Theatre Director · Actor · Educator
Chicago-Based Theatre Director
I direct new work, classics, devised performance, and musical theatre. My rehearsal rooms combine close script work with physical composition, improvisation, and theatre games—concrete tools that help actors take risks, solve problems, and live fully in the moment.
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 give actors something concrete to do, make risk playable, and turn analysis into action. Rehearsal is where we prepare deeply enough to be surprised.
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 that begin with what happened in rehearsal, follow the question, and bring the argument back to the work.
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. He directs new work, classics, devised performance, and musical theatre. He brings close script analysis, physical composition, improvisation, and Viola Spolin’s theatre games into the room—not as a fixed system, but as tools actors and ensembles can use to make the work more alive.
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 the founder of AdlerImprov.
Rob joined the faculty of The Theatre School at DePaul University in 2017 and served as Co-Head of BFA Acting from 2023–2026. 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.