Leonard Pronko

Leonard Cabell Pronko (1927 – November 27, 2019) was an American theatre scholar best known for introducing the Japanese dance drama kabuki to the West, beginning in the 1960s.

In 1986, Pronko received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Degree, from the government of Japan in recognition of his achievements in introducing kabuki to the West.

In 1984, Pronko became chair of the Theatre Department, which he served in that capacity for seven years, and he has remained there, teaching courses in dramatic literature, in kabuki performance, and directing plays, including some eighteen kabuki productions, and twenty-four classic western plays from Shakespeare and Schiller to Anouilh and Dürrenmatt.

Pronko's first article was on the poetic theatre of Lebanese, Georges Schehadé, which led him to an interest in the most recent playwrights writing in French.

When, during his frequent visits to Mexico (three months each summer for nine years), he witnessed plays by Eugène Ionesco and Jean Tardieu in the early fifties, he determined to study the new playwrights, and he published his second book (the first having been The World of Jean Anouilh, 1961, University of California Press), Avant-Garde, the Experimental Theatre in France, in 1962 (U.C.

His performance experience began as a child and continued in graduate school when he participated in plays and sang for two years in the chorus of the New Orleans Opera Company.

He studied at the École Dullin and the Sorbonne in Paris, where he has spent a number of years, and he traveled annually to Europe and Japan and to other more exotic climes.