Mere Trifles by Susan Glaspell, et al.
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 …
The Kilroys: A Prequel
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 …
Breath, Boom by Kia Corthron
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 …
Becky’s New Car by Steven Dietz
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 …
Superior Donuts at Sing Sing Correctional Facility
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 …
Listen to a silenced voice
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 …
How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel
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 …
Five Women Wearing the Same Dress by Alan Ball
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 …
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