In rehearsal / in the works
Welcome! I am Kate Powers; I am a stage director, a prison theatremaker, an artistic mental health practitioner, a college professor. I am an artist with training in consent-based and trauma-informed ways of working, holding the space, sharing the temporal real estate. This is my portfolio.
In August 2023, I was published, in collaboration with Frannie Shepherd-Bates, in Shakespeare and Social Engagement, edited by Rowan Mackenzie and Robert Shaughnessy. Frannie and I co-authored a chapter: “Mind the Gap: Working Across Lines of Difference in Carceral Shakespeare.” In 2024, I will be contributing a chapter, “Like Bright Metal on Sullen Ground,” to Shakespeare in the Age of Mass Incarceration, edited by Gina Hausknecht and Liz Fox.
Having recently moved back to Western New York, I am still getting up-to-speed on the ways in which the theatre scene has changed during the decades I have been away. I will direct Drew Fornarola’s Fauci and Kramer for First Look Buffalo in February 2024 and produce and direct Buffalo Quickies at the Alleyway Theatre, for the second time, in March 2024.
I am thrilled beyond measure (beyond even measure for measure, you could say) that I will be directing for Shakespeare in Delaware Park in 2024. My career really began on the Shakespeare Hill; first as a relentlessly enthusiastic child, taking in my first Shakespeare long before anyone told me that these plays were ‘supposed to be important ‘important,’ and then as a teenaged apprentice, replete with feathered hair, braces, and a longing for a life in the theatre. (With, clockwise, Frank Bradley, Jesse L. Martin, and Amy Ann Franckowiak). I will direct The Winter’s Tale for Buffalo, because I think it is a play that strives to answer the question, ‘what do you do AFTER the unspeakably horrific thing has happened?’
Working with Rehabilitation Through the Arts, I am launching a theatre workshop at Collins Correctional Facility in early 2024. We were thrilled to help facilitate Collins’ Celebrate Your Children event in October 2023.
Here is my team (clockwise from upper right: Rachael Jamison, Gabriella McKinley, Tuhran Gethers, & Richard Satterwhite), in a photo with NBA champion Eddy Curry (below), who spoke with the men about parenting, repairing relationships one has neglected, and also about whether Michael Jordan or LeBron is the GOAT.