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The busy and passionate Off-Broadway director has built her career on ensembles and new work
IT'S HARD TO START A PROFILE OF LILA Neugebauer without first mentioning that her theatre debut was as a performer in the first musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda (perhaps you've heard of him?) when they were both at Hunter College High School in New York City. Neugebauer was in 7th grade; Miranda was in 12th. It was the school's annual spring student-written show; Neugebauer played a partygoer. She had braces and a bowl haircut, as many of us do in our tween years.
Her tie to the omnipresent Hamilton creator may be intriguing, but it's not what has given this young director a busy, acclaimed career. Neugebauer (pronounced NOYguh-bow-er) has seemingly catapulted onto the New York and regional scene-though, as with any "breakthrough" moment, it's been years in the making. Most recently, she directed Sarah DeLappe's The Wolves at the Playwrights Realm (it ran roughly from September through December, thanks to producer Scott Rudin). In the midst of that run her theatre company the Mad Ones, of which she's one of four coartistic directors, premiered Miles for Mary at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn; they're currently the company in residence at Ars Nova. This year, she's helming Branden JacobsJenkins's Everybody, a riff on the 15th-century morality play Everyman, at Signature Theatre starting Jan. 31, and Annie Baker's The Antipodes at the same theatre in April.
"It's the spring of Neugebauer!" Jacobs-Jenkins jokes. "We're all going to be 'Neugebauered.'"
While she didn't study theatre in college (she was an English major at Yale), Neugebauer's first professional forays out of school were internships in the literary departments of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company and California's Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where she met Les Waters, who would sit and read the paper on a bean bag chair by her desk. The English director, now artistic director of Kentucky's Actors Theatre of Louisville, became "an incredibly important mentor," Neugebeaur recalls. "He was the first person to tell me I was a director."
Waters would later bring her into the fold at Actors Theatre, where she was a directing intern for a year (the Mad Ones came together during this time). She eventually directed on the mainstage...