Theatre Director · Ensemble Artist · Rehearsal Problem-Solver
Chicago-Based Theatre Director
Actor-centered directing for text, new work, and ensemble performance. I build rehearsal structures that help actors move from explanation into embodied action — especially when a scene, relationship, rhythm, or performance problem must be solved quickly and collaboratively.
Great Acting Looks Improvised
by Zach Helm
Fully staged reading series
by Noah Haidle
by John Maclay & Danny Abosch
from Shakespeare's First Quarto
Original devised work
Games are not warm-ups. They are rehearsal structures that focus attention, make risk playable, and help actors stop illustrating choices and begin doing them. Every rehearsal is an act of composition.
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
Rob Adler is possibly the best improvisation acting teacher in the United States.
Aaron Speiser · Acting Coach to Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, Gerard Butler
Two peer-reviewed publications arguing from inside a directing practice — extending what happens in the rehearsal room into scholarly form.
Notes From the Field. A director's account of how three Viola Spolin theatre games — Kitty Wants a Corner, Where Exercise with Floorplans, and Contrapuntal Argument — transformed a constrained staged reading into a dynamic theatrical event with professional Los Angeles actors. One audience member remarked they forgot the actors were holding scripts because their physical engagement with the space and each other was so compelling.
Video essay published as an online-only feature. Argues for Spolin's space work as theatrical invocation rather than illustration — placing invisible space within a broader tradition of materialist performance theory.
Rob Adler is a Chicago-based theatre director, actor, and educator whose rehearsal practice is actor-centered, ensemble-driven, and grounded in Viola Spolin theatre games, physical composition, and close text work. He directs new work, classical texts, devised performance, and musical theatre.
He has worked with Coin & Ghost Theatre Company, Theatre Dybbuk, Interact Theatre Company, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the Bootleg Theater, and has collaborated with Roger Guenveur Smith. He is an ensemble member of Interact Theatre Company and founder of AdlerImprov Studio Hollywood.
Rob joined the faculty of The Theatre School at DePaul University in 2017 and has served as Co-Head of BFA Acting since 2023. He holds the 2021 Excellence in Teaching Award, the 2024–25 Wicklander Fellowship for Professional Ethics, and a 2022 University Research Council Grant.
Available for directing projects, commissions, university workshops, and collaborations. Based in Chicago.