Short Bio...

Todd Brian Backus is a new works director, dramaturg, and illustrator based in Portland, Maine. He likes to work on "weird theatre" by which he means: Sci-fi plays about absentee voting, Chekhovian cavemen plays, time-traveling gentrification musicals for kids, and plays that combine poetry, swordplay, and ghosts. His work focuses on showcasing stories that stretch the theatrical imagination as he did in his first Too Strange to Live, Too Weird to Die series with Caridad Svich’s Red Bike, Kevin R. Free’s Am I Dead?, and Topher Payne’s Angry Fags. In 2021 Todd received grant funding to launch a second season of Too Strange to Live from the Maine Arts Commission. He used that funding to produce readings of The Zero Hour by Madeleine George, A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes by Kate Benson, and peerless by Jiehae Park. Todd is a co-producer of Dungeons + Drama Nerds, a weekly podcast that explores the intersection of theatre and tabletop roleplaying games (currently in its third season); a co-founder and Artistic Producer with PowerOut; and a co-founder and former producer of Hot Pepper Theater.

Influences...

Todd is interested in interpretations of the world instead of mere reflections. Theatrically, this has drawn him to the works of Qui Ngyuen, C.A. Johnson, Sarah Ruhl, Moisés Kaufman, and Rajiv Joseph, among others.

Some of his favourite plays are: Ngyuen’s Six Rounds of Vengeance, Ruhl's Passion Play, Kaufman's 33 Variations, Stoppard's The Invention of Love, Joseph's Animals out of Paper, Ruhl's Melancholy Play, Anouilh's Antigone, and George's The Zero Hour.

Favourite non-theatre writers include: N.K. Jemisin, Ruth Ozeki, Virginia Woolf, Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss, and the women of CLAMP.

Affiliations...

Portland Stage - Literary Manager, Affiliate Artist
Dungeons + Drama Nerds - Co-producer, Co-Host, Illustrator
PowerOut - Co-founder, Co-Artistic Producer, Director, Illustrator
Hot Pepper Theater - Former Masochist, Theatre Critic, Spicy Co-host

The more lengthy Bio...

Raised in Central NY, Todd has always been fascinated with storytelling regardless of medium: from books to plays, video games to comic books, and weird avenues in between. Trained at the State University of New York at Oswego in Theatre and Graphic Design, Todd was introduced to a number of artists both theatrical (Sarah Ruhl, David Henry Hwang, Moisés Kaufman) and visual (Chip Kidd, Takashi Murakami, Alphonse Mucha) that forced him to consider the ways form and content interact and how that can inform, support, or subvert a performance or illustration.

Immediately after college Todd spent three years at Portland Stage in Maine. In that time Todd got involved with the programming at the theatre. After conversations between Todd and Artistic & Executive Director Anita Stewart, Portland Stage launched Studio Rep, a series which invited smaller theatre companies into Portland Stage's Studio Theater for a three-show, four-week repertory. Todd directed the PEER award-nominated For the Lulz in the first Studio Rep, and was on the selection committee for the second Studio Rep.

In addition to his work with Portland Stage he honed his skills as a producer, and director working with his own company, PowerOut, which operated in Portland for three seasons. In 2014 PowerOut reopened in New York City and produced seven shows from downtown Manhattan, to Brooklyn, to Williamstown in a short 18 months. Among those plays were: Let's Play Play (and its remount), Derek and the Sheep, and Todd's first-ever play Emily Dickinson: Paranormal Investigator.

In mid-2016 Todd relocated back to Portland, Maine as the Literary Manager of Portland Stage. Since returning to Portland Stage he’s launched a new developmental series, the Studio Series Workshops, where he’s helped develop seven additional plays since early 2017 with more on the horizon. He’s helped refocus Portland Stage’s programming towards new work, and has helped shepherd seven (of fifteen) plays from the Little Festival of the Unexpected to Portland Stage’s Mainstage in five years of programming. In the fall of 2019 in an effort to push the limits of what he could produce at Portland Stage Todd launched Too Strange to Live, Too Weird to Die, a reading series of bizarre and beautiful plays that test the limits of the theatrical imagination. In 2020 he launched Dungeons + Drama Nerds with fellow dramaturgs Percival Hornak and Nicholas Orvis. The podcast explores the intersection of theatre and tabletop role-playing games and is now in the midst of its third season. In 2021 he got grant funding from the Maine Arts Commission to relaunch Too Strange to Live, Too Weird to Die and brought more weird plays to Portland in the summer of 2022.

Interested in Todd's work? Shoot him an e-mail.