Adam Marple is a theatre director, designer, educator, and researcher whose work centers on the audience experience. He is interested in theatre not simply as an artistic event, but as a space where people gather, encounter one another, and construct meaning together. His practice asks a fundamental question: how do we intentionally make an audience?

This question has become the foundation of Marple’s research into Audience Making, an emerging pedagogy and practice of performance that considers the audience as an active component of theatrical composition. Rather than treating spectators as a passive endpoint of the creative process, Audience Making asks directors and theatre-makers to consider who their audiences are, how they arrive, what conditions shape their attention and participation, and how the architecture, rituals, social dynamics, and dramaturgy of an event can influence what an audience experiences. His research explores how these choices can transform performance into a centralizing event through which communities form and empathy can spread.

Marple is the Founder and Moderator of The Board of Directors and host of The Board of Directors Podcast, a global constellation of theatre directors dedicated to building community, sharing knowledge, and transforming the role of the director in the twenty-first century. Through the project, he convenes directors from across artistic traditions, cultures, and generations to exchange practices, examine leadership, and imagine new possibilities for the field. He is also the Artistic Director of The Sustainable Theatre Project, which develops sustainably produced theatre in non-traditional spaces and investigates how environmental responsibility can become an artistic and dramaturgical practice rather than simply a production constraint.

From 2011 to 2025, Marple served as Co-Artistic Director of the internationally recognized The Theatre of Others, an international collective of theatre artists committed to intercultural, interdisciplinary, and sustainable performance. During its fourteen-year history, the organization created work across six continents, including sixteen original audio plays, seven in-person productions, and three digital productions. Marple also co-hosted The Theatre of Others Podcast, which reached more than 30,000 listeners in 96 countries and ranked among the top five percent of podcasts worldwide.

As a director, Marple has created more than fifty productions and interdisciplinary works across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia, including regional and Off-Broadway productions. He has directed more than half of Shakespeare’s canon and frequently adapts classical texts for contemporary audiences. He has also written, devised, or adapted sixteen original works.

His work in sustainable performance has increasingly connected artistic practice with climate action. The Earth Turns was selected by the Global Stocktake as an official side event of COP27 and performed in the UN-controlled Blue Zone for delegates in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The work was subsequently transformed into an audio play for COP28. Bright Light Burning, commissioned by the British Embassy Gulf Strategy Fund, was presented at COP28 in Dubai and subsequently at COP29 in Azerbaijan and COP30 in Brazil. Across these projects, Marple has explored how theatre can make climate change emotionally and humanly legible by placing lived experience, storytelling, and empathy at the center of environmental discourse.

His sustainable theatre research has also led to experiments in radically reducing the material and energy demands of performance. Working across theatre, architecture, engineering, and design, he has developed ultra-low-energy performance models that reduce theatrical power consumption from approximately 30,000 watts to under 300 watts per performance. His work incorporates live energy generation and measurement into the scenography itself, making the labor and resources required to produce a theatrical event visible to audiences.

A second major strand of Marple’s practice is The Viewpoints, which he approaches as an interdisciplinary and transcultural performance language. He studied and worked with Viewpoints practitioners, including Mary Overlie, Anne Bogart, and Tina Landau, and has taught and practiced the methodology for more than twenty-five years. His research and teaching examine how Viewpoints can provide artists with a shared vocabulary for investigating space, time, movement, architecture, sound, and collective composition across cultural and disciplinary boundaries. His scholarship includes the chapter “The Viewpoints as Transcultural Pedagogy” in Western Theatre in Global Contexts and peer-reviewed research on applying Viewpoints to multimedia performance.

Marple is an Associate Professor of Devising and Directing at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA). He has previously taught at LASALLE College of the Arts/The University of the Arts Singapore, Universidad de las Américas Puebla in Mexico, and the American University in Cairo. His teaching, directing, and workshops have taken him to institutions and theatres throughout North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia, including Lincoln Center Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, the National School of Drama in India, Goldsmiths University of London, the Victorian College of the Arts, Kyoto University of Art and Design, and the American University of Beirut.

Across these areas of practice, Marple's work is concerned with a common problem: how can theatre create the conditions for people to encounter one another differently? Whether investigating spectatorship, devising, sustainable production, intercultural collaboration, or directing pedagogy, he approaches theatre as an opportunity to design not only what happens onstage, but what happens between people.

He holds a BFA in Acting from Wright State University’s Professional Actor Training Program and an MFA in Directing from Columbia University in the City of New York.