This project began as an experiment, and a love letter to the small, rural farming community where I live. Over four productions it has grown into a beloved community institution, drawing casts of up to 50 local participants—a mix of seasoned performers and novices—and audiences nearing 300. Adapted from a rehearsal model pioneered by Anonymous Theatre in Portland, OR (with their enthusiastic blessing), our shows are cast and rehearsed in secret and performed only once. These are community affairs; each year we conduct a spirited, provocative, intimate conversation with one of Shakespeare’s texts. I’m there on the night, book in hand, to shepherd the audience and actors—who enter the stage from the audience as they speak their first line—through a show none of us has ever seen. We weave original songs and community testimonials into our text. In Romeo & Juliet (2018) we explored personal lore and parental failure, in Measure for Measure (2019) we grappled with power, governance, and sexual misconduct, in Twelfth Night (2022) we explored connection, mourning, and the tensions and surprises which can arise from a period of lockdown, and in Hamlet (2023) we told a story about performance, toxicity, generational cycles, and what it means to be miscast in your own story.

Improvements is a short film about inheritance, hauntings, and the horror of home renovation. The script was commissioned by The Theatre Company during the early days of the pandemic as part of their PI:SW series which developed new films written for a single actor in a single Portland location. Emily Gregory, a playwright and frequent collaborator of mine, brought me in as a director/dramaturg to help develop and workshop the script. I was then invited onto the team as the film’s director, which launched nearly two years of pre-production, a week-long shoot in Portland’s Clinton district, and post-production. This is my first film, and I am exceedingly proud of it, and my extraordinary collaborators, including actor Julia Morizawa, cinematographer and editor Jordyn Roach, and the entire production team. Click HERE for more information about Improvements and where it can be viewed.

Problem Play is a finished version of what began in 2019 as Thornbrooke’s Measure for Measure. An extraordinary ensemble cast of Northeastern University actors fleshed out the world of nine Thornbrooke Academy students who revolt against the abusive policies of their corrective boarding school by taking control of their classroom. With little space and no internet, the girls pass the time by reading, rehearsing, and then performing Measure for Measure, discovering and sometimes chafing against the parallels between the play’s themes and their own lives. Essential to the success of this production was the contrast between the intensity and occasional brutality of the material, and the playful, empowering, deeply supportive culture of the rehearsal room.

Two years of close collaboration with Ally Sass culminated in this wild, provocative play about masculinity, performance, and the mythic roots of misogyny in our stories and ourselves. It was a delightful challenge to find a theatrical language for melding our “real” world and the world of “Oracle,” the fantasy MMORPG where the characters spend more and more of their time.

Eliana Pipes and I logged hundreds of hours of conversation over several years as we worked to make sense of this meta-theatrical fantasia about the intersection of capitalism, sexism, racism, and the media mayhem of a gruesome 1990s scandal. What might have been a straightforward retelling of Lorena Bobbit’s story became, in Eliana’s hands, a profound, dizzying, and ultimately personal exploration of authorship. The production itself was a puzzle of opposites: flatness and depth, artifice and reality, cacophony and quiet. Meg McGuigan’s set design provided the perfect playground for us to explore the many frames (within frames within frames).

It was an honor to bring Sarah DeLappe’s opus of wild girlhood to Boston University for the first time. I love plays written at a breakneck speed. DeLappe tells directors that this play is, above all things, “Physical. Concerned with the body, with women’s bodies, not as eye candy or symbolic vessels but as muscular, dexterous, capable, contradictory, and fallible individuals.” So my approach with this excellent ensemble was a highly physical one.  We use psycho-physical acting techniques and other exercises as the means of physical dramaturgy, creating depth, character, and relationship from physical impulse.

I began this process with a framing device and a casting requirement, and one of my favorite of Shakespeare’s texts. I knew we would be exploring an all-girls Measure for Measure, and I knew the bare bones premise of our adaptation was that a group of teenagers had barricaded themselves inside their classroom, holding their teacher hostage. That was it. Using Grotowski-based physical exercises, the company and I trained and improvised, creating and deepening the characters. By the third week it was clear that we were not just applying a frame to Measure for Measure; we were devising an adaptation. I became company playwright as well as director, stitching together and expounding upon our discoveries in rehearsal.

Using Maggie Nelson’s haunting, confessional, philosophical treatise on heartbreak and the color blue, myself and a cast of four courageous young actors devised a work in which an academic lecture unravels into unreality, as the lecturer’s beloved demons pour in through the cracks in her own heart. This is a form I keep returning to; the direct address that tumbles out of the speaker’s control, turning inside out.

“The opera is in a house. The house is an egg. The egg sings.” This experimental opera, set and performed inside a house, told the story of a writer who recovers a memory of incest, and tries to hide it inside her opera. The breathtaking libretto was written by Ethelyn Friend, and the music was improvised live in performance, using methods  and techniques that Ethelyn Friend and composer Gary Grundei had been teaching for many years. In order to create just enough order and structure, I created an improvisational score for each scene/spong. This remains one of the most challenging and creatively satisfying projects of my directing career.

Performed in Portland’s  Lone Fir Cemetery, this production of Romeo & Juliet was about unraveling centuries of romanticism and telling a story not of true love, but of the failure of adults and institutions in preventing a series of tragic, and very preventable teen deaths. We cast teenagers as teenagers and adults as the authority figures in their lives. I set the play very much in the “here and now” of there and then: Portland, OR of 2018.

Anon It Moves Theatre’s first production. A highly physical deconstruction of Shakespeare’s Henry V as war propaganda, The Fifth used a spare set and intricate shadowplay to pose questions about legend vs. reality, lifting and exploring tensions in Shakespeare’s text. The final scene, between Henry and princess Katherine, was played twice: as a love scene, and as a power struggle between a conquering king and his spoil of war.