My first love has always been the playwright’s voice. I receive inspiration and wonder from many of America’s greatest living dramatic writers: Luis Alfaro, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Sarah Ruhl, Jeanine Tesori, Lauren Yee. These playwrights spark my curiosity. What is the unique world they’ve laid on the page? What’s their vision for that world, and our own? And how can I guide a production team to best excavate and inhabit that particular vision? In a way that only a live theatrical experience can provide? 

 

“The purpose of theatre is to wound our memory so we can remember.” 

Paula Vogel

 

The best theatrical experiences have wounded me. Silenced me for a moment. About the world I live in, a community I didn’t know, a history that hasn’t been told. They have taught me how to be broken, for a moment, and then pick up those pieces and share what I’ve experienced. They bravely point a mirror towards histories that some want to keep hidden. So we can reclaim our past and reveal a present path forward. So our nation and world can build a better future.    

 

When audiences watch productions I help lead, I want them to see the thoughtful architecture our production has discovered from inside the playwright’s artifice. But I also hope they feel the emotion that underpins it. That they too feel the beauty and the passion of the theatrical experience. So they too believe the theatre is a tool for community and for change. 

 

“Take me to a world that’s real

Show me how it’s done

Teach me how to laugh, to feel

Move me to the sun

Just hold my hand whenever we arrive

Take me a world where I can be alive."

Stephen Sondheim