Some of these photos are mine (mostly from rehearsal) and some are from various audience members who posted them on Pigeon Creek’s Facebook page or tagged cast members. I’ve kind of lost track of which was which at this point. I finally got to see one of my shows in the Rose, and it was […]
In the 2016/2017 season, I somehow ended up directing two productions of Much Ado About Nothing. The first was with high school students at the American Shakespeare Center’s high school theater camp. The second was with Pigeon Creek Shakespeare, a touring professional company in Michigan. As I’m preparing to go back to Michigan to remount it at […]
I’ve said before that my college theater was wonderful because they gave me a lot of “yes.” Recently, I was digging through my old files and I found the speech I gave at honors convocation in my senior year at Hiram College. I read it expecting it to be vaguely embarrassing, and was surprised to […]
Silas is taking an *awesome* theater class at JMU. It’s taught by theater ed majors, for homeschool kids, ages 7-13 or so. Nearly all of the kids are at least 2 years older than he is, and he is so impressed with them. They are playing some theater games and also devising a play based […]
David, at EMU theater, mentioned to me that he was pretty behind on getting the lights done for an upcoming production of Macbeth. So I offered to come lend a hand…but of course, I’d have my tiny assistants with me. He said that was okay–maybe they could drop color for him–and so we went over there […]
Seeing people’s #threefictionalcharacters posts this week (which has been super fun, by the way), I’ve been thinking of other ways to sum up a person in just a few items. Here’s one: What are your top five creations? Ground rules: Listing your children is cheating. It should be stuff you’re proud of and that helped […]
I recently spent just under 48 hours in lower Manhattan for a work thing. Apologies to anyone I didn’t get to see while I was there–it was a blink in and out of town. It was a crazy trip, but I did manage to sneak in a visit to Broadway on my one night in […]
I’ve been meaning to write about Liesl Tommy since I saw her speak at the KCACTF Region 2 Festival in the winter. She was the keynote speaker at the festival. And she was amazing. She’s from South Africa, and she talked about what it was like to come to the US, how she found theater, the […]
Recently, on a road trip, Heidi and I wound up talking about what kinds of plays speak to us. Both of us will direct practically anything, and will find our way into it, but every director is drawn to certain types of plays. The fact that I get hired for plays outside of my wheelhouse […]
2016 was, at a macro level, a total disaster. But, as Rachel Held Evans writes, in a moving post on becoming a mother, it also was some people’s best year. It was my best one in a long time. Hard and complicated, yes, but also amazing. This is the year I was 33. In Mennonite circles […]