Walk into the office of Joseph Haj, the producing artistic director of PlayMakers Repertory Company, and you’ll quickly notice unusual wall art. A closer look identifies the yard-long spread sheets paneling the room as extensive flow charts that track character, scene and lighting changes for Haj’s latest project, Shakespeare’s Henry IV and V. The two plays require a director to keep track of 25 actors playing more than 90 characters.

The upcoming production, scheduled to open in January, is another bold leap for PlayMakers Repertory Company. (PlayMakers presents Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? between Nov. 30 and Dec. 18.)

Fall of 2009, PlayMakers shocked audiences with the massive project of Nicholas Nickleby. Running a brisk six hours and 22 minutes, PlayMakers is one of only two theatres in the country to have tackled David Edgar’s script based on Charles Dickens novel. The success of the show can be traced back to Haj’s leadership, who since assuming the role of producing artistic director in 2006 has helped push PlayMakers into highest caliber of American theatres. PlayMakers was one of three theatres nationwide to earn the highest grant of 100,000 dollars this year from the National Endowment of the Arts. The other two recipients were the Lincoln Center Theatre in New York and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. The grant will help fund Haj’s ambitious project of Henry IV and V. For Haj, the challenge of such plays fuels his creative spirit, daring him to push artistic, social and cultural boundaries, a task he’s been after his whole life.

A first-generation American, Haj’s parents emigrated from Palestine to New York in 1959. His family quickly relocated to Miami where Haj found himself in a sea of immigrant culture. His friends and neighbors were Cuban immigrants, not Palestinian. “There was always a feeling of outsider, otherness, not quite belonging,” said Haj, of his childhood.

Whether as a result of feeling isolated or teenage apathy, Haj was, as he puts it, a “terrible student.”  “I was one of those year-long students, skipping school, failing classes and having to retake courses over the summer,” he said. An elective acting course in his senior year kick-started change, unleashing a drive Haj didn’t know existed.

That 18-year-old guy could have never predicted that his high school drama teacher would be sitting in the audience at PlayMakers years later applauding Haj’s directorial triumph of Nicholas Nickleby.

He attended community college to get his grades up, completed his B.A. at Florida International University in two and a half years and traveled to the Tar Heel state for a master’s degree from UNC’s Center for Dramatic Art.

“For some time, being an actor seemed like the whole world. Then, almost like a light switch, it became clear that my own perspective changed,” said Haj. “As an actor, I felt like the punter on a football team; trained in a specialized task, but not an overseer of the entire play.”

In other words, Haj wanted to have a bigger hand in the whole production. Thus, Haj took on the new challenge of directing.

“As a director, I became very interested in the idea of what a community can mean in theatre.” He let this curiosity drag him completely out of his comfort zone and behind bars. With a small grant from a theatre education fund, Haj headed to a maximum-security prison in Los Angeles.

Haj brought together a cast of men all with life sentences to put on Shakespeare’s Henry V. He initially chose the play because of the stark reality of the prologue. In the first lines of the show, the chorus bemoans the lack of resources for the play within the play, an ironic truth as the real actors had nothing to work with.

Despite the lack of funding or experienced actors, Haj formed an artistic community in the most unlikely of places. Haj described how his initial challenge was to unite the inmates who until Haj had only associated with members of their own ethnicity.  By the end of the process, dividing lines had faded. As Haj recounted in amazement, “Under the umbrella of imaginary circumstances, relationships can be forged. These guys became stars on the yard.” It gave whole new meaning to the play’s verse,  “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

Haj’s directing exploits continued as he conducted projects overseas in Salzburg, Edinburg, Paris, Venice, Japan and the West Bank and Gaza Strip. His accomplishments internationally and at home earned him various leadership positions, serving on the review panel for the NEA and the board of directors for the Theatre Communications Group, a national organization responsible for strengthening the network between American non-profit theatres. TCG later pushed Haj into his role as an administrator.

Haj cultivated a reputation for being adventuresome, dynamic and never one to sit back on his heels. This attitude reflects his repeated choice of ambitious projects for PlayMakers. In choosing Henry IV and V, Haj took on the challenge of bringing the verse of the 16^th century playwright to life so that it relates to a 21^st century audience.  Add the pressure of opening these two complex Shakespearean plays for a day-night marathon event and to make enough money to sustain the company and you sense Haj has strived to succeed on another level of difficulty entirely.

“If you are doing it right, making a play is frightening,” he said, “nothing is known.” The fear energizes rather than inhibits Haj’s mentality. Quoting one of his directing mentors and now professor at the Yale School of Drama, Robert Woodroff, “Every time I do a show I feel like I’m locked in box, wrapped in chains and my job is to get to surface,” said Haj. “I’m buoyed by the confidence of my previous success. But the job is to add more chains and drop to the bottom to the bottom of the ocean.”

Haj hasn’t sunk yet. Instead, he has only rapidly risen to the surface, earning the title from American Theatre magazine as one of 25 theatre artists who will have a significant impact on the field over the next quarter century.

Upon hearing Haj’s story, the words, “The Making of a King” on the poster for Henry IV and V become a double entendre. While the phrase explicitly refers to the development of the play’s main character, it accurately describes the director’s own personal battles and artistic triumphs.