The productions featured on this page are among those of which I am most proud. Each production page contains an overview, program notes, reviews, and photos. For a complete list, please see my résumé.
“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again.” – Matthew 7:1-2 “We are stardust, we are golden.We are billion-year-old carbon,And we got to get ourselvesBack to the garden.” – Crosby, Stills, Nash, and…
Director’s Note The nation is bitterly divided by partisanship and politics. People are scarcely able to credit the humanity of those on the other side of the conflict. Women’s words are dismissed, discounted, and only finally heard far too late. There are regular and increasingly daring transgressions of the rule of law. Large numbers of…
The cultural moment and the rehearsal process Fall 2017 turned out to be a very peculiar moment to be working with undergraduate students on a play that is about discovering and exploring one’s sexuality. When I accepted the project last spring, I had, half-jokingly, urged the Chair of the Department of Theatre & Dance at…
In collaboration with Executive Director Anne Bertram at Theatre Unbound, I curated an evening of short plays to be in conversation with Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, for its’ 100th anniversary; I directed all four pieces. We commissioned Minnesota playwrights Rhiana Yazzie and Maxie Rockymore to write new pieces that picked up Glaspell’s themes, and we capped…
When Joseph Papke at Classical Actors Ensemble asked me to direct Merchant of Venice, I was both delighted to be asked to work with this fresh young company and also wary at the prospect of tackling this deeply troubling play. Is this an anti-semitic play or is this a play about anti-semitism? Should we perform…
In 2016, as our contribution to the celebration of Shakespeare’s 400 year legacy, the men of RTA and I staged Twelfth Night at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. It was my fifth time directing this play; it was my fifth full production behind the walls. It was the first experience of Shakespeare for many of…
Paula Vogel’s Desdemona cannot outrun Shakespeare’s Othello. She cannot escape her death. Nor, at least as much to Vogel’s point, can any woman escape the restrictions and restraints placed upon her by the men who define her existence. Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief is one kind of feminist retelling of Shakespeare’s story. Vogel locates…
In the first half of 2014, I directed Death of a Salesman at Fishkill Correctional Facility, under the auspices of Rehabilitation Through the Arts. With my incarcerated assistant director, Johnny Hincapie, I wrote the following for the playbill: Willy Loman says, of his sons, “I got a couple of fearless characters,” to which his neighbor,…
In Fally 2013, I directed the premiere of Rosemary McLaughlin’s Paterson Falls within the Department of Theatre at Drew University in Madison, NJ. Paterson Falls chronicles and celebrates the ‘fragile bridge’ (to borrow a phrase from Steve Golin) that was built in 1913 between striking silk workers in Paterson, NJ and artists, intellectuals and Village…
I directed Our Town at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and the men, with their female civilian counterparts, performed the play twice for the population of the facility and once for an invited civilian audience of ~225. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town opened on Broadway on February 4, 1938 — this year, we celebrate the Pulitzer…
Charese Scott-Cooper as Angel, Aissatu Young as Malika and Michelle Quintero Williams as Prix. I heard one of the first readings of Breath, Boom at the Public Theatre several years ago; I was immediately struck by the force of Kia’s writing. I also remember thinking that no one would ever let a white girl who…
Harley Granville Barker, a director, Shakespeare scholar and clever redhead, wrote, “Let us humbly own how hard it is not to write nonsense about art.” He wrote this in his preface to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a kind of nonsense that becomes art. In no particular order, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is love,…
Overview We had two short weeks in impossibly beautiful Aspen to stage Steven Dietz’s Becky’s New Car — a whirlwind ride of a one woman show that happens to have six other actors in it. And while we were in tech, the carpenters, pavers and gardeners were working round the clock to complete Theatre Aspen’s…
On the verge of donut greatness How can I describe my experience directing Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts with men inside Sing Sing Correctional Facility? Thrilling, challenging, profoundly moving, frustrating, fun, exhilarating, playful, instructive, just like rehearsing any play with a dedicated company anywhere. Except that it isn’t. These men have all been convicted of serious…
In early 2010, Jeff Glaser directed a production of Starting Over, written by a group of incarcerated men at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison just north of New York City. I partnered with Jeff as something more than an acting coach, something very like a co-director, but it was…
Overview The most striking thing to me about John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt is that it scans. As in scansion. I don’t know what Shanley was thinking when he wrote it, but as I read and reread the play in preparation for rehearsals, I could feel the pauses. I could feel the muscular intensity not merely…
“Sir, / You speak a language that I understand not”.
Overview This was my third time directing Twelfth Night. Artistic Director Grant Mudge threw down two especial challenges: stage the play using ‘original practices’ and with only five actors. Modeled on the Actors from the English Stage concept, Richmond Shakespeare annually stages several of their winter season productions with five actors, so that in addition…
Overview In September 2006, Jon Kimbell approached me about co-directing A Christmas Carol with him at North Shore Music Theater this season. North Shore has been producing Carol for the past 18 seasons, and Jon felt that the production had gotten both a bit stale and a bit adrift from the story, that some musical…
Overview Amy de Lucia first approached me with a copy of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Fräulein Else in 1999, while we were working on How I Learned to Drive in Bangor, ME. Amy said she felt sure that there was a play in there, if only she could figure out how to unearth it. After I…
Prologue While I was pursuing my M.A. at the Shakespeare Institute, I studied with Dr. John Jowett, who has done a tremendous amount of work on attribution studies in general, and the relationship between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton in particular. I was particularly intrigued by his scholarship with regard to Measure for Measure, and the…
My program notes When this play was first produced, the British theatrical impresario Ivor Brown wrote, “Within a few years, the student of the drama will be sitting in complete bewilderment before the text of Private Lives, wondering what on earth those fellows in 1930 saw in so flimsy a trifle.” Despite summary dismissal by…
Prologue Execution of Justice ran from January 28 trough February 8, 2004 on the Babcock Stage at Pioneer Theatre, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The acting company was comprised of students in the Actor Training Program at the University of Utah; not only did they embrace George Moscone and Harvey Milk, who died before most…
Prologue I am only the second person in the world to direct Humble Boy, having served as associate director to John Caird on the American premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club in the spring of 2003. John is an extraordinarily generous mentor; he encouraged me to explore the differences between our interpretations and to direct my…
“It’s down to me, yes it is The way she does just what she’s told Down to me, the change has come She’s under my thumb Ah, ah, say it’s alright.” ***** “I will be kind, won’t be so cruel, I will be sweet, I will be true, Because of you, a brand new start,…
Don’t forget about the sex American master director Stephen Wadsworth reminded me that As You Like It is “not necessarily a play about love but about self-realization through exile.” British director David Leveaux, by way of advising me, said: “Don’t forget about the sex.” I kept both of these extremely sound observations in mind as…
Pieces is a very personal exploration of very public events. Pieces is a soldier’s story; a young woman’s search for hope as she journeys from drama school in New York City to military service in the Israeli desert; from peace to shattered pieces in the wake of Itzhak Rabin’s assassination and as she struggles to…
The particular challenge I worked to tell the stories of the play as truthfully and as clearly as we can, but I also wanted to celebrate the innate theatricality of the play. We examined every irregularity in the scansion, every short verse line, every shared verse line, every transition from verse to prose: what is…
My program notes A love story and an authentic moral contradiction, How I Learned to Drive challenges our definitions of family love and romantic love; it blurs the boundaries between right and wrong. Paula Vogel says, “We receive great love from the people who harm us.” Drive dramatizes the great gifts that L’il Bit receives…
My program notes Faithful love. Mistaken identity. Lost children. Separated lovers. Magic potions. Wicked stepmothers. Exhausting and frightening journeys through the wilderness. War with the Romans. Reconciliation. Forgiveness. Just your basic fairy, uh —Shakespeare. Only it isn’t. Basic. Cymbeline was one of the last plays that William Shakespeare wrote. Only The Winter’s Tale and The…
Reviews Peter Filichia, TheaterWeek: “When you go theatregoing, take in at least one off-off-Broadway show, for “The Small Stem” has its many charms, too… no theatre does it better than the Westside Repertory — For a while, it appeared that I’d have to stand. And, based on what I saw of their The Voice of…
In collaboration with performers Frank Bradley and Seana Lee Wyman, I founded Some OTHER Shakespeare in the Park. Between 1996 and 1997, we produced and I directed Much Ado about Nothing in Bryant Park (behind the main New York Public Library) and Twelfth Night in Madison Square Park (across from the Flatiron Building). I began…
Five Women… grapples with questions about the nature of friendship and sexual relationships for generation which was born in the wake of the sexual revolution and which has come of age in the era of AIDS. As they watch two of their peers celebrate what looks to be a less than promising union, five women…
Amy Reiter,, Backstage: “Some off-off-Broadway theatres could learn a thing or two from Westside Repertory Theatre. . . [Fanny’s First Play] is well directed, acted and designed to boot. Director Kathleen Powers has assembled a first-rate cast . . . we have more good Shavian drama to look forward to.” John Attanas, oobr: “The Westside…