Directing

Amor & Psyche

Living Room Theatre

This production was a joy to work on with its whimsical cast of characters, and I made sure to anchor each joke and tear in the real. Being a choreographer and director, staging a play I’ve written enhances the revision process and expands ideas and performance values. In the pool, there is no room for an added set and props, so this necessary minimalism creates a sense of magic in the viewer when something is added or taken away.

 Her Name Means Memory

Living Room Theatre

Every staging choice felt inevitable during rehearsal. What seemed like simple choreography for the chorus yielded profound complexities. Every gesture matters like threads in the woven design of the play where movement meets words.

Lucy’s Wedding

Living Room Theatre

Rehearsal is that golden period when we feel our way through scenes, engage and take cues from each other. Working within a space that feels safe and inspiring promotes freedom of thought and expression, forming the crucial component in the evolution of the 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, but quite generously invites collaboration and reinvention. The cast and I analyzed and reimagined scenes, located the inherent drama in each, and 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, their ideas spin out of control and the plan becomes increasingly absurd. Staging developed into a 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 egomaniacal, corrupt leader, world domination, feigning doctors, loyal servants, and jealous women. 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 that I, and Polina Ionina, an actor in the production, translated. Audiences moved from indoors to out and back inside. The collaborative spirit of Living Room Theatre both onstage and off changes the usual order of business of making theatre. On a day off, the company made party hats from rolls of wallpaper for the party scene that starts with joy but soon goes awry. We festooned a dead cherry tree with silk blooms and replanted it so audiences could see it through the Carriage Barn window when seated indoors. 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 sense of a way of life ending forever.

Uncle Vanya

Living Room Theatre

I stayed with the site-specific plan for this production, setting act one under a gorgeous spreading Linden tree. A violinist led the audience, to the tune of a Bartok dance, into the first of three locales in the Park-Mccullough Carriage Barn. 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 offers. Every character in the play is flawed, brilliant, funny, grieving, lovable, and questionable, and 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. Our cast of splendid actors showed up the day of the party, bringing gifts and Kostya’s favorite Russian foods. He surprised us by showing up with a play he had written, starring his actress mother, Arkadina. When he was told that she couldn’t be there as she couldn’t get away from her tour, Kostya erupted in sorrowful 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 the 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. It worked splendidly, and the Living Room Theatre company was born.

Our Town

Hubbard Hall

It felt right to strip away folksy New Hampshire characteristics of dialect, costumes, and stage dressing to make a more timeless setting; and from my research, there are strong indications that Wilder felt it should be this way, too. It’s a great play, and like other great plays you can strip them to the bone, and they won’t break. 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 to reflect the deep chord of the play—that of small-town citizens encountering the vastness of the cosmos, who wonder what their place is in that order.