Leonard Pronko
Theatre History / Kabuki / Directing
lpronko@pomona.edu
#215 (909) 607-4390

Leonard Pronko, Professor of Theatre, came to Pomona College in 1957 to teach courses in French and Spanish literature and language. At the same time he began directing plays occasionally in the Theatre Department. In 1963-4 he spent his first sabbatical on a Guggenheim Fellowship studying Asian theatre and its impact in the West. When he returned to Pomona. Convinced that Japan’s Kabuki theatre was the most exciting theatre he had seen, he began to direct Kabuki plays in English at Pomona College. During his second sabbatical in 1970, he spent fifteen month at the newly formed Kabuki Training Program at the National Theatre of Japan, the first, and one of the few, foreigners allowed to enter the program. Pronko’s production of Kabuki in English became more authentic as he studied the form in more depth, and at the same time he began experimenting with western classics, or newly written plays, performed in Kabuki style.
In 1984, Pronko became chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance, and served in that capacity for seven years. Since then he has continued as a member of the department where he teaches dramatic literature, kabuki, and directs plays.
Pronko’s first publications were on the contemporary French theatre: The World of Jean Anouilh (1961), and Avant-garde: Beckett, Ionesco and the Experimental Theatre in France (1962). Upon his return from Asia, he published his best-known book, Theatre East and West (1967), and subsequently other books on Japanese theatre or on Shakespeare and Japan, as well as studies of the great writers of French farce, Eugene Labiche and Georges Feydeau. He has published translations of a number of Kabuki plays, and many of the dramas of the important Spanish playwright, Alfonso Sastre. Pronko has performed lectures and demonstrations on Kabuki make-up and costuming before the audience hundreds of times.
In 1973 Pronko received the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his productions of Kabuki at Pomona College, and the following year took his group to the Kennedy Center to perform Kabuki. In 1986 he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese government, and in 1997, the Award for Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education by Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Pronko has also received Distinguished Alumnus Awards from Drury College, where he did his B.A., and from Tulane University where he did his Ph.D., and two Distinguished Professor Awards from Pomona College.