Co-Head of BFA Acting and Assistant Professor at The Theatre School, DePaul University — the institution's first co-leadership arrangement in that role — where he teaches acting, scene study, improvisation, on-camera work, and directing.
His directing practice moves between devised theatre, new work, classical texts, and film. He has worked with Theatre Dybbuk, Coin & Ghost, Interact Theatre Company, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Bootleg Theater, and in ongoing collaboration with Roger Guenveur Smith.
His process is rooted in Viola Spolin and informed by training with Complicité, SITI Company, Second City, and the influence of Moment Work. Recipient of the 2021 Excellence in Teaching Award at The Theatre School and the 2024–25 Wicklander Fellowship for Professional Ethics.
I believe that all theatre is devised. Whether a text exists before rehearsal, whether a single writer drafts it, or whether a company generates material together — it only becomes a play when people put it in space, and that event is never quite the same twice. For me, devising is not a niche practice. It is the fundamental theatrical act of turning text, research, image, impulse, behavior, and composition into shared event.
The director's job is not to arrive with a finished concept but to build the conditions in which the ensemble can discover the work together. The most vivid, playable ideas grow from within the shared space — not from above it.
Games are not warm-ups. They are the architecture of the rehearsal room — structures that make play purposeful, attention possible, and risk safe enough to take. Through games, actors stop performing and start doing.
Devising can emerge from meticulous textual investigation, archival objects, poetry, and political urgency as much as from personal experience. The archive gives the work purpose; play keeps it alive.
Students need both permission and purpose: room to generate material, and clear problems that sharpen their choices and give form to what they make together. Craft is not the opposite of risk — craft is what makes risk legible.
2011 · Bootleg Theatre, Los Angeles · With Roger Guenveur Smith
Created through weeks of meetings in an empty theatre — conversations about the news, the architecture, the political moment. A chalk Constitution on the stage floor. Surveillance cameras, hidden windows opening onto the city, fireworks on the Fourth of July, live music, dancers, a DJ, and Roger's improvisational brilliance. An event built before a conventional script existed.
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2016–2022 · Theatre Dybbuk · Fowler Museum, Los Angeles
Devised with Theatre Dybbuk from the surviving 269 lines of the ancient play by Ezekiel the Tragedian — expanded through refugee and immigrant narratives, music, masks, and rapidly shifting identities. Devising emerged from meticulous textual investigation rather than vagueness.
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2019 · Coin & Ghost Theatre Company, Los Angeles
Built from the First Quarto using Spolin's Contrapuntal Argument to drive script development. As actors interrupted, argued, and rebuilt language in the room, Shakespeare stopped functioning as inherited authority and started functioning as live material.
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2026 · DePaul University · Director
Bold theatrical composition, political energy, and actor-centered storytelling at scale — drawing on the Brechtian tradition while building vivid ensemble life.
2023 · Chicago Playworks TYA · Director
A large-scale Chicago Playworks production — bold visual storytelling, theatrical play, and ensemble work shaped for young audiences with clarity, scale, and inventive craft.
2020 · DePaul University · Devised
Devised from Kevin Coval's A People's History of Chicago through poetry, history, research, and structured improvisation. Students turned civic history into ensemble performance — discovering how form emerges through action.
2021 · DePaul University · Devised by the Ensemble
The first devised piece made with DePaul students after the long year of COVID isolation. One student's private ritual of compulsive list-making became the compositional engine — using Spolin's Begin/End Game and Moment Work to turn shared memories into an expression of gratitude for company, contact, and communion.
2025 · DePaul University · Director
By Noah Haidle. Follows one woman, Ernestine Ashworth, from her 17th birthday to her 107th, exploring a century of life through the ritual of baking a birthday cake each year. Directed without set or props — actors built the entire world through Spolin space work.
2017–Present · The Theatre School, DePaul University
Co-Head BFA Acting and Assistant Professor. Acting, scene study, improvisation, on-camera, and directing. The first co-leadership arrangement in the school's history — modeling the collaborative values embedded in the curriculum.
Rob Adler is possibly the best improvisation acting teacher in the United States.Aaron Speiser · Acting Coach to Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, Gerard Butler
Uniquely entertaining…innovative in a few different ways.LA Weekly · Bad Hamlet, Coin & Ghost
Shakespeare for a new generation.Accessibly Live Off-Line · Bad Hamlet, Coin & Ghost
As a company, Coin & Ghost clearly has talent and ambition.Stage Raw · Bad Hamlet, Coin & Ghost
Based on the true story of a whistleblower who exposed flaws in early electronic voting machines and was jailed for it. Official Selection, Bahamas IFF; Finalist, Best Short Film City Film Festival.
A film grown from watching the Kavanaugh hearings with a newborn — political rage fused with questions about language, culture, and how we teach the young to live in a damaged world. Official Selection: Pasadena IFF & Chicago International REEL Shorts.
"Space is not a container. It is a substance — a collaborator. It holds the potential of what might be."
Rob's term for the phenomenon at the heart of Spolin's space work: the collaborative conjuring of a shared living reality through embodied attention. Not suspension of disbelief — active co-creation. When a Spolin actor lifts an invisible cake with weight and care, the audience doesn't just watch. They may internally feel the gesture.
"Were you actually handling that object or were you drawing us a picture? — It was a very nice picture. We all saw it. But you didn't."
Spolin's distinction between mime and space substance — between illustrating a reality and entering one. The actor does not perform reality. The actor enters reality. Space substance makes something real. It's not a drawing. It's invocation.
"I smelled the cake. It felt real."
After directing Birthday Candles without set or props, Rob interviewed audience members six months later about what they remembered the set looked like. They described marbled countertops, a piano on stage left, flower measuring cups, eggs, a basketball hoop — vivid, specific, real. A shared world built entirely from space, attention, and collective belief.
"That meaning is made between us. That is the alchemy."
The real magic isn't what appears. It's how we agree to find it. Theater games are not childish warm-ups — for Spolin, they were sacred rituals: a magic circle where transformation becomes possible. It's not creating something from nothing. It's about exposing the something that's always been there.
"You take what you get, because whatever you get, it's more than you started with."
From Rob's teaching on space walks: Michelangelo called his unfinished statues "the slaves" — there wasn't enough marble for the angels inside to fully emerge. In space work, actors make contact with every rock and stone of an emerging reality, holding whatever appears. The where becomes teleportation. You don't force a world into being. You allow one to emerge through the body's contact with space substance.
"Anyone who dismisses Spolin's work misses the significant contribution of a Jewish woman from Chicago."
From a recorded class: Anyone who does not understand Spolin's work with space substance to be as significant as that of Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, or Japanese Nō theater has barely scratched the surface of her contribution. Play is itself a form of cultural ritual — it takes people from different places, different cultures, different communities, and binds them, however fleetingly, into one.
Let's build something
extraordinary together.
Available for directing projects, commissions, university workshops, and collaborations. Currently Co-Head of BFA Acting at The Theatre School, DePaul University, Chicago.
