Noah Watkins (he/they) is a Chicago-based director.
Watkins won Best Director at the 2025 Lou Awards for Spring Awakening, staged with Steppenwolf's Lookout Series. His work spans new-work staged readings — Gold, Code, ei hytte, According — and assistant/associate credits with Porchlight Music Theatre, Kokandy Productions, and the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey.
He holds a B.A. in Theatre from Northwestern University, where he trained with Jessica Thebus, David Bell, and Taibi Magar, among others.
The term "theatricality" has fallen out of fashion. For many, it connotes cheap trickery or flash without substance, and they want to avoid such a label at all costs. However, as a medium, theatre offers affordances that no other medium can.
Unlike cinema, which merely recalls previous images with exacting precision, theatre creates "happenings" where the sheer craftsmanship of what is occurring right in front of us is plainly seen and moments are conjured in our collective imagination. It is one thing to see a beautiful countryside accurately captured. It is another altogether to witness a group of artists conjure a countryside into being from a dark space.
For me, theatricality is a refusal to be bound by realism and, in this refusal, an act of creation far more authentic.
— Noah Watkins"If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound. If what you want is for the play to be heard, then you must conjure its sound from it."
— Peter Brook, The Empty Space