David Feldshuh

David Mark Feldshuh, born January 31, 1944, in New York City, is an American playwright, director, actor, educator, and board-certified emergency physician. Raised in Scarsdale, New York, he is the son of Lillian (née Kaplan) and Sidney Feldshuh, a lawyer, and the brother of actress Tovah Feldshuh. He married Martha A. Frommelt in 1986 and is the father of Noah Feldshuh, former guitarist for X Ambassadors.

Feldshuh earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College, graduating with honors in philosophy and election to Phi Beta Kappa. He trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and studied mime with Jacques Lecoq. He subsequently completed a Ph.D. in Theatre at the University of Minnesota, with a focus on creativity and actor training. His Broadway career began in 1968, when he appeared in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

His professional acting career launched as a McKnight Fellow at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where he later served as Associate Director for seven years. In that role he directed, wrote, adapted, and created productions for both the mainstage and experimental spaces. Guthrie credits include Becket, An Italian Straw Hat, Baal, The Measures Taken, and the theater's first production of A Christmas Carol, for which he served as director and co-adaptor. He also directed The Coronation of Poppea for the Minnesota Opera Company and Orlando, based on Virginia Woolf, at Illusion Theater. His play Fables Here and Then, published by the University of Minnesota Press, became the first Guthrie Theater production to tour, traveling to 52 cities across the Midwest.

Alongside his theater career, Feldshuh pursued medicine, earning an M.D. from the University of Minnesota. He completed a residency in Emergency Medicine at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis and became board certified in emergency medicine, attaining Fellowship in the American College of Emergency Physicians in 1983.

Feldshuh is best known as the playwright of Miss Evers' Boys, a drama based on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. The play was developed at Minneapolis' Illusion Theater and Robert Redford's Sundance Institute and received the New American Play Award sponsored by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. It was a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The 1997 HBO film adaptation, written by Walter Bernstein, received nominations for 11 Emmy Awards, winning four, and two Golden Globe Awards, winning one. The film was recognized as Best Picture and received the President's Award for television presentations addressing vital social issues, the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Television Movie, and the CableACE Award for Best Picture. Public attention generated by the film contributed to a formal apology issued by President Bill Clinton to survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in 1997. Miss Evers' Boys also received the National Education Association Award for Achievement in Learning Through Broadcasting and the American Medical Association's Helen Hayes Award for Best Film on a Medical Subject, reflecting its widespread adoption in medical school and ethics curricula examining cultural bias in healthcare. Feldshuh further explored the subject as co-producer of the documentary Susceptible to Kindness, which features interviews with Tuskegee study survivors and received multiple international film awards.

Feldshuh began his directing career in film in the early 1970s with Just Be There, an independent drama about a Vietnam War veteran's readjustment to civilian life in Minneapolis. In 1977 the film was acquired by American Films Limited, retitled The Swinging Teacher, and remarketed as an exploitation film, though its serious dramatic content remained intact.

Among his other theatrical works, Feldshuh wrote Dancing with Giants, depicting the friendship between German boxer Max Schmeling and his Jewish manager Yussle Jacobs before World War II, and Virginia's Gift, originally titled Orlando's Gift, inspired by the life and writings of Virginia Woolf. His adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone received its professional premiere at Center Stage in Baltimore in 2019, and he made the script available online without royalties, enabling its use in educational and performance settings in the United States and internationally. His short story "Are You Satisfied, Thomas Becket?" was published in The Emergency Room: Lives Saved and Lost — Doctors Tell Their Stories, edited by Dan Sachs and published by Little, Brown and Company in 1996.

In 1984, Feldshuh joined Cornell University to help lead the creation of a new building complex dedicated to theatre, film, and dance, becoming the first Artistic Director of the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Productions at Cornell with companies of professional and student actors have included King Lear, Angels in America, The Cradle Will Rock, Amadeus — featuring actor Roshan Seth, Feldshuh's former roommate at LAMDA — The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, featuring Tovah Feldshuh, and Leonard Bernstein's Mass, staged with a mixed cast of 138 student and professional singer-actors. Over more than four decades of teaching at Cornell, Feldshuh developed multiple original courses, among them Executive Presence, a 15-week distance-learning course applying theatrical techniques to public speaking and the reduction of performance anxiety. He was recognized as a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Cornell University's highest teaching award. He also received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University.