Born to an Italian mother from Florence and an American father from Indianapolis, Coonrod grew up living between her parents' native homes in Europe and the Midwestern United States.
[2] In the late 1990s, Coonrod began earning critical acclaim for her productions of more obscure works by the English playwright William Shakespeare, such as Henry VI (1996) and King John (2000).
[3] Coonrod founded her second New York-based theater company, Compagnia de' Colombari in 2004[7]—also made up of a small ensemble cast of actors, musicians, and theatre crew—with whom she produces the majority of her later plays.
Her experimental theatrical style sometimes calls for the musicians and stage crew to operate in full view of the audience, serving as part of the ensemble cast.
[3] In 1996, Coonrod staged two plays, Victor, or Children Take Over by French surrealist playwright Roger Vitrac[2] and Henry VI by Shakespeare.
[5] Victor, or Children Take Over was staged in Spring 1996 at the Ohio Theater and was adapted with a translation by Coonrod, Aaron Etra, Esther Sobin, and Frederic Maurin.
"[2][5] In December 1997, Coonrod directed Christmas at the Ivanovs', a rarely performed absurdist play by Aleksandr Vvedensky from 1938 which she translated with Julia Listengarten.
According to The New York Times' Peter Marks, Coonrod was "an excellent match" for the play and turned "the acerbic piece into an out-there fairy tale."
"[14] The author Flannery O'Connor died in 1964, and her estate made strict adherence to the words in the text a precondition for allowing the dramatization to be staged.
According to Weber, "Coonrod has encouraged a weaselly aspect from the performers… making the usurping senators seem like gossip mongers in the halls of Enron or lackeys in a Karl Rove strategy session" with "a conspiracy more venal than noble.
It dares to mirror Shakespeare's intention in a near-empty space—and let the austere play speak for itself.For 2010's More Or Less I Am, Coonrod drew inspiration from Walt Whitman's 1855 poem "Song of Myself".
Trimming down some of the "obsolete wordplay about Latin declensions", Coonrod's adaptation of the play—about four men attempting to remain celibate to focus on academic pursuits—cuts out several of the subplots and relies more on slapstick humor.
[26][27] Coonrod produced the play with Compagnia de' Colombari and staged it, in 2015, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,[26] the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C.,[27] and the Wesleyan University Center for the Arts.
[1] After the performance of Coonrod's The Merchant in Venice (2016) in the play's titular city, a mock trial was staged with several judges, including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
"[29] For the Theatre at St. Clement in New York in 2018, Coonrod directed Babette's Feast from a play by Rose Courtney based on the 1950 short story Anecdotes of Destiny written by Isak Dinesen and published in Ladies' Home Journal.
Unlike the 1987 Danish feature film Babette's Feast, the director forgoes the culinary elements of the play and lets the audience imagine the preparation for the banquet.