In rehearsal / in production

I am slated to direct Kia Corthron’s Breath Boom and to teach Intro to Acting at SUNY/Purchase this fall.

In late July / August 2011, I directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the 2011-2012 Almost Blasphemy tour at the American Shakespeare Center.  It was a pure joy to do so.   The production has just completed a tour of the eastern third of the United States, and will play on the mainstage at ASC from April til June 2012.

Peter Marks wrote in the Washington Post:

“Crisply and cannily directed by Kathleen Powers, this Midsummer is free of the high-concept distortions rampant in classical theater these days: the eschewing of scenery acts as a kind of liberation from the burden of reinvention, of transplanting the action to the Gobi Desert, or Cyprus in the 1890s, or the grounds of a defunct circus. No, here — with Powers’s encouragement — the actors simply do the play. And without makeup or spotlights, the production manages to fully evoke Shakespeare’s magical night.”

In January, I team-taught an Intro to Acting workshop at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. You can read about it here.  I’ll be teaching Acting 201 at the prison in the late spring / early summer 2012.  Here are the first and second of two segments that CBS.com ran about RTA, my 2011 production of Superior Donuts and Sing Sing.

In late March, I taught a master class in audition and cold reading technique at SUNY/Fredonia.

I recently wrote a guest post at www.2amtheatre.com, about productions of Shakespeare that make mere mortals feel stupid.  It is emphatically not okay, fellow theatremakers, to make art that is so busy being clever that you leave the smart, thoughtful civilians in your audience feeling dumb.  They’ll stop contributing; they’ll stop coming.

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In June 2011, I directed Steven Dietz’s Becky’s New Car, featuring the lovely Sandy Duncan, at Theatre Aspen in Colorado.  You can read the advance articles on BroadwayWorld and the Denver Post.

With Sandy Duncan, Jeffrey Correia, Autum Hurlbert, Heather Lee & David Ledingham on opening night at Theatre Aspen

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Since mid-2009, I have worked as a facilitator, teacher and director with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison north of New York City. In addition to collaborating with Jeff Glaser on his production of Starting Over in spring 2010, I have team-taught two directing workshops at the prison.  This spring, I have directed Tracy Letts’  Superior Donuts at Sing Sing; we performed the play for the population and for an invited civilian audience May 11,12 and 13, 2011.

Photo by Xavier Mascareñas

I invited actor Michael McKean, who created the role of Arthur at Steppenwolf and then on Broadway, to come speak to the men at Sing Sing.  You can read the article about his late April visit here and see additional photos of his visit here.  You can read the post I wrote for 2am theatre here.