Ron May - Founding Artistic Director

Ron is the founding Artistic Director for Stray Cat Theatre. Credits include Stupid Kids, The Dianalogues, The Laramie Project, A Clockwork Orange, [sic], The Normal Heart, The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love/Suicide, Trainspotting, Fat Pig, 4.48 Psychosis, A Number, Pulp*, Everything Will Be Different, An Impending Rupture of the Belly, columbinus*, Blackbird, The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, Speech and Debate*, Learn to be Latina*, Octopus, Abraham Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party, The Sparrow, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Heddatron, Wolves*, Sons of the Prophet, Chicks With Dicks, The Flick, The Whale, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, The Brothers Size*, Pluto, Sex with Strangers (co-production with Arizona Theatre Company), Stupid Fucking BirdAmerican Idiot, John, Native Son, HirKiss, Mercury*, Hand to God, The Antipodes, Let the Right One In, American Psycho: The Musical, Assassins, and Sleeping Giant. (* - asterisks = Zoni Award for Best Overall Production).  In 2020, he headed back to Chicago to direct Holmes and Watson for Buffalo Theatre Ensemble and during the zombie plague, directed a virtual Heddatron for ASU. This winter he will direct Noah Haidle's ode to his mom - Birthday Candles - with valley pillars Maureen Dias Watson and Patti Davis Suarez, and Stray Cat's season closer - a thoroughly Stray Cat look at the classic musical Little Shop of Horrors.

Outside the kitty condo, Ron most recently directed She Kills Monsters for Scottsdale Community College, and Barbecue for Black Theatre Troupe. He has also directed for Phoenix Theatre (Buyer & Cellar*, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson*), Actors Theatre (Seminar, Hunter Gatherers, This, boom, Augusta, The Pursuit of Happiness, A View of the Harbor), Nearly Naked Theatre (As Bees in Honey Drown, Valparaiso); Mesa Community College (Good N Plenty*, Mr. Burns: a post-electric play); ASU's Mainstage (Raw Footage, Electropuss), and Planet Earth Theatre (Shopping and Fucking, Polaroid Stories.)  (* - asterisks = Zoni Award for Best Overall Production)

Local acting credits include The Minutes at Stray Cat, and The Truth About Winnie Ruth Judd at Phoenix Theatre Company. Other credits: Southwest Shakespeare Company's The Alchemist and Hamlet; Crumpet the Elf in The Santaland Diaries at Arizona Theatre Company; Francis Henshall in Phoenix Theatre's One Man, Two Guv'nors; Gil Pepper in Stray Cat's Year of the Rooster; Mike Daisey in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at Actors Theatre and The Trump Card at Stray Cat Theatre; Millett in Nearly Naked Theatre's Fuddy Meers and Mason Marzac in Nearly Naked Theatre's Take Me Out.

During the summer of 2001, he spent time in New York as a fellow in The Lincoln Center Theatre Director's Lab.

He was named a finalist for the 2018 Zelda Fichandler Award recognizing an individual who has made, and who continues to make, a significant contribution to their community through extraordinary work in theatre in the Western region of the United States (defined as Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming). He was also nominated as an Artist for the 2019 Governor's Arts Award and in 2021 received the Trailblazer Award by City of Tempe Neighborhoods.

email: rmay[at]straycattheatre.org