Director, actor, writer & educator
I believe in theatre as a kind of medicine. We produce and prescribe it to un-numb ourselves to the complex, painful and rapturous realities of being alive. Good art makes life bearable by acting as an emotional and spiritual dialysis: drawing our feelings and attention out of us and working on them in a public, yet intimate, way. I believe good art must mirror back some truth about being alive, whether that truth comes in the form of uncanny verisimilitude or abstracted expressions that speak to us in some subterranean language. I know how often our work falls shy of these standards; but I believe we should ask nothing less from art made to move us, to soften us to one another, and to salve and debride our psycho-spiritual wounds.
As a director, I focus on rigorous text analysis, physical and nontraditional dramaturgy, close collaboration with writers to guide new plays through development, and helping actors and students work from a place of regulation and groundedness. As a teacher, my areas of specialty are acting training (through a range of traditions), voice and dialect work, text analysis, directing, and a method I’ve developed for actors based in the operations of the nervous system.
