Portfolio

This page includes a handful of production photos from a few favorite shows, along with links to read more about them, and see video and more photos.

Silk Moth Stage:Wonder of Our Stage (world premiere), 2023

When Monica Cross sent me Wonder of Our Stage, a brilliant script about Shakespeare…and robots, I knew on first read that we had to do it. There’s something ineffably “mothy” about it—it has magic, it’s quirky, the language is powerful and crafted, and it has ample opportunities to use the audience.

I also could completely picture how it would play at Silk Moth. There were moments when I could imagine the balcony coming into play, which we hadn’t used much previously. I knew I wanted the Automaton to stand on the stump for “To be or not to be.” I had an idea that the top level of the porch could create the confinement of John Dee’s study, and that the story of the Automaton exploring the world could include them literally moving out into the yard, into the grass and the flowers and the trees. (Read more…)

Pigeon Creek Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra, 2018-19

W. H. Auden wrote: “Antony and Cleopatra are saying, ‘I want to live forever.’ […] The enemy is the passage of time.” He’s not wrong. When I ask myself, “What is the thesis of this play?” the answer I keep coming back to is,  “This is why we can’t have nice things.” The play is about wanting to freeze a moment in time, wanting to always live in this golden moment–but the world keeps moving onward.

As time moves and both Antony and Cleopatra and the world around them shift and change and grow, they keep trying to return to how things were, but they can’t. Heraclitus got it right: They can’t step in the same river twice, because both they and the river are constantly changing.

There’s that river again. It’s never far away in this story. (Read more…)

Richmond Shakespeare Festival/Quill Theater: Merry Wives of Windsor, 2022

This is a play about a community. The people in Windsor are constantly into each other’s business. Most of the play happens in public, either in the city streets or when half the town comes over to the Fords’ home and witnesses Ford’s jealous rages. In Shakespeare’s history plays, he’s always showing us how the king’s actions affect the peasants. In Merry Wives, he’s showing how even average citizens affect their community. (Read more…)

Silk Moth Stage: Give Us Good (world premiere), 2022

The words that came out of my mouth were, “Write me a Victorian roadtrip bromance, with puppets.” With astonishing speed, Pam Mandigo churned out Give Us Good, which takes place in a world where everyone has their own monsters, and sometimes one’s monster gets out of hand, and you have to call a monster eater. (Read more…)

York College Theater: On the Verge, 2019

At the beginning of the process, I asked each of the women to think about the play’s subtitle, “The Geography of Yearning.” What is each character yearning for? Does she find it? (Read more…)

Pigeon Creek Shakespeare: Richard III, 2019

I told the actors about something Bethany said to me a few weeks before I started rehearsals: “All violence is misogyny, because people are made by women. And women are expendable. If society really valued women’s lives and women’s work, nobody would ever allow any harm to come to a person who was created by a woman.” It’s so true that it hurts to say it. (Read more…)