Directing

Amor & Psyche

Living Room Theatre

This production was a joy to work on with its comic and whimsical cast of characters, and I made sure to anchor each joke and every tear in the real. Staging a play I’ve written enhances the script’s revision process as it expands when on its feet. I always listen to actors when they realize something true and/or wonderful that I haven’t thought of.

Her Name Means Memory

Living Room Theatre

Every staging choice felt inevitable during rehearsal. What began as simple choreography for the chorus yielded profound complexities not found on the page. Every gesture mattered, like threads in a woven design where movements met words and emotions.

Lucy’s Wedding

Living Room Theatre

Rehearsal is that golden period when we feel our way through scenes and take cues from each other. Working in a space that feels safe promotes trust and freedom of thought and expression, forming a crucial component in the evolution of performance.

Adam & Evie

Circle in the Square
Living Room Theatre

Charles Mee’s text lives on the page as a long poem that offers some theatrical details, and generously invites collaboration and reinvention. The cast and I analyzed and re-imagined scenes, locating the inherent drama in each, and then grounded them with invented backstories, telling details, music, and dancing.

Men of Tortuga

Living Room Theatre in NYC at TADA

Best Ensemble nomination, New York Innovative Theatre Awards

Jason Wells sets his play in a high security conference room where four powerful men consider how to eliminate a rival. Who is the rival? Are these guys politicians or corporate bosses? We never find out. Around a conference table, ideas spin out of control and the plan becomes increasingly absurd. Staging developed a kind of complex yet nuanced dance behind, in front of, and around that table that never lost the audience’s interest.

Exit The King

Living Room Theatre

Reading Eugene Ionesco’s play feels like an essay on power as epitomized by its characters: an ego-maniacal, corrupt leader, a feigning doctor, loyal servants, and a young queen opposed by her elder rival. We found the comedic possibilities within the text and translated scenes and moments into parades, vaudeville sketches, and dances.

,The Cherry Orchard

Living Room Theatre

We used a new script translated from the Russian by Polina Ionina, an actor in the production, and me. Audiences moved from indoors to out and back inside. Onstage and off, the collaborative spirit of Living Room Theatre changes the usual order of business of making theatre. For instance, on a day off, the company constructed party hats from rolls of wallpaper — a scene that starts in joy but soon goes awry. We festooned a dead cherry tree with silk flowers so that audiences sitting indoors could see it through the Carriage Barn window. With a mysterious sound score by John Eagle, and actors attuned to Chekhov’s realism, the production laughed through its tears, as we all experienced the poignant sorrow of a way of life ending forever.

frUncle Vanya

Living Room Theatre

I stayed with the site-specific plan for this production, setting act one under a gorgeous spreading Linden tree. To the tune of a Bartok dance, a violinist led the audience after act one into the Park-McCullough Carriage Barn where each act was placed in a different space there. Audiences reported that they relished moving from room to room because each location afforded a more intimate relationship with the play and its actors than a standard proscenium can offer. Every character in the play is flawed, brilliant, funny, grieving, lovable, and questionable. Navigating these contradictions is the work and joy of doing Chekhov

The Seagull

Living Room Theatre

Before rehearsals began, I set up a 13th birthday party for Kostya, played by Michael Broadhurst, with secret letters sent to all the characters in advance. Our cast showed up the day of the party with gifts for Kostya, including his favorite foods. Michael surprised us by writing a play as Kostya, and starring his actress mother, Arkadina. When he was told that she couldn’t get away from her tour to be at the partyy, Kostya erupted in a tearful rage that galvanized the actors to the underlying circumstances of the play. Because we don’t have a proper theatre in Vermont, we did a site-specific production: act one in our garden, act two in the side yard of our house, and acts three and four in our living room as it resembles a Russian dacha. The transfer worked splendidly, and the Living Room Theatre company was born.

Our Town

Hubbard Hall

It felt right to strip away the folksy New Hampshire characteristics of dialect, costumes, and stage dressing for a more timeless setting; and from my research, there are strong indications that Wilder felt it should be this way, too. Because all the characters are trying to come to terms with what is eternal in life, I wanted Simon Stimson, the lonesome musician character, to play the music of French composer Olivier Messiaen on the piano to reflect the deep chord of the play—that of small-town citizens encountering the vastness of the cosmos, all of whom are wondering what their place is in that order.