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…
Some Essential Women Playwrights of the 20th & 21st Centuries In June, the Kilroys released their fantastic and important list of most recommended new plays by women. In July, partly in preparation to teach a course entitled Women in Theatre, partly because many of them have been on my ‘to do’ list for a long time and partly because I apparently abhor…
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…
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…
I have tasked my assistant director on Superior Donuts at Sing Sing with keeping a rehearsal journal; if we were working at a theatre outside the prison’s walls, he might be writing blog posts for the company’s website regarding the progress of rehearsals. He has started to find a nifty balance between a documentary voice…
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…
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…