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Erin Weaver, Johnny Link + company in Private Jones at Signature Theatre, written + directed by Marshall Pailet, with Alexandria Wailes as Director of Artistic
FROM THE PRESIDENT
I am writing this during a heat wave, as record hot temperatures blast the central and eastern United States. Miserable though it may be outside, the weather feels appropriate for the moment—we’re all under pressure right now as we make our work and live our lives in extraordinary times.
The first issue of the Journal published during my tenure as SDC Executive Board President, Spring 2020, included Executive Director Laura Penn’s piece “Culture Wars and the Transfer of Influence,” which examined a time when rights to freedom of expression in the theatre were threatened across the country. In my letter in that issue, I wrote about that piece and about the importance of SDC’s commitment to fostering safe, diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplaces. While we have all been through a lot in the five years since then, the themes of the Spring 2020 magazine remain strikingly relevant today. Freedom of expression is again under threat, and our ongoing work to make workplaces safe and equitable has become politicized, making our commitments to our artistic and cultural values more important than ever.
With that in mind, it’s a special pleasure that this issue of SDC Journal highlights directors and choreographers who work to expand theatre’s accessibility while staying true to their artistic impulses. Director Marshall Pailet writes about his work with Alexandria Wailes, Director of Artistic Sign Language, on the new musical Private Jones, which was performed by a company of hearing, deaf, and hard-of hearing artists. Sean Daniels talks with Michael Rohd about his work on the Recovery Arts Project and the power of theatre to create genuine change—in its audiences and the national narrative. Kristin Hanggi and Maxx Reed discuss creating a safe rehearsal and performance space for performers and audience members with photosensitive epilepsy.
This issue also gives us a peek into the stories of some remarkable directors and choreographers: Lili-Anne Brown speaks with Kimberly Senior about her past and present work in Chicago’s theatre scene, Lue Morgan Douthit interviews Sara Bruner about her path from acting to directing to artistic leadership, Warren Carlyle shares his journey from watching MGM musicals to working on Broadway, and Oz Scott brings back SDC Journal’s “What I Learned” column to reflect on his most important influences.
As we navigate the heat waves of the present moment—both physical and metaphorical—I take heart in the determination and artistry of the directors and choreographers highlighted in this issue and in our collective power as SDC Members.
Evan Yionoulis Executive Board President
FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Every time I read the final proof of SDC Journal I am reminded of the scope, scale, and stature of the SDC Membership. I see the breadth and depth of your work in these pages. And, as you continue to expand the craft, we continue to grow SDC protections.
As an exercise, I took a pass through a few statistics: At the time of this writing, SDC has 2,181 SDC Members and 1,118 SDC Associate Members. Members and Associate Members live in 49 States (plus Washington, DC), England, Scotland, Ireland, Mexico, Japan, Germany, France, and Canada. (No SDC Members live in West Virginia—do you know any professional directors or choreographers there?) In 2024, SDC Members filed 2,362 contracts; SDC processed contracts from 872 distinct employers; and Members’ total earnings were $85,773,467. But I digress.
Recently, I was reading through the Union’s archives, and I came across a debate within the Executive Board that happened several decades ago. The question at hand was, could the Union expect to continue to grow?
This is a question an effective Board must ask itself on a regular basis; it’s a best practice for any organization. We have the clear advantage of being here today and knowing that the American theatre did continue to expand—and that the Union did as well. SDC reached deeper into communities to identify theatres where directors and choreographers were working and paid attention to new theatres emerging across the country. And so the Union, through expanded jurisdiction and growth in Membership, continued to grow.
More recently—for nearly two decades now—SDC has been paying closer attention to what might be considered “non-traditional” work, finding you and your peers increasingly making work in what not too long ago might have been thought of as outside the “legitimate” theatre. And we continue to grow, both jobs and the Membership.
In strategically and appropriately aligning the Union’s goals and objectives with yours, we are led by your ambitions as artists. That ambition is captured in each issue of SDC Journal
In the conversation with Lili-Anne Brown, one of Chicago’s many relentlessly creative Members, I am reminded of a trip I took to Chicago early in my tenure at SDC. On that visit I met Kimberly Senior (thank you, Leigh Silverman, for that introduction). Shortly after that meeting, with Kimberly’s help as a new SDC Member, we began to work with storefront theatres. Every time SDC Journal lands in Chicago, it is inspiring and affirming!
Alexandria Wailes was working as Director of Artistic Sign Language on the Broadway production of Children of a Lesser God when she joined SDC. Employing a Director of Artistic Sign Language is an overdue practice for producers and theatremakers seeking authenticity. Alexandria, a multi-hyphenate artist, reached out to us, and she is now central to our organizing efforts to support the directors and choreographers who work in Artistic Sign Language.
As artists, SDC Members know—and have always known—that their work impacts the audiences and the communities that experience the stories told on stage. The passion and power and purpose of
Sean Daniels’s work today, his unwavering commitment to creating great theatre that intersects with great need, has become an initiative. He has lifted our consciousness, through theatre, to understanding recovery and addiction. Kristin Hanggi and Maxx Reed are exploring practices to expand access to the theatre for neurodivergent audiences, specifically those with epilepsy.
In 2024, Sara Bruner assumed the position of Producing Artistic Director of Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival in Nevada, and Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland. The unique model of partnership represented by these companies is not well known, even as so many of our Members create work in one of these spaces—work that will then go on to the other two companies, which are based in vastly different parts of the country. While SDC has had a long-term relationship with Great Lakes Theater, the Idaho and Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festivals have only formalized their relationships with SDC in the past 10 years.
The phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants” is attributed to Isaac Newton. (I’ve read that he wanted to make known that he felt his discoveries were possible because of the work of Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, and others.) Toward the end of this issue there are two sections that had me thinking about what we stand on.
In reading about the SDC Foundation Awards this year, and the Members who have passed, an image came to mind. Not only are we standing on the shoulders of those who came before, but your Union stands on the shoulders of those who are, right now, doing the work. Your artistic work and your service as Union Members, when combined with the legacy of those who came before, make for the enormously powerful force that is SDC.
This is your Union. We represent each one of you and the Union draws its inspiration and priorities from your needs, your ambitions, and the work you do across the country, with a wide range of sensibilities, aesthetics, distinct processes, aspirations, and measures of success. SDC Journal is but one reflection of this, one opportunity for you to learn a bit about each other and the myriad ways you are making theatre—and a reminder that our Members are innovators who are forging new paths. SDC both supports and leads as we keep expanding, providing new protections in support of your careers.
In Solidarity,
Laura Penn Executive Director
PHOTO HERVÉ HÔTE
WHAT (AND HOW) I LEARNED
BY OZ SCOTT
Oz Scott is an accomplished director of theatre, television, and film. He was integral to the development of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and directed productions of the play at New Federal Theatre, The Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, and on Broadway. Scott continues to direct regionally and internationally, most recently a production of Intimate Apparel at Arizona Theatre Company.
I have carried on the tradition of my father in the entertainment business. He was a preacher—a good one. I joke about it but there is a lot of truth in it. Our jobs are very similar: to make you think, to make you laugh, and to help you to enjoy life. My father was very important to my development as an artist and person. As well as being a preacher, he was a teacher. He taught all the new student chaplains in the US Army from 1946 to 1959—the imams, priests, rabbis, and ministers. He was an early pioneer in using television cameras for classes. There is a picture in the February 1953 issue of Ebony magazine of him teaching with one of the big old, bulky cameras.
My style of directing is probably very similar to his. I tell stories when I’m working. For me, telling stories is a way of connecting the actors to who they are, what they should be feeling, and what’s going on in the characters’ world. Both my father and my mother were inspirations to me. My mother got her master’s degree at Teacher’s College at Columbia University back in the ’50s. She took television/film classes. As a child I remember her talking about cutting film, camera angles, and how long a scene should be.
My mother also took me to see plays. She took me to the closing night of a play on Broadway when I was a kid. It was called A Hand Is on the Gate, a collection of poems and songs that Roscoe Lee Browne had put together to create a Broadway musical. In some ways, it helped contribute to the development of for colored girls, because for colored girls is basically a collection of great poems with a fabulous cast. A Hand Is on the Gate also had a spectacular cast: Cicely Tyson, Moses Gunn, James Earl Jones, Ellen Holly, Gloria Foster, Josephine
BELOW Tracey N. Bonner + Aaron Cammack in Intimate Apparel at Arizona Theatre Company, directed by Oz Scott
PHOTO TIM FULLER
Premice, Leon Bibb, and of course Roscoe. Watching those brilliant actors transform those poems, all of them became friends and inspirations to me. For years, when I’d walk by an old record store I’d look for a copy of A Hand Is on the Gate to replace the copy that I had worn out. I always thanked Roscoe for that early inspiration.
Another important period in my development as an artist was when I was 19. I was working for a company called Living Stage in Washington, DC, founded by Robert Alexander at Arena Stage. Living Stage was an improvisational theatre company where we went into prisons, halfway houses, daycares, community centers, and schools, performing for kids one day, inmates the next, then a rehab center the next day. I was the stage manager and utility actor when needed. I kept
the production going and gave notes when the director wasn’t there. Giving notes for improvisational theatre is different than a play because you’re not saying, “This line is wrong. Your blocking was off.” My notes were, “I didn’t feel it.” “I don’t know how you made that transition.” “Where’d that come from?”
“You weren’t really in it.” That experience very much contributed to who I am as a director today.
We did eight weeks of improvisational theatre rehearsals and then we did three months on the road, six days a week, going from school to school, place to place, prison to prison. So much coming out of those performances of Living Stage was inspiring. We would say, “Every story can have more than one ending.”
We would get almost to the end and say to the audience, “Okay, how do you want to see this end?” Or, “What else
would you like to see?” We’d do two or three different endings. It helped hone my storytelling tremendously because I’m always thinking about “What are the other stories? How could it end?”
Another significant part of my directing growth came when I took acting classes. I’m not an actor, but I would take acting classes because it made me see, understand, and remember the actor’s tools. One time I had this wonderful actor who had one line. It was not a big line, but he couldn’t do it. He kept stumbling over it. It’s always said that one line is as difficult as 20. So, I went to the side, and I acted it out loud. When I did that, I realized it was a tongue twister. I said, “Oh, it just needs a tweak here. Just a word here, and it’ll be great.” So I say sometimes: take an acting class. Step outside of your comfort zone.
The New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, directed by Oz Scott
The new musical, It’s All Your Fault, Tyler Price!, premiered at the Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles in November 2024. The show focuses on the family of a student with epilepsy, a brain disorder that causes recurring seizures. About three percent of people with epilepsy suffer from a condition known as photosensitive epilepsy, in which exposure to flashing lights, strobe effects, and other intense visual stimuli can trigger seizure, migraines, or dizziness. SDC Journal contributor Ellie Handel spoke with director Kristin Hanggi and choreographer Maxx Reed about their journey to understand how some theatrical lighting design affects individuals with photosensitive epilepsy and how the creative team worked to make Tyler Price safe for all audience members to enjoy.
Kristin, how did It’s All Your Fault, Tyler Price! come to be, and how did you get involved?
KRISTIN HANGGI | Back in 2007, a producer gave me a CD and said, “See if you think this could be a musical.” It was an album written for children that Ben [Decter, It’s All Your Fault, Tyler Price! composer, lyricist, and co-book writer] was one of the co-composers on. We met for dinner, and he told me the story of his family and how his daughter was diagnosed at 17 months old with catastrophic childhood epilepsy. Because Ben is a composer, he dealt with it by writing songs. He started playing me songs he wrote to try to find his way through. From 2007 to 2019, Ben and I just tried to figure out how to tell this story. We started working with the Epilepsy Foundation of America, the Epilepsy Foundation of America in Los Angeles, and the Children’s Ranch.
During this time, as we started getting our resources in line, I participated in Broadway Dreams [a nonprofit theatre performance program for young people that creates inclusive spaces where students of all backgrounds can explore their artistic potential]. One of the choreographers I worked with was Maxx Reed. I watched Maxx start doing this choreography with these young people and I just said, “Well, who’s this genius? Where has he been my whole life? Whoa.” We got into a taxicab, and he started to talk a bit about himself. I learned that his niece has epilepsy and that he started a foundation with her called EpiArts Alliance.
What is EpiArts Alliance, and how was it established?
MAXX REED | My niece, Anzli McNew, her goal is to be a Broadway performer. When she was diagnosed with epilepsy, she got knocked back a little bit. I started bringing her to Broadway Dreams with me as a student. I discovered a lot about how to be sensitive to her as a performer and what was needed to protect her from having seizures on stage. I was trying to communicate that to other teachers, choreographers, and directors that I work with in the Broadway Dreams ecosystem.
Anzli and her mother, Heather McNew, became the creators of EpiArts Alliance. [Founded in 2023, EpiArts Alliance supports performers with epilepsy and photosensitivity through education and awareness campaigns.]
KRISTIN | Maxx and EpiArts brought a very important component to Tyler Price because I had not been educated, up to that point, about how to create a theatrical environment that was sensitive to the needs of audience members with epilepsy.
I learned Maxx’s niece gets triggered by certain lighting cues. When Maxx was performing in Beetlejuice, he would have to tell her when certain cues were coming. Then she knew that if she put a palm over an eyeball, she could watch it without it triggering a seizure. Here I come, Kristin— who directed Rock of Ages, which is all flashing lights all the time—and I didn’t know. I thought only strobe lights could trigger seizures. That’s not true. It’s not just flashing lights, it has to do with color spectrum as well. If someone has epilepsy, light sensitive epilepsy, it really is an intense health matter for them.
Before Tyler Price premiered, Kristin and Ben Decter participated in a lighting safety research roundtable organized by EpiArts and inspired by some of the work Maxx was doing with Anzli for Broadway Dreams. The discussion was attended by photosensitivity researchers Dr. Arnold Wilkins and Dr. Laura South, lighting designers Donald Holder and Barbara Samuels, and ConsultAbility founder Paul Behrhorst. How did that conversation affect your team’s work on Tyler Price’s design?
MAXX | We were lucky enough to get wonderful directors, lighting designers, and doctors—literally the man who wrote the book on photosensitive epilepsy—into one giant Zoom call. Now, there’s a strong relationship between doctors who really understand the science of epilepsy and lighting designers who understand the science of their craft.
We started coming up with protocols for photosensitive design. Strobes and flashes are often unavoidable in theatrical storytelling; however, there are ways to design so that the risk is minimized. For example, designers can point the strobes toward set pieces rather than towards the audience and can change the frequency and color contrast to minimize risk for photosensitive audiences.
Tyler Price was very much a case study. Because we had heard from researchers early on, we approached this production with empathetic design from the start.
KRISTIN | Jamie Roderick [Tyler Price’s lighting designer] talked to EpiArts to get all that information and research. Jamie created the show to be light sensitive and it still had gorgeous lighting cues.
MAXX | Jamie’s work was insane. It was gorgeous and it was safe for all audience members. Jamie and the team made sure to include detailed signs in the theatres of the exact flashing light cues and scenes. They went beyond the “Flashing Light Warning” sign that is standard practice in theatre. That’s a core mission of EpiArts, to provide audiences access to understand the potential risk ahead of attending a show.
This process of empathetic design and implementing safer lighting practices with Tyler Price proved that it can be done, and you still have all of the storytelling pieces there. My niece came and watched the show three times. One of those times she sat in what could be potentially the most triggering seat in line with a particular light. To watch my sister sit next to my niece and never have to shield Anzli from any cues...they could both watch the show. It just shows that it’s possible.
KRISTIN | We also had a sensory sensitive performance where we also looked at the other elements—sound, conversations with the audience—those kind of things. While photosensitivity is often focused specifically on light and visual triggers, we took a holistic approach that considered the full sensory landscape of the production. For that performance, we lowered the overall volume, softened sudden sound cues, and worked with the cast to ensure there were no unexpected vocal spikes that might be jarring. We also communicated clearly with the audience about what to expect and made space for movement and vocalization during the performance. Our goal was to preserve the emotional integrity of the show while adjusting the delivery to be more accessible.
Has your work with EpiArts and Tyler Price shifted how you approach your craft?
KRISTIN | An undercurrent that developed in the show was being willing to talk about things that are challenging, even if we don’t have language for them yet. The creative team learned how to do
Erin Choi + Charlie Stover in It’s All Your Fault, Tyler Price! at the Hudson Theatre, directed by
Kristin Hanggi + choreographed by Maxx Reed
PHOTO JIM COX PHOTOGRAPHY
that together, asking each other, “What do I need in order to feel safe in this space? Can we make an inclusive space for each other?” When it was okay to ask for our needs to be met, we discovered that we could create a process that felt good to us, but we have to learn how to talk about our needs first, even if we don’t know how to name them.
The process has become so important to me. I want to make sure that it’s nurturing for myself and my collaborators, the entire team, to create something sustainable. It has to feel good in my body. That has profoundly shifted for me. The work is integrated with a deep internal listening.
MAXX | It has changed the way I choose projects. I decided to go and be a part of this show so that I could make something my niece would be proud of. It’s made my filter for the things I want to do with my time much finer. I now know that it’s possible to keep creating while making sure that the work aligns with things I would like to teach, experience, or grow in, and I get to be beside people that I can learn from, love, and respect.
It has changed the way I interact with people in the room. It has changed—from a technical standpoint—what I think is necessary in order to make something interesting. Some of the most effective things in this show were the simplest. I’m going to trust that more for the rest of my career.
Kristin Hanggi is best known for directing the smash hit Rock of Ages, for which she received a Tony nomination for Best Direction of a Musical. Other directing credits include the original productions of bare: a pop opera (Hudson Theatre, American Theatre of Actors); Accidentally Brave (Off-Broadway); Clueless (The New Group); and Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (Seattle 5th Avenue).
Maxx Reed is a multi-genre movement artist and educator, choreographer, director, and multi-medium filmmaker. With the art of movement, theatre, and filmmaking, Maxx aims to show compassion through choreography and creative collaboration––emphasizing his role as a dance educator and multi-platform storyteller.
MUSES & MUSINGS
WITH WARREN CARLYLE
Who or what inspired your career in theatre?
I grew up in a village in England, and the village didn’t actually have its own theatre. So a lot of my early inspiration came from
MGM movie musicals. Anything that Fred Astaire did, anything that Gene Kelly did— that was really my first access to dance of any kind.
I studied in the local dance school, and I graduated from there into full-time ballet school, just outside of London. Classical ballet was the bedrock of my training. Then I danced. I worked on 10 West End shows before I came to America. I danced lots of different styles, in lots of different productions. I was a swing, a dance captain, an assistant choreographer, an associate choreographer, and a resident director. I found an interesting path and I think those early MGM movie musicals led me to what I’m doing now. Big, bright, joyous things, I hope.
Where do you get your inspiration now? Is it books, music, visual art?
One of my earliest memories is listening to music and imagining things. I think I just always had that thing—I hear music, and I see people moving. Now I sit in
my apartment and listen to music and imagine people dancing.
I spend a lot of time in my scripts and in my music. I always have a dance arranger. I always have a drummer. I do research, but I try not to be bound by it or biased by it. Especially with some of the period things. Pirates!, as an example of that, is set in 1890. And if I was bound by period, I’d really be in trouble, I think; I don’t know quite how I’d make that dance in the way that I have.
As we speak, your production of Pirates! The Penzance Musical, a reimagining of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, has just opened on Broadway. Tell us about the world you created for that show, and what inspired it.
Pirates! is very much a kind of decoupage world. I wanted the dance to feel like that. The clothes—beautifully designed by Linda Cho—feel like that; the scenery—by David Rockwell, lit by Don Holder—feels like that. I wanted the choreography to be in the same world as the scenery and the costumes.
One of the biggest opportunities with Pirates! was to make something that’s traditionally a Gilbert and Sullivan
PHOTO MURPHYMADE.COM
Samantha Williams + company in Pirates! The Penzance Musical on Broadway, choreographed by Warren Carlyle PHOTO JOAN MARCUS
operetta—something that’s not a dance— to make it dance. To make it move, give it style, give it a language all its own, to make it for this particular generation. We’ve updated it already, because we’ve set it in New Orleans. That gave us license to change the music. Then as soon as we got jazz and Creole influences in the music, that started to influence the casting, and that started to influence the way people are moving.
There are very distinct character groups in Pirates! That was fun for me. There are the pirates, the daughters, the police, and these very well-defined principal roles: the modern Major-General, played by David Hyde Pierce, and the Pirate King, played by Ramin Karimloo. How’s the Pirate King going to move? How is he expressing his physicality and his strength? Jinkx Monsoon plays Ruth, the nursemaid. How does Ruth move? How does she express herself?
I researched British Naval semaphore [flag signalling] for Pirates! I wanted to create a language for the modern Major-General, and I wanted it to be historically correct. The flags in Pirates! are actually correct: blue and white was correct for the land, and orange and red is correct for “at sea.”
So for me, it was a massive opportunity to really create a world for each character and group, and then to push all those things together. Pirates! is this beautiful combo of a show with very distinct
movement styles for each of these groups, and then for each of those principal characters.
The other thing I wanted to do is to have fun. I wanted to make a bright, joyous, intelligent, humorous piece of theatre. I didn’t want it to be too thoughtful, choreographically. I wanted it to move. I wanted it to move beautifully—every time it stopped, I wanted it to look beautiful— but I wanted it to move.
Where do you find inspiration outside of your work as a choreographer?
A friend of mine, David Rockwell, who’s a brilliant designer, has really encouraged me to paint. I really haven’t painted in my life. I don’t remember ever painting in watercolor, certainly. I really like it. I feel like I paint pictures with people for a living. That’s really what I do.
I hope I paint beautiful pictures with people and tell beautiful stories with people. And now I’ve started to try that with paint, just gently with a brush, and see how that works. It’s really humbling and really challenging, but I like it. My brain likes it.
You paint lot of landscapes, so you’re painting with people in your choreographic work but not yet in your visual art.
It’s tricky. People are way too hard for me. Unless I’m struck by something at
New York City Ballet. Quite often, those shapes really inspire me. I love going to ballet, and City Ballet has been really a big place of inspiration for me over my 25 years in New York. I continue to go to City Ballet every season, and I continue to be a huge fan of those dances, and of that organization too. That’s a wonderful artistic venture, and something that I’m constantly inspired by.
I also love seeing other choreographers’ work. I’m fascinated by it. I’m such a huge fan of this strange and wonderful group of people. I’m always curious about what makes someone tick. Why is that rhythm like that? Why are they traveling like that? Why did they choose that step? Why is that that color? Why does that go across the phrase, and why does that line up at the end of the phrase? The way people use music is fascinating to me, too. All of us are wildly different. I’m a massive fan of the theatre, massive fan of directors and choreographers.
Warren Carlyle is a Tony Award-winning director and choreographer. Broadway: Pirates! The Penzance Musical; Harmony; The Music Man; Kiss Me, Kate; Hello, Dolly!; She Loves Me; On the 20th Century; After Midnight; Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway; Chaplin; A Christmas Story; The Mystery of Edwin Drood; Finian’s Rainbow; and A Tale of Two Cities
Ramin Karimloo + company in Pirates! The Penzance Musical on Broadway, choreographed by Warren Carlyle PHOTO JOAN MARCUS
TURNING THE LIGHTS ON
AN INTERVIEW WITH LILI-ANNE
BROWN
BY KIMBERLY SENIOR
Lili-Anne Brown and Kimberly Senior met in Chicago, where both directors forged their earliest creative paths in the heralded storefront theatre scene. When the two longtime friends and colleagues talked over Zoom for this interview, Brown, a Chicago native, had just returned home from directing a production of August Wilson’s Two Trains Running for The Acting Company. She had spent the weekend attending plays, catching up with the theatre community she loves fiercely, and was brimming with enthusiasm for performances she had seen—Andrew Burden Swanson in Ronán Noone’s The Smuggler at Jackalope, directed by Gus Menary, and Stephen Schellhardt’s production of Fun Home at Porchlight Music Theatre.
LILI-ANNE BROWN | The little girl who played Small Alison [Tessa Mae Pundsack] in Fun Home—I’m still thinking about her. When she sang “Ring of Keys,” she had true, profound discovery. The kind that you spend your whole career trying to get out of actors. Just that constant note of, ‘Don’t forget you are experiencing this for the first time. This is transformative.’
KIMBERLY SENIOR | You’re talking about these holy grail moments of performance. Tell me about your process as a director.
LILI-ANNE | I think I am just a guide in the room, because what happens in the room is magical. And what goes into the room, of course, affects what comes out of the room. I’m as painstakingly particular as I’m allowed to be about what goes into the room and the spirit of the thing. Actors need to be given everything they need. It’s not about creature comforts, although coffee and a snack are nice, too. It’s really about being supported and feeling safe.
We spent a bunch of time about a decade ago talking about “safe space,” and I feel like
we didn’t get at it. That conversation was rather surface because, of course, people with money who run things want to problem solve. They’re just like, “What is this? Is there a Band-Aid available? Great. Here it is,” instead of having the deep conversation of what safety is and how to provide it. So I spend a lot of time trying to put people together who will make magic together. It’s sort of chemistry; these molecules have to bond in certain ways. And trying to make the room safe, make everything conducive to the magic happening.
KIMBERLY | So the director’s job isn’t just telling the story?
LILI-ANNE | That’s tech to me. I love tech, I can be very technical, but I do not lay claim on that magic. It is not mine. It’s greater than me. It’s always going to be greater than me. I am just trying to get out of my own way and help everybody else get out of their own way. I honestly think if you said, “Okay, if your job came down to one job, what is it?” I would say: helping people get out of their own way.
Lili-Anne Brown PHOTO JOE MAZZA
KIMBERLY | I’m having an image of a party being thrown. You’re not even throwing the party—the director isn’t throwing the party—but you’re a guest who maybe has access to bring a few more things than everybody else. “Maybe there’s a better table. We want the round table. That lighting doesn’t work.” What I love about what you’re saying is it doesn’t feel like this is Lili-Anne’s party; you’re also a guest and you’re going to experience the joy of being a guest at the party too.
LILI-ANNE | I really do.
KIMBERLY | With a little bit more concierge effort.
LILI-ANNE | Yes, one of those really good concierges that has that special key. It’s like the Wes Anderson movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel. There’s a special level of concierges that actually exists in the world that I didn’t know about until I saw that movie. I would like to be that kind of elite service provider.
KIMBERLY | You use the words “safe” and “safe space.” What do those words mean to you? Those are words that get thrown around a lot, always with positive intent, but
I think there’s a really different definition for everyone.
LILI-ANNE | Exactly. That’s why I was saying that conversation that started 10 years ago hasn’t really been mined. I never really saw it being hit in the way that I wanted it to because the work is not one-size-fits-all. You know that’s one of the bees in my bonnet about the American theatre—and many other things. It’s not one-size-fits-all, and I really take that super seriously in the room. It is a hard job figuring out how to make a safe environment for 20 different people in potentially 20 different ways. That’s the work; that’s the really hard work. For me, “safe” is there are no impediments to doing the work. For an actor, that work is being vulnerable. Trying and failing every day and trying again, and trying to go deeper and revealing themselves and being willing to look a fool and just bare themselves. It is such raw work, and they have to be so brave.
KIMBERLY | In this, a safe space is one where all impediments are removed from you doing your job. Which can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, right?
LILI-ANNE | So many things. It could be anything.
“I spend a lot of time trying to put people together who will make magic together. It’s sort of chemistry; these molecules have to bond in certain ways.”
Robert Cornelius + J. Nicole Brooks in Lottery Day at Goodman Theatre, directed by Lili-Anne Brown
PHOTO LIZ LAUREN
KIMBERLY | An impediment could be a physical obstacle, an emotional obstacle, it could be financial. It could be all these things. So you’re there in your concierge/ party mode and you’re like, oh, this feels like an impediment. I’ve gotten to observe you in space with people, and what you’re great at is asking, “Is this in your way? What would happen if I just moved this for you?” That is where the true magic happens. I think lots of people can concierge. I think a lot of people can do those tasks. But the listening and insight and intuition that you possess help you shape these spaces so that they’re free of impediments.
LILI-ANNE | Thank you. But let’s make no mistake. It’s not like I’m totally egoless. I sort of get off on doing it well, because it feels so good to be in a space like that. I enjoy it, and I enjoy that actors, technicians, designers feel comfortable, too.
KIMBERLY | Can you think of an example of where you feel like you’ve been able to do this well?
LILI-ANNE | Well, my favorite thing I’ve ever made—one of my favorite stories is how that cast checked me one day and I learned a ton.
KIMBERLY | Tell this story.
LILI-ANNE | This is formative for me. My favorite thing I’ve ever made is Lottery Day, for a bunch of reasons. [Brown directed a workshop of Lottery Day by Ike Holter at Goodman Theatre’s New Stages Festival in 2017 and the world premiere at the theatre in 2019.] It was like a theatrical equivalent of Avengers: Endgame. Nothing else exists like it; it is the final play of a seven-play saga that takes characters from each of the previous six plays and puts them all in one play. We actually used the actors that had been in those plays. So it wasn’t just the characters, it was also the actors that originated the characters.
KIMBERLY | How many of those other plays leading up to this big finale were you involved with?
LILI-ANNE | I had only been involved in one of the other plays and I didn’t premiere it.
KIMBERLY | That’s cool, though. So many times we hear stories where everyone’s like, “I was with it from before Ike was born, I was already putting the idea in his head.”
LILI-ANNE | What’s great is how we do community here in Chicago. I feel like I was part of the world from the first play because Ike and I are friends and mutual admirers; I was seeing his work, and he was seeing my work. I saw all the plays and had a lot to say about them, and we would talk about them and think about them.
The plays really respect and love Chicago, and there’s an athleticism and authenticity of the language and how people speak to each other while also being heightened language. Ike is often compared to August
Lottery Day at Goodman Theatre, directed by Lili-Anne Brown
PHOTO LIZ LAUREN
Wilson, which is generally lazy. For me, the only reason for any comparison is that both write authentically the way people talk, but are presenting it in a way that is heightened. That hat trick is so special. It’s one of the many reasons I love his work.
The most special thing about Lottery Day was that the community was so excited about it. When do you get that—an entire theatre community in a big city like Chicago all rooting for one little play? That started in 2017 when we were in workshop. I think we were the first New Stages show to ever sell out in a matter of hours. I think Goodman was like, “What’s going on here?” But the whole thing was that we were the Bad News Bears. We were considered the scraggly storefront kids who would never ever be setting foot in the Goodman. Then here we were, going to set foot in the Goodman—
KIMBERLY | A lot of feet.
LILI-ANNE | When we were in New Stages, it felt like incredibly high stakes, and I think Ike felt that too. We had all these conversations where we were like, “We are going to kill this. It’s going to be amazing. This staged reading in this festival is going to be the biggest, best, awesomest workshop that they’ve ever seen because we are determined to get produced.” It was as if we thought there was something that we personally could do, right? If we ran real fast, we could win somehow and get a production. That’s really how we were approaching it, with just insane stakes on it. And at one point that really got to me.
The wonderful Tanya Palmer—it’s just very funny to even say it was Tanya Palmer in this story because we both know how lovely Tanya Palmer is, right? [Palmer was Goodman’s Producer and Director of New Play Development at the time, in which capacity she coordinated the annual New Stages Festival ] She’s the best, most supportive—
KIMBERLY | No bigger champion of new plays and artists.
LILI-ANNE | That workshop process, more than any process I have ever been in—and this is saying a lot because my room tends to be a party—but that room was literally a party. Every day we would throw a party and see where the chips fell, and that helped Ike write this party in the play. So it was real rowdy, and we were hyper aware of where we were and who we were in this place. And I have to say, we were a room full of Black and Brown people. One day we’re doing something, and Tanya comes in to observe, unannounced. She just wandered through. I was like, “Oh God, the literary manager is here. All right, everybody, let’s go back to one and then we’re going to run this again.”
And the cast was like, “We’re going to do it eventually.” But in their own time and while being loud and still telling jokes and doing whatever the hell they were doing. I immediately thought, “Oh God, she’s going to think that I don’t have control of the room.” I got real in my head about it. And later, when she left and we were done with our work, I said, “So you guys, when these Goodman people come in here—”
KIMBERLY | We’ve got to behave.
Duain Richmond + company in Fela! at Olney Theater Center, directed by Lili-Anne Brown PHOTO TERESA CASTRACANE
LILI-ANNE | “I need you guys to listen to me. I’m going to get replaced by some other director if they think I can’t run my room.” I genuinely thought, this play will maybe get produced, but they won’t let me direct it.
And of course it’s sort of an unstated thing—especially because of who was on the staff at that time—I might be saying “these Goodman people,” but it’s also saying, “these white people.” So I said that, and God bless them, it was like a record scratch moment. They just looked at me, like, she said what? And they said, “Oh no, no. First of all, you are the one that told us that we are not doing that. You created this culture. You created this room. You told us to be free. You made it safe for us. You did this. And now we’re being ourselves and having the time of our lives and what we’re not about to do...” They kind of were like, “How dare you say that, Lil, we are very disappointed.” And I was like, “Holy shit, you are so right.”
KIMBERLY | I love that they were holding a mirror up to you; they were saying to you, “Be more you.” You had created such an amazing thing that the cast was able to uphold your values even in a moment where you crumbled a little. This is what we do, and this is who we are.
That story is very foundational about you. Knowing you, I see how a lot tracks back to that minute. This is why I think you’re one of the greatest minds of the American theatre. From experiences like this, you’re like, “I know how to fix things. I’m not going to stand on the sidelines and point. I’m not going to write essays. I’m barely going to complain, except maybe after a couple of cocktails with close friends. But what I’m going to do is model this behavior.”
LILI-ANNE | It was super formative, and also one of my greatest success stories. I created something where the actors felt so comfortable that they could say to me, the director, you’re fucking up, in a way that was perfect and loving. I think about that moment and I’m so grateful because I consider it an incredible success to create a culture that does that.
KIMBERLY | It’s very easy for us to use words like “party,” and “concierge,” and “creating culture,” and “empowering people,” and “removing impediments.” All of which are true and all of which are the things that you do. But the people we’re working with, that we love and are our collaborators, have been held down, disenfranchised, and disempowered, and their predominantly Black and Brown bodies have not been seen
and acknowledged. So there’s some work to do in there.
I don’t want someone to read this and be, “Okay, cool. What I have to do is throw a party and act how I want to act.” I want to ask you about the challenges of doing the work and the creation of culture that you’re doing, and what happens if and when it backfires?
LILI-ANNE | If and when it backfires. First of all, it’s heartbreaking. I feel like I have a lot of what I would count as personal successes and not a lot of personal failures. But I do have them, and they haunt me because I try to learn and sometimes there’s not anything to learn. Sometimes you can’t remove impediments from people because sometimes they’re internal and I can’t remove that. I can sure try. And that can be heartbreaking, especially if there’s not any awareness.
Also, as a director, you have to be ready to fall on your sword, to take the blame, because you might be blamed for not being able to remove somebody’s personal impediment. Because they’re looking around like, “Everybody else is having a great time, why am I not? You’re not taking care of me.” That has absolutely happened.
Michael A. Shepperd, Robert Cornelius + Brian D. Coats in The Acting Company’s national tour of August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, directed by Lili-Anne Brown PHOTO LORE PHOTOGRAPHY VENTURA
KIMBERLY | On the list of what makes you a great leader is your ability to also be vulnerable and admit that you’re a human in space. I think women of our generation, in particular Brown and Black women, we were told, “Don’t show a thing.” “Be a rock.” “Don’t let them see a crack.” “Don’t let them see you sweat.” I feel like some of your superpower lies in what you’ve been talking about. This vulnerability, and ability to take stuff on or to know you can’t take this on, is part of the humanity and the redefining of leadership that I think you do really well.
LILI-ANNE | I want to be down on the ground with the actors.
KIMBERLY | Well, you’re an actor.
LILI-ANNE | I’m always telling them, “I’m in here with you.” But they don’t necessarily feel that way. I really used to be like, “I’m down here in the mud with you,” and they believed it. The more my career goes along, the older I get, the further away—
KIMBERLY | Let’s also admit, the fancier you get.
LILI-ANNE | Right, fancy. Whatever that is.
KIMBERLY | When you’re making plays for $12 with 10 clip lights above a Mexican restaurant, you can roll on the ground with the people.
LILI-ANNE | Right. And they feel that because they see you painting the set.
I still feel like a storefront director. I don’t know how to feel any differently. I’m just, “Yeah, we’re all going to go have some beers and paint the set.” And everybody’s looking at me like, “What are you talking about?”
KIMBERLY | You said it so perfectly; you’re still in the storefront.
LILI-ANNE | I am. I will never not be. I just am always going to be like, “Well, you know what? Can we just take a PVC pipe and paint it up and then that can do it?”
KIMBERLY | “I’ve got some tinfoil in my trunk, and I think it will do the job.”
LILI-ANNE | I’m very blessed. I also think I worked hard for it, and, lucky me, I accidentally branded myself well. My trials and tribulations became my strongest suit because I could not get hired as a director 20 years ago, especially as a Black girl who
wanted to direct musicals. Everybody was like, “Huh, no, what are you talking about?”
Because of that, I had to self-produce all my first work as a director in Chicago. I had been here as an actor the whole time, but as a director—for the first few years I just self-produced. If I’m producing it and I’m programming it, I’m going to do all my bucket-list stuff that has been sitting in my heart for years. I wasn’t thinking about branding. I was just thinking, “God, I really want to do Dessa Rose. I want this story to be told. I really want to do Marie Christine or See What I Wanna See. How come Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson has never been seen in Chicago? I have to do Passing Strange.” I was just bursting, and inadvertently, that became my brand. People were like, “Wow, we have a strong sense of what she does.”
By the time I was entering the LORT world, the brand was really, really strong because all I had done previously was artsy musicals and new work like Lottery Day and Ike Holter’s Wolf at the End of the Block, and Kristiana Colón’s Tilikum. And so people had a really strong sense of what I was into, but all of that was born of nobody letting me do Mamma Mia!
The Nacirema Society at Goodman Theatre, directed by Lili-Anne Brown
PHOTO LIZ LAUREN
KIMBERLY | I wouldn’t mind seeing your Mamma Mia!, but...
LILI-ANNE | When you’re like, “Will anyone let me direct anything?” “What are you doing? Can I do it?” and the answer being “no” for years and years and years, that created something wonderful eventually. But thank God I didn’t give up, because that’s another thing that sometimes happens.
KIMBERLY | Well, we are all very lucky.
LILI-ANNE | There was no way, there was no way I was giving up. I had just tried for too long. When you’re called to do a thing in the way that I know we both feel called, there is no alternative.
KIMBERLY | Let’s talk a bit more about Chicago. You used the word community a lot when you were talking about the Lottery Day story. I’d love to start with your definition of community, or what you feel community is, and how much of that comes from your lifelong experience in Chicago.
LILI-ANNE | As [Chicago historian] Dilla says, “Everything dope about America
comes from Chicago.” I’m from the South Side, so I was born into a strong community. I’ve always felt sorry for anyone that didn’t come from some sort of formative big community.
I think we’re getting separated from some of our humanity as communities dilute and dissipate in this modern, isolated world. Theatre is one of the most communal things that humans do. Period. There’s eating together and theatre. I’m like, these are the top two, you guys—things that you can do together that are spiritual and necessary and there’s an agreement. That’s how I feel about theatre.
When people come to Chicago for a show, I always feel really proud when they start talking to me about this community. “You just support each other and everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows what’s going on. It’s so close-knit, and it feels less competitive and more supportive.” I really believe all of those things. That is what I come from. I think there have been a couple Golden Ages of Chicago theatre. I wish we had names for these eras.
“There was no way I was giving up. I had just tried for too long. When you’re called to do a thing in the waythat I know we both feel called, there is no alternative.”
Shantel Cribbs, Brittany Mack + company in The Color Purple at Goodman Theatre, directed by Lili-Anne Brown PHOTO BRETT BEINER PHOTOGRAPHY
KIMBERLY | Like they do for generations.
LILI-ANNE | Whatever era is 1990 to 2020, that 30-year period for me was distinct in Chicago theatre, especially in storefront. There was the House and the Hypocrites.
KIMBERLY SENIOR | Bailiwick Chicago.
LILI-ANNE | Jackalope came to be. My theatre company, Bailiwick Chicago, came and went. A lot of theatre companies came and went. We had Oracle, we had the changeover and then death of ATC [American Theatre Company]. I could go on, right?
KIMBERLY | I moved to Chicago in ’95, and thought, “There’s 150 theatre companies here at any given time.” How many companies have I seen come and go, and now there are new ones that I’m so psyched about. Even with the ever-changing nature of the landscape, the soil is fertile.
LILI-ANNE | I think of that era as being so influential. Martha [Lavey, of Steppenwolf],
Bob [Falls, of Goodman Theatre], Barbara [Gaines, of Chicago Shakespeare Theater]. Those were the titans I was looking at. And then I think about the small companies that were coming up. These kids are in a fucking house all living together on Honore with this stage in the backyard that is maybe going to fall down at any given moment. Which is also part of how I met Ike Holter. I remember that the first time I went to the Inconvenience [a community of interdisciplinary artists, where Holter is a member], I left 10 minutes later because I was like, “Who are these kids?”
KIMBERLY | They’re younger than we are.
LILI-ANNE | I’m not cool. I felt really weird and out of place, and he kept inviting me. He didn’t care that I just was a dork. This is what I’m talking about with community. I had come in as a musical theatre person, and I will say the community can be extremely segregated—but it’s not on purpose. Everybody thinks their world is the world because theatre is your life.
If you’re doing musicals, first of all, you spend most of your life commuting. At least in my era as an actor, all the large-scale musical theatre was out in the suburbs, which is why those of us at Bailiwick Chicago and these other companies were trying to bring musical theatre to the city. We thought it was crazy that everything was Mamma Mia! or Oliver! We were like, “But I want to see some dark thing that Michael John LaChiusa wrote.” There were dozens of musicals that had never been to Chicago. It was as if, if there wasn’t a Broadway tour, they weren’t worth doing.
This could be where we start segueing into talking about commercial theatre versus non, because I’ve been thinking about and talking about that a lot lately. I had to check in yesterday with the Walder Foundation, it was the one-year mark of my award.
KIMBERLY | You were an inaugural recipient of the Walder Foundation’s Platform Awards, a three-year grant that provides unrestricted support for performing
Rashada Dawan with Emma Sipora Tyler + Tyler Symone in Caroline, or Change at Firebrand Theatre, directed by Lili-Anne Brown PHOTO MARISA KM
artists working across disciplines in Chicago. I love that the money is distributed over a period of time, because it acknowledges the burden of the hustle. It’s a bridge so that you can be the artist that you are without biting your fingernails each month to make sure ends meet.
LILI-ANNE | The Foundation keeps asking me, “What resources can we provide?” And I keep responding, “I want you to introduce me to the money people.”
This is something that I’ve been asking everywhere. It’s my new question everywhere I go. “Can I meet the money people?” Because especially in Chicago, I don’t understand why we are following a format given to us from another city, from New York, when we should be figuring it out for ourselves and doing our own thing.
There are all these big theatres where shows come in—they are not generated here—and the producers spend all this money and the money leaves Chicago. We don’t get the money. This is taking up all of our real estate downtown. We don’t own most of those venues. Our actors aren’t in those shows, for the most part. All of the talent is imported. The shows are imported. And then the money is exported. How is this for us? What do we get?
KIMBERLY | I think you’re answering the question I was about to have, which is, why aren’t we making our own commercial theatre that’s nurturing and feeding our community here?
LILI-ANNE | It frustrates me that people keep writing think pieces about, “Is the theatre dying?” Nobody’s actually asking the artists what’s wrong and how to fix it. Because what is wrong with the American theatre right now is that the artists have taken a far back seat. We’re in the trunk. We don’t lead the art anymore, unfortunately.
KIMBERLY | That leads me to, what do you want to dream into being?
LILI-ANNE | I have been to several theatre shops, and some of those shops are on the South Side of Chicago, but few Black people work in those shops. The people in the community that the shop is in don’t work in the shop. I think these people don’t know that these are jobs—they have never heard of a scenic charge; they’ve never heard of IATSE. That bothers me, particularly because I know people who have certifications in welding or work in construction. Can you imagine somebody pouring concrete day to day, how it would change their world if they were building a set? How would it affect them, how would it open up their world?
To create some sort of pipeline, to expose people to those jobs, is something that I want very much.
I also want to create commercial pipelines, because “commercial” should not be a dirty word. The way things are set up now, it kind of is. As we’re dealing with latestage capitalism and a rising oligarchy, commercialism does feel dirty. But it doesn’t have to be.
I’ve had conversations where board members have asked, “Why are you doing it that way?” And I’ve replied, “Because that’s best practices for making a play.” Sometimes it makes them uptight because it’s a thing they don’t know about, as opposed to allowing themselves to be led through the world and saying, “Tell us what you need and let us meet you in the middle and work out how we can facilitate that.” It’s sort of like when someone gives you a present and it’s something you didn’t ask for and don’t want. But if you don’t like it, suddenly you’re an ingrate.
KIMBERLY | What you’re saying is, if we’re transparent, if we just turn on the lights a little bit, everybody would be functioning better. The stumbling blindness and the walls we’ve built are the impediments—back to that—to all of us thriving. This is working for you at an artistic level, at an organizational level, at a dreaming level. You’re like, “Let’s just turn the lights on, y’all.”
LILI-ANNE | Transparency on all levels would do so much for us; I really think it is the answer. And I understand that you can’t do everything democratically. That is not what I’m suggesting.
KIMBERLY | That’s not what you’re saying.
LILI-ANNE | I’m suggesting transparency, and I am suggesting that things be artistcentered. Not optics, because these days everything is optics and most of what we see is not what’s really happening. Which is also how a lot of the kids are getting miseducated, which is a huge problem right now—especially for the kids that came into this industry in the midst of and in the wake of a pandemic, to really not understand how the sausage is made. If the people who are paying for the sausage don’t know how the sausage is made and the people who are eating the sausage don’t know how the sausage is made, and half of the people in the factory making the sausage only know about the one lever they pull, we’ve got a real problem.
KIMBERLY | That’s how power has worked. If I leave you all in the dark in your little silos, you can’t join together and try to
overtake me. And you’re like, why would I be threatened by all these amazing people that are working together to make this thing? You’re not saying, “Oh, let’s be democratic all the time.” You’re saying, “I’m going to make the decision. I just want to tell you why I made it, and I want you to know that you were thought of and considered.”
LILI-ANNE | To go back to the room—I spend a lot of time in my rooms asking everybody else what they want to do and what they need. Because guess what? I’m not in the play. I say that a lot. “You’re in the play, so you tell me what you need to do. Do we need to run it again? Do you have questions? Do you want to sit down? Do y’all want to go home for day and work on your lines?” We don’t have to be in here just because we have the space and have the hours.
I radically believe in asking people, “What actually is it that you need so that you can do your job?” Because I did mine. Now we’re in the room, this is just fun for me. I’m just helping people get out of their own way, until we get to tech, and I have to work real hard again.
KIMBERLY | I’m so glad we’re friends. Y’all reading this article, just be jealous. It’s actually as great as it sounds to be Lili-Anne Brown’s friend. But also she likes people, so she’ll probably be your friend.
LILI-ANNE | That’s true. But we do have fun, and it’s not that hard. You don’t have to make it hard. Whatever it is that you believe in—God, a higher power—comes into the room. And the more you can work with that, give it up to that, be in that flow, the more you win it. Because we all do that, right? If we are in that space and then we invite the audience to be in that space with us, we’re all connected. We’re all in the midst of something greater than us that holds us all together. And that’s the goal. That’s the goal of theatre.
Kimberly Senior is a freelance director, educator, mentor, mother, and advocate. She is the author of What Would a Person Do? Thoughts on Directing and Living.
Marshall Pailet’s Private Jones—a new musical, written and directed by Pailet—tells the true story of a deaf Welsh sniper in World War I and is performed in three languages: spoken English as well as some American Sign Language and British Sign Language. Developed and first staged at Goodspeed Musicals in association with the Arlington-based Signature Theatre, Private Jones had its world premiere at Signature in 2024 and was honored with four 2025 Helen Hayes Awards, including the Charles MacArthur Award for outstanding new play or musical. The company, consisting of hearing, deaf, and hard-ofhearing artists, was led by Pailet; he was, in turn, working at every moment alongside Director of Artistic Sign Language (DASL) Alexandria Wailes, a multi-hyphenate artist who has worked on stage, television, and films as a member of creative teams and as a performer.
Johnny Link, Amelia Hensley, Leanne Antonio, George Psomas + Dickie Drew Hearts in Private Jones at Signature Theatre, written + directed by Marshall Pailet with Alexandria Wailes as Director of Artistic Sign Language
PHOTO DANIEL RADER
Alexandria Wailes rehearses a silent death scene. On stage, a deaf soldier cradles his hearing friend who has been shot in the throat.
Drowning in his blood, the hearing soldier must use sign to communicate; hands full trying to stop the bleeding, the deaf soldier must use speech, though the audience hears nothing. But the most compelling thing on the stage is Alexandria: she stands center sculpting the language— range of motion, pace, visibility—and as she does, she somehow inhabits the characters, her face becomes paler, the movement of her hands affected by a weakening breath. Instinctively, the actors breathe with her as does the rest of the room—the usual clattering fingers at tech tables go still. As her hands sweep and flurry, she repeats a sign I don’t recognize, a direction to the actors—“effortless,” an interpreter whispers in my ear. Effortless, I think: it’s amazing how effortless she is for someone whose life has been anything but.
The actors go again from the top—one soldier is struck in the neck, the other cradles him, the two perform a ballet of hands until one pair of hands goes still. Nobody moves. Except Alexandria who turns to me, smirking. Her right hand makes a sign, its literal translation: “that.”
Both actors go on to score Helen Hayes nominations for their performances, as does the production and a vast majority of the creative and design team. But not Alexandria.
There’s no category for what she does.
“A DASL is a Director of Artistic Sign Language,” Alexandria explains, “and I want to emphasize Artistic Sign Language, D-A-S-L.”
I’m Zooming with Alexandria months after the premiere of our musical, Private Jones. I’m far enough along in ASL to sign my questions, but not far enough along to understand the nuances of her answers. Two interpreters sit patiently in adjoining Zoom
“A DASL is a Director of Artistic Sign Language... and I want to emphasize Artistic.”
ALEXANDRIA WAILES
boxes—Lynnette interprets my occasional English into ASL, and Justine interprets Alexandria’s ASL into English. Alexandria is a sensational orator, she speaks in long, poetic monologues that often end in calls to action. Today is no exception. She’s cooking, and Justine is cooking right alongside her. Interpreting is exhausting work; if Justine’s tired, she doesn’t show it.
“ASL, American Sign Language, is a language of its own, period. So we’ll start with that. It has its own grammar; it has its own syntax. English is its own language. It has its own grammar. It has its own syntax. And so when you’re looking at two separate languages and you have signs that are being included or incorporated into a production, that is where a DASL comes into play. You consider how signs and sign language are relevant throughout the scripts to the characters, how the characters relate with each other, how that interplays with societal expectations, class, education. So that’s why I call it Artistic as opposed to American Sign Language:
Alexandria Wailes in rehearsal for Private Jones at Signature Theatre
PHOTO CHRISTOPHER MUELLER
because it’s the art of communication, it is the art of language.”
The first job of the DASL is translation, such that the burden of translation isn’t placed on the actor. Most scripts written by hearing writers featuring signing characters (including mine) are written fully in English. You know, like:
GOMER (signed)
I’m more than you think I am, Miss. And I’ll prove it.
But that sentiment could be signed a thousand ways. You could use the internet to translate word for word, but to call that inauthentic would be a vast understatement.
“When I’m working, I think about what period is the story taking place in? Are the deaf characters language deprived? Are they college educated? There are so many different variables of possibilities to just, ‘Oh, I’m going to learn some signs from a book.’
You completely strip the complexities of that humanness, that experience that comes with the language and the culture on an individual level for every single different signer.”
“Who are the characters, specifically?” I contribute. Hoping to seem as cool and smart as she is.
“Exactly! Who are the characters?” she echoes, making me feel cool and smart. I wonder in that moment how much cumulative time she’s spent making the hearing feel comfortable. “What are the complexities of the humans,” she continues, “the humanness in each of these people in the play? And do they become deaf later in their life when they’re a teenager or even later when they’re 50 years old?”
“Or maybe they became deaf when they were one.”
Alexandria wasn’t supposed to live. She contracted pneumococcal meningitis at 13
months old; a consistent high fever and a cocktail of medication and antibiotics that seemed to be failing had her doctors preparing for the worst. Miraculously, the fever passed, but as the sickness left her body it took her hearing with it.
My body tenses reflexively as I receive the story—Alexandria doesn’t know this, but my 13-month-old is toddling just out of the frame, repeatedly shouting her first word. It’s “yay.”
For years, doctors doubted Alexandria’s deafness. They said she was pretending, that she was actually hearing, that she was just seeking attention—besides, she seemed like she could listen. But her mother had doubts. “She realized that my instincts to survive forced me to pick up on lip-reading. And so I was able to catch a lot. Lip-reading is not something that is natural or common, and so it’s really interesting that that survival instinct kicked in that way.” To this day, she lip-reads almost flawlessly—an adaptation technique
Marshall Pailet (right) + ASL interpreter Krystin Balzarini in rehearsal for Private Jones at Signature Theatre PHOTO CHRISTOPHER MUELLER
D. Woods, Alexandria Wailes + Tendayi Kuumba in for colored girls... on Broadway, directed + choreographed by Camille A. Brown PHOTO MARC
J. FRANKLIN
that activates whenever she, for example, orders at a restaurant.
When she was three years old, her parents were given confirmation of what they’d long suspected: their daughter was deaf. But what so much of society sees as disability, this doctor saw as opportunity: “Alexandria,” the doctor said on the day of diagnosis, “don’t turn around. Tell me what’s on the wall behind you.” Without hesitating Alexandria replied, “It’s a clown. It’s a picture of a clown.” Her mom turned, shocked to find her daughter was right. “I think deaf people widen their periphery,” Alexandria reflects decades later. “I have a better sense of what’s in my peripheral vision and am able to catch more information that hearing people may not be as quick to pick up on.”
And so the hearing parents with a deaf daughter embarked upon the mission of making her a Deaf daughter (“deaf” refers to biology, “Deaf” to culture). They placed her in a Deaf school, and on her first day she learned 60 different words in sign
language, so starved was she for a means of expression. Her parents were committed; they made flashcards, they learned sign, they signed as a family. They leaned in. “I was fortunate that I had parents who worked through whatever it was they might’ve had any hesitation about. They wanted to uplift this little child, me, to learn how to communicate. So…I’m lucky. Yeah.” But there was one more recommendation from doctors, something that might help with her motor skills: “Put her in dance.”
Alexandria is signing autographs outside the Booth stage door. It’s 2022, and she’s just finished performing in a matinee of for colored girls… An earnest young fan signs with Alexandria. New to ASL, the fan fingerspells the majority of the conversation, letter by letter, anxiety in her eyes and effort in her fingers. Alexandria is patient, kind, but eventually pulls out her phone, the notes app already open, and hands it to the young fan who starts typing, relieved. I squint from the
distance to make out the words she types, but luckily the font is big: it says, “You were so present.”
“When I work as a performer, I try to bring intentionality to my body language, whether I’m dancing, or still, or signing. It’s all those little spaces between the words, where nothing seems to be happening—that, to me, is really compelling.” Alexandria points to a portrait of Martha Graham behind her, “There’s this famous Graham quote, ‘The body never lies.’ I’m ever mindful of that, because we want to tell a story with intentionality, with a layer of mindfulness of those little moments that convey truth, and to be okay with the messiness of being human.”
As I watch Alexandria speak, I can’t help but see this intentionality in practice, and I recall her words to me in our very first meeting: “ASL is NOT how we express language, it IS our language.” A visual culture, where each member has a visual identity.
Deaf community members have two names: one that’s spelled and one that’s signed—or the “name sign.” This name sign is traditionally given by another Deaf person, and it’s usually a MOMENT. A gift. Hearing people can receive them too, but you have to earn that shit. Alexandria gave me mine four years into our collaboration, in front of our full company, on opening night. Thumb, index and middle finger outstretched—the sign for “three”—then a touch of the thumb then middle finger to the solar plexus, because I “lead with heart.” My legs shook as I received it, so meaningful was the gesture, for so long had I wanted it. Alexandria’s name sign is the dominant hand in a thumbs up (kind of the letter A) sitting upon a flat palm, then the dominant hand raises and shimmies (like the sign for “spirit”). She received it in a NOT MOMENT, in a high school around-the-circle meet-andgreet where she admitted she was never given one. The high schoolers brainstormed and came up with what has become her moniker, then she ran it by her Deaf friends who said, “Yeah, that works.” But mention her to any working Deaf creative and they have a different name for her: the dominant hand in the shape of a “Q” touching shoulder to hip in the shape of a sash.
“I try to bring intentionality to my body language, whether I’m dancing, or still, or signing. It’s all those little spaces between the words, where nothing seems to be happening—that, to me, is really compelling.”
ALEXANDRIA WAILES
It means “the queen.”
Alexandria didn’t get bit by the acting bug until after she graduated with a BFA in modern dance. “I didn’t see or feel enough representation of actors, actresses when I was growing up,” she explains, “It was like, who is deaf? Who looks like me? Who have I seen in terms of people from my community out there just in the wide world? I know one, maybe two. I was like, ‘Is this even a possibility?’”
But after falling into a series of mixedlanguage productions, she started realizing how she could use her dance training background, and everything she’d learned and experienced up to that point, to tell stories in a different way: “From those experiences of working in spaces where both languages are operative, where you have the support from the creative team, where you have a DASL involved—in those spaces of shared language, you find how ideas can travel across language. So then I started going, oh…this is possible.”
In the summer of 2002, Alexandria went to Deaf West’s Summer Intensive program. There she was fully immersed in a community of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing actors, dancers, and creatives supported by
a staff of hearing and Deaf creative talent, many of whom were former National Theatre of the Deaf members. “I realized then the importance of legacy,” she reminisces, “the importance of what we’re doing to carry on the tradition.” From there she was cast in Deaf West’s groundbreaking production of Big River, which made its way to Broadway, leading to a series of breakthrough roles on stage and screen, though not enough to make a consistent living. She wanted to keep learning, to remain in creative spaces, to go back to school, but she kept bumping against the wall of access: “Just to get through a class, the logistics of access is an extra burden, an extra layer of work that people don’t think about. Interpreters have a cost.”
“But then there’s a shift in my thinking,” she continues. “What if I’m hired to work on a set and learn that way? If I use those experiences as a masterclass for myself?” This shift would lead to an avalanche of opportunity; over the next decade and a half she would direct, choreograph, and do DASL work on Broadway, Off-Broadway, TV, and film, including the Oscar-winning CODA. She is everywhere, working on everything.
Russell Harvard, Alexandria Wailes + Troy Kotsur in a Deaf West/Pasadena Playhouse co-production of Our Town PHOTO JENNY GRAHAM
Alexandria pulls me into the green room. She’s agitated about something and needs my help. It’s week one of Private Jones, and while the music director teaches the score to the singing cast, Alexandria works with others on translation. Today she’s with Amelia, a magnetic storyteller and consummate prankster who likes teaching me dirty signs against my knowledge. At the moment they’re translating a line that uses the word “hear” both literally and metaphorically, and it’s throwing them for a loop. “It takes too much time to translate literally, so we need to find the meaning beneath the meaning,” Alexandria says. After a couple minutes of defensive sputtering, I admit that I don’t actually know—I just like the way it sounds. Head hung low, I vow to write something better. But Alexandria stops me: “I’m not asking you to re-write it, I’m asking you how it feels to hear it?”
Speech is an inherently oral medium, there’s meaning but also oral flair that is uncapturable in visual analog. In the same
way, masterful ASL has visual flair. It has metaphor and callback that is uncapturable in speech. “There are different ways to have the language live in the body, exist in the body,” Alexandria says on our Zoom. “And having a DASL as a part of that creative team can really reinforce the actors’ and the artists’ capability to express complex thought. How do you protect the story? And how do you protect the imagery of the production as a whole?”
In our rehearsal room, the DASL is more than just a specialist, it is a co-equal branch of government with choreography and music direction. The DASL must understand and collaborate on every aspect of production, including and especially music. As Misha Shields choreographs, Alexandria bobs and weaves along with the rhythms of the dancers’ bodies and the rhythm of the bass notes pulsing through the floor. The feeling of the music informs the mood informs the characters informs the sign choices. Everything is connected.
And then there’s diction. Just as a vocal coach might teach singers how to use their diaphragm to breathe properly, how to make sure their tone and consonants are both beautiful and clear, Alexandria shapes the visual language—can the audience see your hands? Can the audience see your face, which contains so much emotional information? Is there clarity? Is there poetry? And on top of that, there’s endless dramaturgy.
“There has to be a level of intentionality. Why are we incorporating sign language here? How do we be more mindful about how these two characters are communicating with each other?” she asks. In this particular production, the actors are utilizing both ASL and British Sign Language (BSL). ASL is used when communicating directly with the audience, and BSL when the Welsh characters are communicating with each other. At one point, I argue the whole show should be in ASL—it’s for an American audience after all. Alexandria fights for authenticity. “I have not forgotten this is for a stage production, that this is for an
Private Jones at Signature Theatre, written + directed by Marshall Pailet with Alexandria Wailes as Director of Artistic Sign Language
PHOTO DANIEL RADER
audience,” she says. “But how do we tell this story that gives a deeper level of integrity of authenticity and care that the audience can hopefully appreciate? And appreciate what does it all mean to have multiple languages on a stage, what does it mean to have different cultures and different ways of existing in a shared space in this world?”
On the first day of rehearsal, Alexandria leads a best practices workshop. She is warm but firm, and though she’s deeply present, you can tell she’s done this many times before. She teaches us: 1) The best way to communicate with a signing colleague is to learn some sign language, or some signs at least. 2) When using an interpreter to speak with Deaf folks, don’t talk through the interpreter (e.g.: “Can you tell her to move over there”); rather, look and interact with the person you’re talking to. Which, you know, seems like common courtesy. 3) Stand where you can be seen; try not to stand in front
of a light source which will throw you into silhouette. And 4) In a mixed-language room, one person speaks at a time. The interpreters can’t interpret all of these conversations happening at once, so try to be intentional.
As Alexandria educates, I look around the room of artists. Everyone has been asked to introduce themselves in ASL, and those who are new to mixed English/ASL rooms hide nerves, their hands under the tables practice letters and signs. Everyone wants to get it right. Everyone wants to be respectful.
One week later, things have loosened up, as they always do. The room is boisterous, people crack jokes in both languages. The beginner signers have become advancedbeginner signers. It happens without trying, through osmosis. Three interpreters work at all times; they stand around the room, usually one behind the creative table, one in the corner, and one next to the actors between runs of scenes.
It should be noted that the interpreters and DASL perform two completely separate functions. “A sign language interpreter is already doing an astounding level of work. They are facilitators of communication, between languages, between these people in a space. That’s their role, that’s their job, but it’s not their job to, and it should not be expected of them, to translate a script or to translate a piece of work for the creative side of a production.” Interpreters take no formal breaks, they’re on duty during 5s and 10s and lunch, so they rotate, relieving each other for small stretches throughout the eight-hour work day. They assume the physical mannerisms and pace of whoever they’re interpreting—calm and thoughtful for Johnny, quick and sassy for Dickie, direct yet mischievous for Alex. It’s hard work, but interpretation is more than just language, and the interpreters are giving access to the full experience. By the end of the day, they’re fried.
The rehearsal day moves slower than rooms most of us are used to—how could it not? Every piece of information gets funneled through multiple speakers in multiple languages, and sometimes information gets lost in translation. What in a single language room looks like “Hey, can you pass your hat to Leanne,” in this room might take two minutes of communication. It might take six.
Access is important but it’s expensive. Interpreters cost a lot of money, the slower rate of rehearsal necessitates longer rehearsal processes, which costs money, and none of this accounts for audience-facing access: interpreted performances, captions, audience education, all of which is expensive. I tell Alexandria I think the audience for this article will be largely directors and artistic directors, many of whom would probably love to program more accessible theatre, but find it cost prohibitive. And with a new federal government that would rather spit on accessibility programs than fund them, the money will be even harder to come by. So why do it at all?
Alexandria smiles, weary. “What you’ve asked…it’s not the first time it’s been asked. And I don’t have this beautiful, pretty, cleancut, tied-with-a-bow response because, well…” She considers her response. “I think the world does not function or survive without art. And in the world of art, there are so many different perspectives, so many different voices, different ways of telling what an inner life might be or what that outside world might be.
There is more than one way of being in this world and being on this earth. It’s audacious to assume that one way of being is the way of being for everyone else on this planet.”
“And so it’s worth it?” I ask.
“It’s more than worth it. Think of all the people who benefit from shows like ours. The parents and friends who watch something on TV or film and say, oh, they use captions? Oh, they have sign language on stage? Oh, that’s cool. And then having those conversations when they’re exposed to that and saying, oh, there are different ways to perceive and take in the world. I think those conversations are what’s powerful about theatre. Because it encourages comfortable conversations, but also uncomfortable conversations. And I think that it comes down to—do we want to tell a story that excites, that teases, or sparks a conversation, lights a fire between, say, a parent and a child, or between two teenagers who don’t like school, but saw a show and they said, ‘Oh, yes, I figured out what I want to do now. I know what my passion is.’”
So why is the investment in accessibility worth it? “Accessibility should be a national right,” I offer. “We have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but how can you pursue those things if you can’t interact with your world?”
“And on the flip side,” Alexandria riffs, “how can the world be happy if they can’t interact with you?”
“It’s very easy to other somebody you can’t understand,” I say.
“And I also think that othering is a strategy to weaken the strength of the collective.”
A couple days later I read over the transcription of our back-and-forth. It’s all nice, it’s all true. But I think there’s an even better answer: accessibility pays for itself. Maybe not immediately, but the investment pays off. The bigger the pool of potential audience members, the bigger the capacity for sales. The more children who see themselves reflected in storytelling, the larger the pool who will grow up to become artists, patrons, customers. And not to brag, but Private Jones broke Signature Theatre sales records for an original musical, so accessible theatre isn’t just good virtuesignaling, it’s good business.
I ask Alexandria if she has advice for directors who have never worked with a DASL. Or directors who have worked with a DASL but want to be a better collaborator.
“Having patience. Having patience and being okay with not knowing what you don’t know. Those are the two biggest things I would say. And trust. Trust goes both ways. When I’m asked to be on a production or a project, I know that it comes with a level of trust with the director and the actors that are in the room. Having that level of trust, I know that it means that I hope I can receive the
Emilia Jones, Troy Kotsur + Marlee Matlin in the film CODA, with Alexandria Wailes as Director of Artistic Sign Language
same because the work is not easy. There will be moments of creative barriers and knowing that those usually come with the stress of time.
“And you have to edit. You have to make decisions in the moment. You have to work quickly. And at the same time, it’s important to remember that, oh yeah, we have more than one language, more than one culture, that is existing in a shared space. And so how do we show up and how do we support? How do we decide what the priorities are? So I think it’s important to have those conversations, preferably outside of the rehearsal timeframe or space if possible, to make sure that we are all sort of homing in to the same vision.
“And really do your homework. Yeah, really do your homework.”
Directing and DASLing are interpretive artforms. The first part of both jobs is interpreting the text and communicating a shared vision. But the true mark of both a great director and a DASL is their ability to learn the theatrical language of every person in the room and be able to communicate
in a way that makes sense to each of them. Each hearing actor is not the same, each communicates in a different way, and it’s our job to make their jobs easier. When we add a new literal language to the room, in this case ASL, it’s still the same job just with an added variable. The Deaf community, like every community, is not monolithic. Everyone is different. Everyone processes in a different way. The way Alexandria works with Dickie is not the same way she works with Amelia is not the same way she works with Johnny. She’s a chameleon yet always exactly herself. Watching her work reminds me how much room I have to grow.
The interview is winding down. On the computer is Alexandria, on my phone next to the computer is the baby monitor for my 13-month-old, now napping. How lucky I’d be if the latter turned out like the former.
“There’s a wide, big community of DASLs that I just want to acknowledge and say that they’re doing amazing work as well,” she adds, unprompted. “It’s not just me. And it’s important that we see each other and that we bring their experiences to this as well.”
I reflect on our years-long collaboration and realize that every conversation we’ve ever had has emphasized the importance of the individual; every single character or collaborator is not a symbol or cog but a completely unique organism deserving of unique treatment. This is the ethos of Alexandria.
“My experience is just one experience. It’s an experience. It’s not the experience.”
Marshall Pailet is a writer, composer, and director. Most recently he wrote and directed Private Jones at Signature Theatre (VA) and Goodspeed Musicals. Upcoming work includes Marcel on the Train, Loch Ness, Nikola Tesla, The Snow Goose, Fountain, and Disney on Ice, as well as more Private Jones www.marshallpailet.com
Alexandria Wailes (right) + On Shiu in Oedipus at Deaf West Theatre
In a generous and compassionate conversation, Sean Daniels, a founder of Dad’s Garage in Atlanta and more recently, the Recovery Arts Project, talks with Michael Rohd about how artists can use the transformative power of theatre to change the national narrative around addiction and recovery.
Sean Daniels
PHOTO CARL SHULTZ
MICHAEL ROHD | I want to start by asking you, where did you grow up, and what was the family unit that you came from like?
SEAN DANIELS | Both my parents’ families are in politics; we lived in Washington, DC. My parents—my whole family—went to the theatre all the time; it was just part of what we did when I was growing up. They had season subscriptions to everything. We were also Mormon, so it was not until much later in life that I realized not everyone goes to church for seven hours every Sunday and not everyone goes to the theatre twice a week, so—
MICHAEL | I want to make sure that’s heard. You grew up in Washington, DC, in a political family environment, going to the theatre a lot, and you were Mormon and went to church for seven hours on Sundays.
SEAN | That was an exaggeration. But you go for three hours every Sunday and then you do events afterwards, so it takes up a huge part of your life. The Mormon Church is smart in that, if you are in the Mormon Church, it also includes sports activities. My dad was a big sports guy—he always played basketball, he always coached young people. When my parents decided to leave the church, it was such a...you have to really uproot your life.
MICHAEL | How old were you?
SEAN | I was 16 when my parents left the Mormon Church.
MICHAEL | So until then, you had the experience of cultural activity in a big city and a very deeply church-connected life.
SEAN | We moved around a lot. We started in DC, and then we moved to Mesa, Arizona, for seven years, and then we moved to Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Oddly, I’ve continued that triangle of moving. We always went to the theatre, so we were involved in the community. I think I always loved the theatre because I was a husky kid who couldn’t play sports; theatre was a place for the strange and the weird kids to find a home. But that aspect of community organization and connecting with people has always been part of who my family was.
MICHAEL | It seems to me that there’s a relationship between the event of sport, the event of church, and the event of theatre. There’s something happening; there are people gathered, there’s energy. How did your early immersion in sports, church, and theatre affect the artist or man that you’ve become?
SEAN | They’re all story-based. My grandfather had to have heart surgery a couple of times. When he would go to sporting events with my dad, they would have to stop at each level—we weren’t rich, so we sat way up top—and he would have to catch his breath before they could go to the next level. When I went with my father, he made sure that we stopped on every level to honor what had happened with my grandfather, so there was a ritual involved in every part of it. I feel like I understood sports on a level of, we hoped our team won, but also, these are the things we do at the stadium to honor those that can’t be with us anymore.
“Maybe all of us, especially Americans, are narrative junkies anyway. But I think when you grow up in politics and Mormon religion and theatre, it’s like the narrative is constantly being explored and reinforced.”
Going to the theatre, I used to think my parents were very evolved, but maybe they were also a little lazy; they just took me to any show they were going to. I saw Sweeney Todd as a very young person, and it was scarring. I had the opportunity to tell Stephen Sondheim eventually and he told me, “Get over it.” So I guess I’m supposed to move on from it, but stories were a huge part of what we were.
Maybe all of us, especially Americans, are narrative junkies anyway. But I think when you grow up in politics and Mormon religion and theatre, it’s like the narrative is constantly being explored and reinforced. I can go back maybe seven to 10 generations in my family of exactly who we’re from and when we came over and where we were born. I think that played a role in my trying
to understand our place in it all. I think also in politics, at its best, you are trying to figure out how you are of service to the community that you’re in. You’re trying to figure out what is it that is not working and how could you adjust it to go forward.
The Udall family in Arizona is my family. My favorite uncle growing up was the deputy whip of the Republican Party, and then also Mo Udall [Morris King Udall] was a Democrat running for president. So I had relatives on both sides. It’s not like we were a Republican or a Democratic family. It was based on where you lived and what you believed. And, as with any Mormon family, at some point half the people in my family had left the church, so you have different people who feel differently.
MICHAEL | This idea of going back generations and knowing where you’re from—I want to translate that for a moment to the generations of artists that you’re from, separate from family. I want to ask you about college. I think when people hear about theatre artists, they’re often sort of curious—particularly other theatre artists— about, “What informed you?” Was college a meaningful part of your journey toward the kind of theatre artist you became?
SEAN | I went to Florida State University. Part of what happened when my group of friends and I were there—and maybe I should have seen these signs coming for the rest of my career—we were not embraced by the School of Theatre, at all. Part of why we founded Dad’s Garage in Atlanta was that we hadn’t really gotten the roles that we wanted in college, and we believed we had something to say that people were interested in, even if the School of Theatre didn’t.
One of our first reviews, in [the arts and culture newspaper] Creative Loafing, said, “This is not what most adults would call theatre.” We put that quote on the front of our brochure for the next year as though it was the greatest thing that anybody could say about what we were doing. And the theatre took off, so it’s all kind of been bucking the system in terms of trying to figure out, in the best populist sense, what are we interested in doing, what is our audience excited to see; not necessarily, how great would we be in The Miss Firecracker Contest if we could get cast in it.
MICHAEL | In a way, what college gave you was something to react against, you and your friends, and you started this kick-ass theatre company in Atlanta. Why Atlanta?
SEAN | The Olympics were coming, and we thought, “Oh, it’ll be a great place. It’ll be a
cultural hub.” We were an improv troupe; we did a kind of improv called theatre sports, and there was no other theatre sports team in Atlanta. But, on a subconscious level— most of us were from Florida. We went to Florida State. Atlanta was far enough away, but not too far away.
What is great about Atlanta is that you can really try out who you want to be as an artist—at least that was true in the ’90s. We made some bad shows, and we lived to see the next time. The Atlanta JournalConstitution had a phenomenal theatre critic named Dan Hulbert who would come and see our shows and sometimes would call afterwards and say, “This wasn’t your best work, so I’m not going to review it, but I’ll come back again.” And then he would celebrate other things that we were doing on the front of the Arts Section.
We had a couple of early breaks. We applied for the rights to Cannibal! The Musical by Trey Parker and Matt Stone before they became famous, and they said, “Sure.” South Park hit after that, so suddenly, we were doing the musical at the same time. We did SubUrbia by Eric Bogosian, and I wrote to him, “I directed your show, and I think I did a fantastic job. You should really fly down
and see it”—which is something I don’t recommend to anybody. But he did, and he brought Richard Linklater, who was going to direct the movie of it. They saw the show, met with us afterwards, and they wrote a letter of recommendation for the theatre.
So we took off pretty quickly in Atlanta. Because Atlanta in the ’90s was not an A-level theatre city, you were allowed to find your way. There was nobody else to get crushed by; it was very supportive. We could grow as artists. We could try out new things. I think the quality of our work at the beginning was not that strong. Actually, what was said about us was that the parties were great, but that the theatre was okay. And then, about seven or eight years later, people were like, “The theatre’s gotten much better, but the parties have really faded.”
MICHAEL | That happens as we get older. How long did you stay there? Where’d you go from there?
SEAN | I was there for nine years, and then I got an opportunity to be resident director and the associate artistic director at Cal Shakes in Berkeley, California. I was only there for about a year and a half before Marc Masterson asked me to come be the resident
director and associate artistic director at Actors Theatre of Louisville. When we talk about where we are from, theatre-wise, Marc Masterson was a real mentor of mine, though he would hate that word.
He was the first artistic director who said to me, “Okay, listen, you can direct fine. That’s great. You have to learn how to read an Excel sheet. You need to learn how to read a production budget. You need to figure out how much things really cost. You need to understand what labor is so that you never sit in a meeting and have people tell you that you can’t afford your vision. You need to understand the whole organization.” That was so helpful because at Dad’s Garage, our budget was $600,000–$700,000, and by the time I got to ATL, the budget was 10 million.
MICHAEL | I’ve got to imagine, since we’re going to talk about activism and community organizing, that being a whole-picture thinker and understanding all the various moving parts of the organization and the project and the people and the resources becomes really important in terms of where your practice has gone. How many years were you at Actors Theatre?
SEAN | I was there for five years.
Dad’s Garage 2000 world premiere of Oh Happy Day by Graham Chapman + Barry Cryer, directed by Sean Daniels
PHOTO C/O DAD’S GARAGE
“A sneaky thing about addiction, especially in the arts, is that being able to go out with everybody till 4:00 in the morning and still be in rehearsal the next morning at 10:00 is totally celebrated, right?”
MICHAEL | Am I right that substance use, alcohol started to become a part of the story of your journey and intersecting with your professional life there? I want artists who are reading this to understand a bit about your own personal journey and how it helped lead to some of the work we’re going to talk about.
SEAN | A sneaky thing about addiction, especially in the arts, is that being able to go out with everybody till 4:00 in the morning and still be in rehearsal the next morning at 10:00 is totally celebrated, right? That’s part of it. Also, there’s a kind of Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, “It costs something to be an artist, and you have to pay that and that’s the life that you live.”
It definitely started to get out of control in Louisville. I would go out three nights a week, and then, eventually, seven nights a week, and then eventually, I would drink at lunch. Then eventually, by the end, I was drinking in the morning before going into work. When Marc left to become the artistic director at South Coast Rep, and I was made the interim artistic director, I think I was really on a path to be in consideration to be the next artistic director. That’s when my father passed away, and that’s then when the bottom dropped out from underneath me—because I didn’t have any emotional tools to deal with that except to drink more. Eventually, I was let go because I really couldn’t stay sober for longer than an hour.
MICHAEL | When you had that moment, where did that lead you in terms of where you went as an artist, as well as where you went as a person? Where did your health go next? Where did that take you?
SEAN | What I’m always grateful for, I was directing a kids’ musical at the Kennedy Center, and I was at rock, rock bottom. At the time, Lauren Gunderson, who was sort of an unknown playwright at the time—
MICHAEL | Now one of our great playwrights.
SEAN | Now one of our great playwrights. Lauren went to the Kennedy Center and said, “You’re not going to fire him. We’re going to get him through this. We’re all going to
step in and do what we can, and then he’s going to go to rehab.” And so, I wasn’t fired. I got paid the full amount to be able to direct a show—which was significant—and I was able to use that money to go to rehab in Jacksonville, Florida.
MICHAEL | Let me use that to build a bridge to the work that you’re doing now with the Recovery Arts Project and beyond. After the moment you described in DC and post-rehab, you’ve continued to have a super active career as a director, also running Arizona Theatre Company for some years in Phoenix and Tucson, moving to Florida and then starting the Recovery Arts Project. So I’m sort of fast-forwarding in a way.
I want to ask you, as a theatre director who’s now leading an initiative that has a larger aim than any single project and that does campaign work around addiction and recovery in a variety of narrative and media formats, how do you think about your work as a theatre director in terms of the amount of time you spend on plays, and the amount of time you spend with the Recovery Arts Project?
SEAN | When we started Dad’s Garage, I thought the most punk-rock thing we could ever do was to start a theatre, and we were going to save the world by doing theatre. We
were going to put on plays that we thought were important conversations, and we were going to stick it to the establishment and all these things. Then along the way, at some point, you’re worried about subscribers keeping their seats, and that slightly coded racist board member and how you handle them. And that urge to fix the world gets beat out of you.
I wrote a play called The White Chip, which is about my own recovery, because for me, I was shocked when I learned about brain behavior and things that I had never heard of before, as they relate to addiction. Even now, we’re not really talking about it, but we know so much more about brain behavior and brain disorders and dopamine and neural pathways. But none of this was talked about.
We did a reading of The White Chip in Glasgow, to see about potentially doing a tour over there. There was a woman who came because she had lost her son, and she didn’t understand why. She thought maybe coming to the theatre would help her to understand. And there was a gentleman who brought his family because he thought they didn’t really understand who he was, and he wanted them to see the play. Suddenly, it was like, “Oh my God, this is the thing we were talking about wanting to do with theatre when we were 22.”
Sean Daniels + Lauren Gunderson
MICHAEL | Because individual people were coming for a sense of understanding that they weren’t getting in other spaces in their lives.
SEAN | That’s right. At some point you go, “Oh my God, I think a lot of people could run theatres, but I’m not sure that a lot of people can do this.”
MICHAEL | Do you think of your mission as exploring and working around addiction and recovery for artists, or is that the door that then opens you to doing that work with the general public?
SEAN | I think first of all, we have to stop artists from dying. We have to figure out how to keep them alive and how to be able to keep them safe. That, I think, is the way that you change national narratives. There was some great research done on how national narratives change; they studied gay marriage. Barack Obama was against gay marriage when he ran for president; today you cannot say what he said as a Democrat in Florida and get elected. So there was a study that asked, “What’s different in our lifetime that we’ve changed that?”
The answer was two things. One was the arts. First of all, the roles that the LGBTQ community is allowed to play went from trauma to wacky best friend to support system, to eventually existing in a story where your sexuality does not determine whether you would be in it or not. Ellen comes out. Everyone thinks she’s going to lose her job. Magic Johnson is HIV positive, and everybody thinks he’s going to be dead within a month. He’s currently a billionaire in better shape than any of us.
The other part was changing the story from “everybody has a legal right to be able to marry who they want” to “people are allowed to love whoever they want to love.” It is just a better story. Between those two things, it was like, “Oh my God, we have actually changed a national narrative in our lifetime.” What if we could do the same thing for addiction? But it has to start with artists. It has to start with the people that help us to better understand the world that we live in.
The Normal Heart happened at The Public Theater, and Larry Kramer stood out front and handed out information to every person that was leaving. Because of that, Reagan had to finally talk about what “gay cancer”
was—or what he thought it was—and talk about AIDS. We know that the theatre has immense power to be able to change conversations, and I promise you that people are alive today because of Larry Kramer.
How do we do the same thing? How do we look at the steps that the LGBTQ community has taken and put those in place for us? I think we can look to that community to say, “What are the steps we should be taking so that anybody who is interested in getting help knows that it’s possible, that there’s a huge community, and nothing is a death sentence.”
MICHAEL | I want to go back a few sentences and note that as a theatre practitioner, when you told the story of The Normal Heart and its impact, you didn’t just say that The Normal Heart happened, and things changed. You said The Normal Heart happened, and Larry Kramer stood outside handing out pamphlets. So in the story you told, it wasn’t just the play, it was also the activism right outside, adjacent to the theatre that contributed to that change. When you think about the Recovery Arts Project, what shape is your work taking these days that is the storytelling, but also Larry outside the theatre?
Gina Rickicki, Andrew Benator + Tom Key in a Dad’s Garage & A Theatrical Outfit co-production of The White Chip, written by Sean Daniels + co-directed by Tim Stoltenberg + Matt Torney PHOTO
CASEY G FORD PHOTOGRAPHY
SEAN | In a couple of different ways. When we did The White Chip in New York, at the very first preview, somebody came up to Joe Tapper, our lead in the show, after the performance and said, “I’m an alcoholic, but I’m not sober right now, and I came tonight.” Our producers put together 12 QR codes to help people figure out who they can contact if they are interested in these different recovery groups (because there’s different groups depending on whatever it is that you’re struggling with). Two weeks in, that same person contacted us and said, “I have been sober 14 days today since I came to the show, so thank you for that.” After that, after every single performance, somebody came up and said, “I’m ready to get help.”
We started to put together resources for people. We partnered with the Clinton Foundation to have Chelsea Clinton come and speak at the show, and we gave out Naloxone to every person who was leaving the theatre that night, to ask them just to put it in their backpack or take it home with them. While that’s going on, the Recovery Arts Project put together a video for performing arts organizations about how they can be more recovery-friendly.
I did a show in Cincinnati, and before we were allowed to start working, we had to watch a couple different videos. One was how to be respectful to our BIPOC friends and what to do in case of an active shooter. These were important things to understand,
but there was nothing about mental health. So we said, “Let’s put together a free video. Let’s put it out there. Let’s work with different organizations to make sure that it’s spot on.”
We’ve worked with the Terrence McNally Foundation to commission artists that are in recovery to write recovery-forward stories. We’re supporting different work. Lauren Gunderson has written a play that’s going to be at Asolo Rep next season, Lady Disdain [directed by Daniels], in which there are people in recovery in the story, and they don’t just exist to have a relapse to threaten the main characters. They just are in recovery, and that affects the choices that they make. We’re trying to work on multiple levels to figure out, “How do you let the average person understand that people in recovery are in the world? That actually, 30 million people in recovery are in the world.”
We worked with the Tampa Bay Rays to figure out how they can make a recoveryfriendly night; how do you walk the tightrope of preaching that “recovery is possible” when the majority of the people who are watching your message are most likely holding a beer at that moment? We’re working with Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation to figure out what their arts and activism future is going to be and how they can lead in those spaces.
We’re trying to, on multiple levels, figure out how to change national narratives. How do
we go ahead and do the same thing that The Normal Heart and Ellen and Magic Johnson did, but for changing perception about addiction and recovery?
MICHAEL | Do you describe the Recovery Arts Project as an initiative? Is it an organization? Is it a program? What is this thing that you are now leading, model-wise?
SEAN | It’s a great question. We started at Florida Studio Theatre, and it was a program. It got too big too quickly, and we moved to a health and human services organization dedicated to addiction, and I was able to spend more of my time on it. Now, we’re partnering with Bigvision Community in NYC [which supports young adults in recovery from substance abuse] so we can accept donations. We’re just finishing up the paperwork, and we’ll have access to 4,000 square feet in New York City to start to really have the first of many artistic homes for artists in recovery. We walked around the space yesterday with Craig Lucas and Jake Brasch. They are the first two recipients of our Recovery Commissions, which were made possible by the Terrence McNally Foundation and Provincetown Theater. Their eventual readings will be presented at Works & Process at the Guggenheim next spring. It was inspiring to think about how we can change national narratives with an additional home in New York City.
Victoria Grace + Alexis Bronkovic in Silent Sky at Merrimack Repertory Theatre, directed by Sean Daniels
PHOTO MEGHAN MOORE
“Next year, I’m only doing one show that isn’t in the recovery world. Almost everything else is recovery-based—not because that’s the only thing I want to do, but I find such power in those stories, and I really see the ability of an audience to change.”
MICHAEL | As a director of theatre who is also doing this organizational work, how much energy or time do you spend in a week these days in a show-making mode versus how much are you spending on the construction of this campaign and all the partnership work and coalition building you’re doing? And how are they feeding each other right now?
SEAN | Next year, I’m only doing one show that isn’t in the recovery world. Almost everything else is recovery-based—not because that’s the only thing I want to do, but I find such power in those stories, and I really see the ability of an audience to change. I’m drawn to this type of work right now because it feels like we are going to create a venue where hearts and minds could be changed. Everything that I wanted to do in theatre. I think all of us got into this because we felt like we have something really important to say.
It’s nearly impossible to make theatre. There are so many easier jobs we could have taken. What I love is that I used to have such a high-stakes feeling about everything that we did in theatre; and now I’m in a field where somebody dies from substance abuse in our country every five minutes. We will have lost 12 people by the time this conversation is over. And so, it’s like, “Oh, that’s deserving of high stakes. That’s deserving of big
personalities. That’s deserving of figuring out how to fight, to get this across.”
Because for anybody that’s ever lost someone, we also understand that a person lost is not just one person. That is a family. That is a child. That’s a father. That’s a loved one. That is a family that is wrecked, one every five minutes. And even though opioid overdoses have gone down since last year, they still have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. From 2019—this is according to the Washington Post—to 2021, in two years, the number of fatal overdoses in our country surged 94 percent. So it certainly feels like it’s worth it for the long hours, and it’s worth it for the times you missed dinner with your family or the times that you have to take a call at 7:00 at night, because it’s not about the small stuff that used to consume me in our field, but really about actual life-anddeath stakes.
MICHAEL | We’re having this conversation in February of 2025. People will read this conversation in the fall of 2025. The moment we’re in right now includes a fairly fierce attack on public services in the health area, mental health resources, public health officials, research—all sorts of safety nets and support systems are being slashed by the new presidential administration. A lot of people will lose some of the care that has existed that affects the way people deal with
Genesis Oliver, Finnerty Steeves + Joe Tapper in The White Chip at 59E59 Theater, written by Sean Daniels + directed by Sheryl Kaller
PHOTO CAROL ROSEGG
addiction and mental health challenges. The arts are under attack as well, and certainly from a federal perspective, being asked to come into much more narrow parameters in terms of what they can and cannot address when federal funding or federal support is involved.
So it seems like the kind of work we’re talking about is more urgent than ever because the conversation will be more urgent than ever, and in some ways, it will get harder because of the attacks on services and people who do the work. So I wonder how you feel the work you’re doing will be impacted or if there are any ways you are thinking strategically about it in this federal moment?
SEAN | The work that we’re doing— focused on addiction and overdose—is the ultimate bipartisan issue. Addiction really doesn’t care who you are, and it’s actually one of the few diseases that hits across the board. It doesn’t matter what race you are. It certainly doesn’t matter what gender, or how rich you are. It doesn’t care about your political leanings. It doesn’t care about whether you’re from California or from Florida. So my hope is that we can continue to make the case that this is above it all.
MICHAEL | Let me shift back to being a theatre director for a moment. Something that I am always really interested in is making sure theatre artists understand that their
skill set is applicable beyond the rehearsal room and the stage. I wonder if you could talk about how your experience as a theatre director has provided you with skills that you are now deploying in broader and broader ways for broader and broader purposes.
“The work that we’re doing— focused on addiction and overdose— is the ultimate bipartisan issue.”
SEAN | I think we always fear that we have this very small specific skill set and can only be hired by one of 72 theatres across the country. In the theatre, we talk about organizing, and we talk about connecting with the community. Honestly, I do the exact same work now that I did then. The only difference is, I do it now with law enforcement and first responders and faith leaders and with Hazelden Betty Ford. It is all actually the exact same work that we’ve always done, which is knowing that a great
story is going to be what changes people’s hearts and minds.
And so, we need to figure out not only how do we organize the stories, how do we get people excited, but how do we get the right story to the right people? We started this social media campaign to collect stories about the fact that recovery is possible, and then we geo-target them into areas of Tampa Bay based on who lives there, so that you can always see people that look like you saying that “recovery is possible.” We’ve had great success with it, and it’s funded by Central Florida Behavioral Health, which means it is allocated from the Florida Governor’s office. Again, the ultimate bipartisan issue.
Everything we know about representation on stage and about making an audience feel a part of the experience is exactly the same thing that we understand about representation in terms of recovery. In our geo-targeted social media campaign in Sarasota, they would love for a really old white guy to tell them, “It’s okay to say at 62 that you’re struggling.” In downtown Tampa Bay, it needs to be somebody who’s younger, somebody who’s most likely of color saying, “Recovery is possible.” They don’t want to hear that it’s just a 60-year-old white guy thing. They want to hear that it’s people like them. Everything that we understand about programming and about bringing in new audiences and about how you make people
Max Alexander-Taylor in The Lion at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, directed by Sean Daniels + Alex Stenhouse PHOTO MIKKI SCHAFFNER
feel at home, is exactly the same for how we do geo-targeted social media. It’s still storytelling. Almost everyone on my team is a theatre person—so when we talk about storytelling, representation, and community, they are already ahead of the curve.
MICHAEL | Right now, you are very focused on recovery. It’s a purpose that, regardless of context or form, seems to be motivating you across how you think about storytelling and how you spend your energy. This could be a lifetime of work. You could work for the next 30 years on this, and there’ll be a need for it. Do you see on the other side of, or alongside, your work with recovery another issue or need in our communities that you could also make a difference in by approaching in a similar way?
SEAN | There are plenty of other issues that I think could be tackled, but before we turned 50, you and I were more likely to die of an overdose than we were of a car accident, of a gun, of cancer, of any of those things. It is the number one killer of people 18 to 49. We have to tackle the thing that is killing the actual workforce of our country.
So many people were there for me when I was struggling, and I feel like it’s my job to be of service and try to be there for the next person.
There’s a show that I did 10 years ago, The Lion, and it’s like, of all the shows, it can’t be stopped. The show is about the idea that great things can come from awful things. It’s about a young boy who loses his Dad and is angry at him, and then he gets Stage 4 cancer but is able to beat it. Then, because of being able to beat it, he’s able to reconnect with his Dad. We just did it in Tokyo, in Japanese, and it was amazing to watch a Japanese audience connect with it and be moved by it. It was amazing to be like, “We’ve toured the US. We’ve done it in London, and now, we’ve done it in Tokyo.” And it works everywhere, because we all need to believe that great things can come from awful times.
And so, even though I’m not a cancer survivor, to see how those same principles can be truly universal across the world—it’s inspiring to think about what we can do with other issues.
MICHAEL | That’s a good place to end the conversation. Thank you, Sean, so much for talking about the really beautiful and important work you’re doing. I know it will be really moving content-wise, but also for people to think about a theatre artist working in ways that might surprise them.
Michael Rohd (Sojourn Theatre, Center for Performance and Civic Practice, Co-Lab for Civic Imagination at University of Montana) is a theatremaker, educator, processdesigner, writer, and facilitator. He has a 30+ year history of creative practice and projects bringing cultural activity to the work of public engagement, community planning, health equity, and cross-sector coalition building.
The 39 Steps at Geva Theatre Center, directed by Sean Daniels
PHOTO HUTHPHOTO
Sustainability is the Trampoline
An Interview with SARA BRUNER | BY LUE MORGAN DOUTHIT
Sara Bruner and Lue Morgan Douthit met in 2014 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Bruner, an actor, worked with OSF’s Black Swan Lab for New Work and played Charles Wallace Murry in the company’s world-premiere adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time; she would go on to join OSF as a company member for six years. Douthit, the Black Swan Lab’s co-producer and co-founder, was amid what would become a 25-year tenure as OSF’s Director of New Play Development and Dramaturgy.
Today, both Bruner and Douthit oversee sprawling artistic initiatives. Douthit is Director of Research and Practice and Co-Founder of Play on Shakespeare, which was launched at OSF in 2015 and is now a nonprofit company that creates and promotes contemporary modern translations of Shakespeare’s plays. In March 2024, Bruner was named Producing Artistic Director Designate of a unique crosscountry strategic alliance uniting three independent theatres: Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland, Ohio; Idaho Shakespeare Festival in Boise; and Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival in Incline Village, Nevada. Led by one artistic director, the alliance enables the companies to share creative and administrative staff, increasing production efficiency and supporting long-term employment opportunities for artists. Bruner, who has a long history with all three organizations as an actor, director, and artistic associate, officially assumed the role of Producing Artistic Director for all three companies in September 2024, following the retirement of her predecessor, Charles Fee.
Over Zoom, Bruner and Douthit discussed Bruner’s trajectory from actor to director to artistic director, and the challenges and opportunities of leading three theatres.
LUE MORGAN DOUTHIT | I’d love to hear the story of what that “aha” moment was in your youth when you thought, “Oh, theatre… interesting...”
SARA BRUNER | Generally speaking, I don’t know that I ever have true “aha” moments; things are slower burns for me. I can remember a moment when the beginning of a slow burn started to happen. It was in Deer Lodge, Montana, which was close to Missoula, Montana, where the Missoula Children’s Theatre started; they would tour to Deer Lodge, which was a tiny little town. I started acting when I was four years old. [Missoula Children’s Theatre, founded in 1970, includes an annual Red Truck Tour that casts local students in full-scale productions.] You got cast according to what size you were—it was about which costume you fit into—and my first year, I was an apple
seed in Johnny Appleseed. The bigger I got, the bigger my roles got, essentially. We’d rehearse every day after school, and I remember being backstage for the first performance, and all the kids were gathered around watching one of the older kids get their makeup on.
It was mesmerizing; I remember thinking it was really special. The thing that’s still special for me is hanging out with everybody, waiting for your scene and practicing together even when you weren’t practicing. That was the first time I thought, “I like this, this is interesting to me.” But it wasn’t about being on stage, it was about the offstage.
LUE | When and how did it transition to, “This could be a career choice?”
SARA | I never decided, “I’m going to be an actor.” I said yes to everything that had
to do with theatre, whether it was running props backstage, running sound for a dance concert, acting in a play—I just said yes, yes, yes to anything that came up. I realized I had made a career choice. “Oh, this is what I do, this is my career now. I’ve invested all my time and all my energy here.” I didn’t start getting serious about it until way too late. It’s not the way I notice a lot of other folks thinking about it now, but it was the way I needed to do it. It was the natural way for me.
LUE | Which is why I wanted to ask the question, because I think we all come to this from different ways. Did you go to graduate school for theatre?
SARA | No. I auditioned for acting but I didn’t like the school I got into, so I didn’t go.
Sara Bruner (rear, center) as Miranda in Bartlett Sher’s 1996 production of The Tempest at Idaho Shakespeare Festival
PHOTO TROY MABEN
LUE | Excellent. A person with taste. How did you transition from acting into directing?
SARA | When I first started auditioning for grad school, I wanted to go for directing. I talked to a few people at that time about it, and they all said to me, “Oh, don’t do that, you’re too good at acting.” And I listened to them. I think back on that a lot. I love my trajectory, but I often wish I hadn’t listened to people. I was flattered by them saying that to me, and so I changed course and thought, “Okay, well, I’ll go for acting.”
I started assisting people, though, wanting to learn more about the process, and I started noticing my thought process in the rehearsal room. I was already feeling a little dissatisfied with acting. I talk a lot about my own journey with ego in relationship to acting, which wasn’t a healthy one. For a long time, over 10 years, I didn’t feel good at the end of the night after performing, and I knew that other actors weren’t feeling that way because I talked to people about it.
I still loved theatre and wanted to work on it and wanted to figure out what other path there was for me. Then, when I was at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I did little projects with Daedalus. [OSF’s Daedalus Project, originally organized in 1988, was an annual fundraiser for local, regional, national, and international HIV/AIDS organizations.] I ended up having a conversation with Bill Rauch [then the Artistic Director of OSF] about directing, and that was the turning point for me while I was in that company.
LUE | Are you ever going to act again?
SARA | I will never say never, but right now I don’t have an appetite for it—and there are a lot of other talented folks that have that hunger. I don’t miss being on stage. I miss being backstage, all the fun things that happen backstage during and before a show; I love the camaraderie and the silliness. As much staging as there is on stage in a play, there’s as much in the backstage patterns of a show, and I love it back there.
LUE | What do you think that you have carried forward from your acting experiences into your directing process?
SARA | I’m still trying to find that balance. At this point, I’ve been a director—really working professionally—for six or seven years. I was a professional actor for 23 years. I lived most of my life, thousands and thousands of hours, in rehearsal and on
stage as an actor. So it’s mostly an actor’s perspective I’m bringing in still.
There are definitely some useful things; one of them is that I understand how to cultivate a room that can create a certain kind of freedom for an actor in order for them to take ownership of a role throughout a process. Not too much freedom, hopefully, but just enough.
Another thing is that, when you’re an actor, often there’s a real disconnect between what you feel like you’re portraying versus what the audience is perceiving. Now I’m the person who represents the people who just showed up—which is what I always call the
“My empathy for actors is strong because I walked in those shoes.”
wasn’t allowed to participate fully in the cocreation of something.
LUE | My impression of you since we met has always been that you had a director’s eye, and that you were interested in more than just how you plug in to the scheme. How have you been able to integrate design and thinking about the three-dimensionality of that as part of how you work on a play?
SARA | First off, I try to surround myself with great people who are fiercely intelligent and work with a lot of goodwill and are really rigorous. And we just have conversations about the plays. I cannot have it be my job to figure everything out. I don’t want to do it, nor do I want to be a single visionary in the room. I think that’s very much some people’s gig; it’s not my gig.
I’m way more interested in—to borrow a phrase our friend, Emily Knapp, uses—the wisdom of the group. I want to create things that are based on the wisdom of the group. So I just talk about what strikes me; I send weird photos, I draw weird pictures, I send weird voicemails, emails. I make offerings and people make offerings back and we collectively make something. To me, that collective vision is all about, “What can only we do as this group of people who have the luxury and good grace to come together in this moment to make this thing right now?” It’s not mine ever; it’s always ours in this moment.
audience. “I know you think you’re doing this thing. I’m here to represent the people who just showed up, and I’m telling you it’s not what it seems like.” That’s definitely something I bring to the process. I know how to talk about it with a lot of empathy because I lived on the other side of it for so long. My empathy for actors is strong because I walked in those shoes. There are very few paths I didn’t tread. So I definitely bring that into the room.
For me, the culture of the room is just as important as anything in a process. If your room culture is broken, your play will be broken, whether it’s in perceptible ways or just intangibly. I’m very sensitive to those things, maybe hypersensitive. It’s trying to make the exact right amount of decisions across the board, to make the right amount of a suggestion to let the rest of the artists, including the designers, fly. I think I learned that from being an artist on the other side and feeling too often as an actor that I
LUE | That’s beautiful. I’ve certainly seen that in the work that you do. How do you set up a room? What’s the difference in your directing process for a new play, a musical, classical Shakespeare— are there differences? And what are the similarities in how you approach those texts?
SARA | Honestly—and I was like this when I was an actor too—it’s always changing because I don’t believe that there is “a way” to do it.
Working on new plays at OSF, it blew my mind that even when we had a playwright in the room, we were still like, “Oh my God, how do we figure out this play?” And the playwright was sitting right there. I was so fascinated by that. Then I would think about Shakespeare plays and go, “What do we think we’re doing? We’re trying to figure this out hundreds of years later with no playwright in the room.”
One essential thing for me with Shakespeare plays is that we try to approach them like
they’re brand-new plays. We don’t approach them like they are sacred, or like they’ve been said a hundred times and we’re here to uphold them like they’re museum pieces that we’re just hitting “rewind and play” on so that somebody can watch it the exact way they remember it from the last time.
Eva Le Gallienne famously went into rehearsal for Romeo and Juliet, sat down, and said, “This is a new play by a new playwright, it’s called Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.” I love that spirit because it also gives you buy-in; it’s yours, and you get to be the first one to coin a phrase, to spin a phrase, to speak it. In that way, I try to keep those approaches similar. In all other ways, just like when I was an actor, I look at the play and ask, “How do we do this one this time? Who’s in it? What are the needs of this show? What are all the other external factors? How much time do we have?”
Every play has a different recipe that’s required. There are so many factors to that that I don’t have a way. Maybe someday I’ll have a way, maybe someday. Over and over again I’ve learned that the second I think I understand something, it’s almost immediately redefined for me. I don’t think I’ll ever have a singular way.
LUE | But isn’t that a way?
SARA | That is a way, and it might be maddening for people around me. The one thing I always do is create ways of engagement in the room. Building individual relationships with collaborators is crucial because I want everyone to have buyin, ownership, and freedom in the piece. I’ve been in rooms where fear dictates decisions, and it kills culture and creativity. Using ethical tactics to create buy-in, joy, ownership—that’s about the only thing I do every single time.
LUE | I want to head toward the world of a director as artistic director, and I’d love to hear a little bit about your history with Idaho Shakespeare, in particular, and your relationship with that company. It sounds a little like your children’s theatre experience in a way; you just kept rising up through the costumes that presented opportunities for you. Would you talk a little about that, how that has happened and the trajectory leading to this moment?
SARA | My first exposure to Idaho Shakespeare Festival was in high school in Burley, Idaho; they came to my school and performed in our auditorium. It was the first Shakespeare play I ever saw, and I loved it. I loved how lively and charismatic the actors were. I was drawn to how much spark they had on a regular day of life for me in school.
Afterwards—I must have had Drama or something, because I was allowed to go help
Ángela Utrera, Benjamin Michael Hall, Royer Bockus + Domonique Champion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Great Lakes Theater, directed by Sara Bruner
PHOTO ROGER MASTROIANNI
“Over and over again I’ve learned that the second I think I understand something, it’s almost immediately redefined for me.”
them load up their van, which was wonderful. I showed them where the pop machine was, and I remember one of them got a Coca-Cola out of the machine. And one of them gave me their phone number because they could tell I really liked theatre and they said, “If you ever have any questions about becoming an actor, you can give me a call.” And that person is actually Lynn Hofflund, the wife of Mark Hofflund, the gentleman who is the managing director of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival now.
I got a theatre scholarship to go to Boise State, and my first summer I auditioned for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival to be in their internship program. I’d never done Shakespeare before, and I found Phoebe—because that’s what you find, you find Phoebe—and I taught myself a Phoebe monologue. I auditioned and got cast in the company, and then we had to audition for the directors. Most people got cast as spear holders and stuff like that. I auditioned for the directors, and I got cast as Miranda in The Tempest when I was 18. And Bart Sher was directing it.
LUE | This is good.
SARA | I ended up doing 19 seasons as an actor in that company. I played tons of roles: every ingenue, every
The Tempest at Great Lakes Theater, directed by Sara Bruner
PHOTO KEN BLAZE
pants role, twice—I really found comfort in the pants roles, as you can imagine. During that time, what we now call the consortium with Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Great Lakes Theater, and Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival was formed, and I started traveling to Cleveland and working on stage at Great Lakes in Playhouse Square.
I was working full time for years. I was assistant directing—but also, for Idaho Shakespeare Festival, I ran props, I would help with strike. I would do anything and everything. I started doing our school tours; I went out on the road with the same tour that I had seen in high school, for, I think, eight years. I cut and directed a few of those along the way as well.
Half of my life I was working for these companies—and along the way, being mentored by our company’s previous artistic director, Charles Fee. He would sit me down and show me spreadsheets in how things were working. I wasn’t fully aware that he was mentoring me, but he was doing it with a lot of intentionality. I wasn’t quite picking up on it, but he definitely saw leadership ability in me before I saw it in myself. That all started to make sense later in my career once I was ready for it—with lots and lots of big mistakes along the way.
LUE | One hopes to be in a situation where you can make big mistakes and
“In my bedroom growing up, I used to pretend I was an artistic director. I had a theatre company that I’d named. I had posters that represented seasons that I had programmed.”
it doesn’t cost you a lot. And we’re perilously close to not being able to make those mistakes in our world at the moment, which I think is really hard on our craft.
Was there a time when you thought, “I’d like to be an artistic director?”
SARA | I did. But this would assume that I was very strategic. I didn’t fully embrace the concept of strategic thinking until I went back to get my master’s degree.
LUE | And remind me, that degree is in...?
SARA | I have an Executive MBA from Boise State University. In terms of becoming an artistic director—I wouldn’t say I wasn’t planning, but I was just going from show to show. I don’t want to sell myself short and say I didn’t have foresight, but I can’t speak to what my methodology was other than just “go, do, go, do.”
But honestly, in my bedroom growing up, I used to pretend I was an artistic director. I had a theatre company that I’d named. I had posters that represented seasons that I had programmed. I would do the dates of the run. I would make up names of the people who were cast. I would sometimes create sets—miniatures of sets, and things like that.
Ángela Utrera + Benjamin Bonenfant in Romeo and Juliet at Great Lakes Theater, directed by Sara Bruner PHOTO ROGER MASTROIANNI
This is something I’ve wanted to do my whole life. It took me too long to say it out loud. I had a ton of access to Charlie as an artistic director, seeing him do his job. I had an amazing relationship with Bill Rauch; I saw him up close, doing his job. And still, I didn’t know what it meant to be an artistic director; it is a huge job, it is so vast, it has so many pieces and parts to it.
LUE | It’s massive. Let’s talk about how massive yours is—in particular, the singular combination of running three different theatres. We’re not talking about three different theatre spaces in one location. I don’t know of another situation in American theatre that is like this, but maybe there are.
SARA | I don’t think there are. My team and I run three theatres: one in Cleveland, one in Boise, and one in Lake Tahoe. The business model is entirely unique in the American theatre. We extend the lives of our shows—which extends the lengths of contracts for those that make theatre with us. We have three separate and dedicated boards and administrative staffs; those of us on the artistic/production side travel with productions, producing September to May at our indoor theatre in Cleveland and transferring shows to our outdoor venues
May to September in Boise and July to August in Tahoe.
LUE | Can you describe the way you think about the process of being a director, and whether that can translate to the world of artistic director? Has it in some ways? And then, what more is artistic directing, in your opinion and experience?
SARA | It’s all the same, ultimately, in that it’s all leadership—creating a team and trying to paint a bullseye that is steeped in a strong mission and value statement. And, particularly in a not-for-profit, trying to avoid burnout along the way. Everybody we work with is running around balancing 10 hats on their head at any given moment. Almost everyone I work with has a very sharp brain and could be doing any single thing they want, but they are mission-driven humans and they have chosen theatre.
Being an artistic director and a director are very much the same. They exist on slightly different scales. And then that scale gets even bigger in our companies when we have one team that’s in Tahoe, one team that’s in Cleveland, and one team that’s in Boise, all working in different time zones, on different producing schedules, in different fiscal years,
but working on the same product—meaning we’re working on the same plays together.
Really, in the end, it is all about leadership and finding the right folks to surround yourself with. That’s the part where I can breathe a little bit because when that’s in place, it isn’t a job of loneliness and singularity, it makes it more of a team sport. There’s a lot of joy in that.
LUE | You described yourself earlier as the representative of the audience, which I think is healthy. How do you reconcile season selections for three different places, three different geographies, with three different audiences? You’ve worked at all three places, so you have a feel for what lands with those audiences, as an actor and now as a director. Do you have a way of going about that? Or is something beginning to manifest itself in how you’re doing the math of that?
SARA | Well, math is part of it. At the end of the day, it’s a business, too, and I allow myself to embrace that aspect of it. The daydreaming doesn’t exist without the business model. Part of my job is to honor the fact that sustainability is a very real aspect of what we do. Sustainability is the trampoline that allows the daydreamers to have their heads in the clouds.
Sense and Sensibility at Great Lakes Theater, co-directed by Sara Bruner + Jaclyn Miller
PHOTO ROGER MASTROIANNI
So it’s very data-driven. We have really good data, and we keep it clean, and we examine it from multiple perspectives. When we’re making our lists of titles we tie into things that are mission-driven, which historically have been things that are related to the classics. Though we’ve been pushing against that because there are obviously—or maybe not obviously—issues, I believe, with the classics and who’s been allowed to tell them and why and what we consider to be classic, etc.
LUE | Also, some of those stories are kind of heinous.
SARA | They are heinous. A lot of them are heinous. Although I also stand by the fact that just because you tell a story doesn’t mean you condone it.
LUE | Right.
SARA | I think that we get that confusion in the theatre sometimes, too. Our job is to be reflective of humanity, warts and all.
LUE | Totally agree.
So you’re doing all the math, you’re figuring out as you’re winnowing things down for season selection, all these things play into the decisions, right?
SARA | Our calendar is a little complicated in how it moves, because where something is placed in one season will determine how and when it moves to another theatre based off of production timelines, and logistically if it can get where it needs to be by x time. And personnel, because it’s not only our acting company that moves across the country with these shows, but also our backstage crew, wardrobe, tech folks, folks who build the set, costumes, and props. We take everyone, it’s not just the acting company; our full
“Sustainability is the trampoline that allows the daydreamers to have their heads in the clouds.”
production moves between all three cities. So there are a lot of logistical considerations in there as well, and we’re ideally looking for shows that, if you picture the Venn diagram of all three theatres, it’s where all three overlap. Our model was created to maximize economies as they relate to materials and to provide more steady work for folks in theatre. We seek a balanced scorecard.
You once said something that really helped me breathe a little bit, which is to remember that theatre is or can be a unifying factor for us, instead of the endless job of market segmentation. That has helped me think about what we’re always looking for in these plays, which is the universality. We’re producing popular titles, we’re not producing (at least now) new plays. We’re doing shows that are...what’s the right way to define them, Lue, you tell me?
LUE | Well, classical plays doesn’t mean antique. It also means that in their time they resonated because they had inscribed in them conventions and ideas that were easily accessed and are still relatable no matter what the context is, 40 years later or 400 years later. In the plays that you’re choosing, you can still follow the trajectory of “somebody does something, and there’s consequences for it, good, happy, or tragic.” And so I’d say you’re choosing classical plays in that sense.
Jessika D. Williams (center), Jonathan Dyrud (bottom), Maggie Kettering + Steve Pickering in The Taming of the Shrew at Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, directed by Sara Bruner PHOTO JOY STROTZ
You’re talking about details, in terms of the choices of three different theatres. But what we’re also trying to get at is our collective sense of “how do we behave together in this world?” Is there a more vital question to be asked? I happen to think theatre asks that question really well. I don’t want your job of trying to figure out how to have plays in all three theatres. I’m just going to say it’s really hard. What piece of advice might you give early-career directors who aspire to be artistic directors?
SARA | Well, one piece of advice I’d give is to be mindful of who you take advice from. Everyone will have an idea for you about what you ought to do. Particularly young artists: they find people that they look up to, and I think they take their words too seriously. Every time someone asks me for advice, I remind them not to listen to me too much.
Try to find the people you love to work with. Be rigorous. That’s one of the number-one things. And I do think you have to show up and be the kind of person in a room who makes people think, “I want to be in a room with that person again.”
LUE | You mentioned burnout a little while ago, so it’s leading me to ask—
SARA | Oh God, are you going to ask me about burnout?
LUE | No, I’m going to ask how you are taking care of yourself to avoid burnout.
SARA | It’s hard for me to not feel a lot of fear right now because of what’s happening nationally, which—emotionally and psychologically—could cause extraordinary burnout. I’ve been recognizing that in myself, and I was already just physically running on low. Lately my mantra has been to not get sad or stressed out but to get strategic about things. That’s been very helpful for me.
I’ve started really letting myself…not be good at the things I’m not good at. I’m going to let other people who are good at them, and like to do them, do them. I have found so much freedom in that. I get anxious every time I think about x. It literally makes my anxiety go up. So I say to so-and-so, “Will you please?” And they say, “Yes, I would love to do that for you.” That’s been a bit of a game changer for me.
LUE | Would you say that some of that strategy came to you while you were at Boise in the EMBA program? Knowing what you’re really good at and sticking with it, and finding people that have a skill set that’s useful—and that they’re good at—was a strategic plan move in a way too, right?
SARA | Yes, definitely. The other thing that that program really taught me is to talk to people outside of the business. Sometimes
you get caught up in thinking your problem is really interesting and special. Then you talk to someone from Hewlett Packard and find out it’s neither.
But also just find mentors, safe mentors to talk to—not people you’re working alongside with. That’s been very helpful.
LUE | I think leadership is a lonely position. Nobody’s going to tell you the truth.
SARA | Nope.
Another thing I learned is that my job is not at all to have all the right answers, it’s just to ask the right questions. Which is exactly what directing is as well.
Dr. Lue Morgan Douthit is the Director of Research and Practice and Co-Founder of Play on Shakespeare. She spent 25 seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where she was Director of Literary Development and Dramaturgy and cofounder and co-producer of the Black Swan Lab.
Joe Wegner (center), with Dar’Jon Marquise Bentley, Jessie Cope Miller + James Alexander Rankin in Twelfth Night at Great Lakes Theater, directed by Sara Bruner
PHOTO ROGER MASTROIANNI
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION ESSAY
Published by SDC and established in 2015, the SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section (PRS) serves directors and choreographers working professionally and in institutions of higher learning. SDC Journal’s mission is to give voice to an empowered collective of directors and choreographers working in all jurisdictions and venues across the country, encourage advocacy, and highlight artistic achievement.
To that end, the SDC Journal PRS seeks essays with accessible language that focus on practice and practical application and that exemplify the fruitful intersections that can occur between the academic/scholarly and the professions/crafts. We are particularly invested in exploring directorial work, applications, and innovations in antiracist theatre practices and related ways of centering care in artistic spaces, laboratories, and classrooms.
Examples of these types of articles include:
• Scholarly analysis of directorial or choreographic practice (by oneself or another); practice-based research and performance as research.
• Scholarship on innovations in the field, such as new approaches to collaboration, casting, staging, staging intimacy, ensemble-building, and uses of technology, digital theatre, and AI; considering how these impact professional work and/or teaching in higher education.
• Scholarship on the relationship between changes in the professional field and the training of theatre artists, including innovative, non-traditional approaches and applications of directorial and choreographic practices and skills, as well as applications of these skills in other economies.
• Scholarship that inspires creative work (original practices, historical context, theory).
• Dramaturgical material from a production or piece that might be of interest to other directors or choreographers, such as topic-specific research or elements of process related to script formulation, adaptation, or devising.
• Approaches to training, teaching, and/or mentoring the transitions between undergraduate, MFA, or PhD training and the profession.
• Continuing education/training for directors and choreographers.
• Scholarship about sociological dynamics of the profession— such as diversity and equity in hiring, rates of compensation and benefits, representation and unions, intellectual property rights, etc.
• Professional-academic partnerships (e.g. academic institutions with professional theatre partnerships, residencies, or guest artists programs): What are best practices? How might we further build connections?
For details on submission requirements, process, and evaluation criteria, please visit www.sdcweb.org/sdc-journal/sdc-journalpeer-review
Please direct inquiries to both PRS Co-Editors:
Ann M. Shanahan
MFA, Professor and Artistic Director, Department of Theatre and Drama University of Wisconsin - Madison Amshanahan@wisc.edu
Emily A. Rollie
PhD, Associate Professor of Theatre, Central Washington University Erollie@gmail.com
SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION BOOK REVIEW
The SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section seeks artists and practitioners to review books and publications that focus upon the field of directing or choreography. The book review section is an edited section that seeks to provide SDC Members and readers with indepth analysis of scholarly and popular material that is inspired by or has a direct impact on the work of directors or choreographers.
For those seeking their first foray into publishing, the book review is an excellent way to learn the publishing process and explore the development of their ideas in-print. In addition to reviewers, the editors also seek book titles and publications for review that would be of interest to SDC Members.
Inquiries, for both reviews and titles for review, may be directed to:
Kathleen M. McGeever SDCJ-PRS Book Review Editor MFA, Professor of Performance and Chair — Northern Arizona University Kathleen.McGeever@nau.edu
Ruth Pe Palileo
SDCJ-PRS Associate Book Review Editor
PhD, Artistic Director — Current Theatrics Current.theatrics@gmail.com
SDC FOUNDATION
THE 2025 SDC FOUNDATION “MR. ABBOTT” AWARD PRESENTATION TO CHRISTOPHER ASHLEY
On Monday, March 31, director Christopher Ashley was honored with the “Mr. Abbott” Award for Achievement on Broadway by SDC Foundation. The festive and joyful evening, written by Doug Wright and directed by Leigh Silverman, took place at City Winery in New York City.
Hosted by actor and director James Monroe Iglehart, the ceremony included tributes— alternately moving and hilarious—from many of Ashley’s collaborators, including stage manager Martha Donaldson, music director Ian Eisendrath (who also music directed the event), designer David Gallo, actor Harriet Harris, playwright Paul Rudnick, choreographer Sergio Trujillo, and producer Beth Williams.
Ashley was also feted throughout the night with musical numbers from shows he directed, including “Welcome to the Rock” from Come from Away, performed by Josh Breckenridge, Joel Hatch, James Seol, Jim Walton, and Paul Whitty; Tony Award nominee Montego Glover’s rendition of “Colored Woman” from Memphis; and “If” from Diana: The Musical, performed by Jeanna de Waal.
Presenting the award, Moisés Kaufman spoke of Ashley’s impact on the field—as a director and as the longtime Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse, where he has served since 2007.
“Tonight, you’ve heard from so many of Chris’s collaborators what an inspired artist he is and what a steadfast creative force he is in the American theatre,” Kaufman said. “You’ve heard how he creates rooms where innovation is nurtured, and artists are bolstered and encouraged to do their best work. All these things are true and they’re the marks of a great artist. And we’re so fortunate to count Chris as part of our industry.”
Kaufman continued, speaking of Ashley’s tenure in San Diego, “He has not only created some of the most memorable and impactful work of the last 25 years, but he’s given a whole generation of artists a place to try things out, to dream, to test ideas out in front of an audience. His impact on the American theatre is impossible to quantify. While we were working on Here There Are Blueberries, he came to the first run-through, at the end of which he approached me and whispered two sentences in my ear. The
entire play came into different focus for me, and we ended up changing the entire ending to what it is now. I’m not going to tell you what he said. That’s between him and me. But suffice it to say that that is his magic. He whispers things and makes our art form better.”
Concluding his remarks, Kaufman spoke movingly about Ashley’s personal impact on him, praising the “courage and imagination” of Ashley’s early days in the New York
Christopher Ashley
PHOTO MICHAEL HULL
theatre, representing “queer characters that were as three-dimensional and independent as their heterosexual counterparts had been in film and literature for centuries.” Today, he said, “we celebrate Chris for his art, his craftsmanship, his courage, and his nurturing of the next generation of theatre artists in America. Like Mr. Abbott before him, he changed the face of our industry. We are all in your debt. Thank you.”
Ashley, the incoming Artistic Director of Roundabout Theatre Company effective July
TOP A performance of “Welcome to the Rock” from Come from Away BOTTOM, LEFT Montego Glover performing “Colored Woman” from Memphis BOTTOM, RIGHT Jeanna de Waal performing “If” from Diana: The Musical PHOTOS MICHAEL HULL
2026, accepted the “Mr. Abbott” Award— presented by RuPaul’s Drag Race superstar Shuga Cain and Broadway Bares and Death Becomes Her performer Michael Graceffa— with characteristic generosity as he reflected on how he felt listening to the tributes that were shared over the course of the evening.
“I was thinking about how incredible it is to be honored by your peers, by other people who know what directors and choreographers do. And there’s so many people who actually don’t quite know
what a director does. I was thinking of my grandmother who tried to come see every show I ever did when she was alive; I think she saw 15 or 20 of them. Every time after the show she would come up and she would give me the biggest hug, and she would tell me that she was so proud that I had made those actors learn all of those lines. So I guess this is for my grandmother and also for the extraordinary work that directors and choreographers do in this country.
“I’m so moved that all of you are joining us up here in celebrating the work of the Foundation,” he concluded. “Because like so many of the directors who were talking about the work, I think I’ve had eight Observers on various shows, and they’ve gone on to extraordinary careers. The work that the Foundation does in connecting people and supporting artists in the darkest times and of also opening a door to new talent...I think we’re living in a not spectacularly door-opening kind of a moment. So the work of the Foundation is more important than ever. And I think this is a golden age of the theatre where really exciting new artists are stepping up to the plate and telling stories we haven’t heard before, with incredible artistry and innovation and guts and passion. So, most of all, together with the Foundation and together with all of you, I’d like to celebrate the next generation of amazing artists in the American theatre.”
TOP SDCF Trustees Maria Torres, Justin Emeka, Victoria Traube, Barbara Whitman, Jonathan Parker + Laura Penn with Foundation Director Dani Barlow (second from left) MIDDLE Susan Stroman, Christopher Ashley, Jerry Mitchell + Jack O’Brien BOTTOM James Monroe Iglehart, Christopher Ashley + Moisés Kaufman PHOTOS MICHAEL HULL
THANK YOU
to all our donors for their generous support of SDC Foundation through their contributions to the 2025 “Mr. Abbott” Award celebration of Christopher Ashley!
Junkyard Dog Productions
Marleen & Kenny Alhadeff
The Araca Group
Sue Frost
David Hyde Pierce
Christopher Ashley
Gould, Kobrick & Schlapp, PC
$20,000+
John Gore Organization
The Shubert Organization
$10,000 – $19,999
James and Deborah Burrows
Family Foundation
Grove Entertainment
IATSE Roundabout Theatre Company
La Jolla Playhouse
Frank Marshall & Kathleen Kennedy
$5,000 – $9,999
Stephen & Paula Reynolds
Spivak Lipton LLP
$2,500 – $4,999
Slevin & Hart P.C.
Susan Stroman
$1,000 – $2,499
Stage Directors and Choreographers Society
Jerry Mitchell UTA
Barbara Whitman
Temple University
Evan Yionoulis & Donald Holder
Three Summers of Lincoln
Victoria Traube
Hank Unger
Kenneth Willman
Actors’ Equity Association
Broadway League
Rachel Chavkin
Joe DiPietro Entertainment Community Fund
Melia Bensussen
Clint Bond Jr.
Jo Bonney
Brown Shoe Productions
Debby Buchholz
Jeffrey Calhoun
Mark Brokaw
Kristy & Tim Cummings
Robyn Goodman
David Hein & Irene Sankoff
Patrick Herold
Liz Diamond
DiPaola Consulting Partners
Justin Emeka
Amy Gilfenbaum
IATSE Local One
IATSE Local 764
Benita de Wit
Sheldon Epps
Daniel Goldstein
Maximum Entertainment Productions
Michael Moore
Agency
Needle Productions
$500 – $999
IATSE Local 798
Anne Kauffman
Moisés Kaufman
Dan Knechtges
Michael Moore
Jack O’Brien
Up to $500
Michael Griffo
Harriet Harris
Ashley Hellberg
Caitlin Higgins
Keith Hurd
John Kiffel
Jonathan Parker
Sam Pinkleton
Mindy Rich
Ellenore Scott
Segal
Robert Osmond
Sharon Ott
Carl Pasbjerg
Laura Penn
Scott Schwartz
Seret Scott
Segal Marco
Theatre Development Fund
Kumiko Yoshii
Bernie Telsey
Beth Williams
Deborah Wilson
Fatima Wilson
Michael Wilson
Doug Wright & David Clement
Parker Nolan
Allison Rodgers
Casey Stangl
Michael Van Sertima
THE 2024 SEASON SDC FOUNDATION AWARDS
On May 6, SDC Foundation hosted a virtual ceremony honoring the recipients and finalists of three of its major honors: the Joe A. Callaway Awards, Zelda Fichandler Award, and Gordon Davidson Award, as well as the recipient of the Lloyd Richards New Futures Residency. The annual ceremony is an opportunity for the Foundation and the national theatre community to celebrate the extraordinary work done by SDC Members, and to acknowledge the enduring legacies of some of the field’s visionary leaders.
This year’s event—hosted by SDC Executive Board Member Leigh Silverman and directed by Ellie Handel—brought together an impassioned and committed group of artists, many of whom spoke about the power of theatre to bring people together in the current moment.
Silverman began her remarks by noting, “In this time, with so much uncertainty in our country and the world, where there are specific attacks on artists, art institutions, on our own humanity, it’s important to come together and lift up our fellow artists to celebrate the work they have poured into their own communities. It makes me think about why I do this work, why I am a director, and what pushes me to keep going in difficult times. My call to do this work has always been the dream of being part of this amazing theatre community. I imagined that
there would be a place filled with people who were as deliriously energized as me, plotting and scheming to move to New York, singing to cast albums, preserving well-read programs, putting folded ticket stubs up on a bulletin board—people who were just as obsessed, just as possessed, and determined.
“I couldn’t wait to find my place,” Silverman continued, “and I found it here at SDC, because it doesn’t matter where you are geographically, we are all together in the same madness, under the safe and protective umbrella of our Union. I’m really looking forward to hearing from those honored today as a source of continued inspiration, and a reminder of why we do the work. So let’s get to it.”
From there, Silverman turned the Zoom screen over to Liz Diamond, President of the SDC Foundation Board of Trustees. In addition to bestowing awards, she noted, the Foundation produces Professional Development Programs, networking gatherings, panels and podcasts, a monthly Bulletin, research, special events, and an Emergency Assistance Fund.
Diamond took a moment to acknowledge her colleagues on the SDCF Board, including Vice President and Secretary Ellenore Scott, Treasurer Sharon Ott, and Trustees Maggie Burrows, Justin Emeka, Jonathan Parker,
Laura Penn, Maria Torres, Victoria Traube, and Barbara Whitman.
To present the first awards of the evening, Diamond introduced Shea Sullivan, Chair of the Callaway Committee, which also included William Carlos Angulo, Maggie Burrows, Roger Danforth, Marcia Milgrom Dodge, Kyle Donnelly, Dell Howlett, Kenny Ingram, Gerry McIntyre, Margarett Perry, Danya Taymor, and Daniela Varon. First presented in 1989, the Callaway Awards are peer-given awards recognizing excellence in the arts of stage direction and choreography in a given New York City Off-Broadway season—in this case, 2023–2024.
Sullivan announced that the Callaway finalists for excellence in directing were Saheem Ali for Buena Vista Social Club (Atlantic Theater Company) and Sam Pinkleton for Oh, Mary! (Lucille Lortel Theatre). The Callaway finalists for excellence in choreography were Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck for Buena Vista Social Club and Graciela Daniele and Alex Sanchez for The Gardens of Anuncia (Lincoln Center Theater).
Doug Hughes arrived next to speak to the work of Daniel Aukin, who won the Callaway Award for directing Stereophonic at Playwrights Horizons, written by David Adjmi. “Let’s face it,” Hughes said, “Daniel is already laden with awards for Stereophonic, he’s stooped beneath their weight, so I
Andrew R. Butler, Sarah Pidgeon, Chris Stack + Juliana Canfield in Stereophonic at Playwrights Horizons, directed by Daniel Aukin PHOTO CHELCIE PARRY
want to gently bend the rules here, and simultaneously recognize the sustained excellence Daniel has demonstrated for years. I am his avid fan. I rate him as a master. Why do I feel this way? I think it’s because courage, the virtue that permits all other virtues, has been on display in every production of his that I’ve seen. He never plays it safe. Judging by what shows up on stage, I believe he is possessed of a brand of contagious courage that inspires actors to go to limits they hadn’t dreamt of when they first walked into the rehearsal room.”
Accepting the award, Aukin thanked Hughes and the members of the Callaway Committee, noting how “deeply, deeply gratifying” it was to be recognized by a committee of his peers.
“I hope the American theatre always finds ways to take big swings with irresponsibly ambitious work,” Aukin said in his remarks. “It’s part of what keeps us alive to the possibilities of this sensitive and beguiling form. Many of the conditions of making theatre are as bad or worse than they’ve ever been in my professional life. Let’s try to find ways to keep swinging for the fences.”
Next, William Carlos Angulo and Daniela Varon presented the Callaway Award for Excellence in Choreography to nicHi douglas for (pray)—a work douglas wrote and directed, as well as choreographed, which was co-produced by Ars Nova and National Black Theatre.
“In their groundbreaking immersive piece, (pray),” Angulo began, “nicHi douglas has created a multiverse of Black expression, combining storytelling, ritual, history, spirituality, and music into an experience that pushes the boundaries of dance theatre. nicHi’s innovative blend of West African dance, contemporary modern, social dance, and spiritual ritual illustrates both the ancient roots and futuristic possibilities of Black traditions. In doing so, they illuminate the interconnectedness of lineage, inheritance, and communal healing. They prophetically help us all to reach into the future by connecting us deeply to our past. I didn’t know that dance could do this.”
Accepting the award, douglas extended congratulations to everyone honored by the Foundation this year, as well as thanks to the Callaway Committee and all their collaborators on (pray). “The piece ultimately is inviting audiences to claim or reclaim, depending on your journey, your relationship to spirituality, whatever that big word means
to you. In these times—I don’t like to say that phrase, but I do feel it’s important, and I’m alive in these times so I have to bring it up—in these times I feel fortunate to have made a work that can keep grounding us in the truthful human quest for meaning. By which I mean I think we all need each other’s prayers right now.”
Silverman returned to the Zoom screen to recognize director Jon Royal, who was the 2023 recipient of the Foundation’s Lloyd Richards New Futures Residency, which supports artists who are illuminating Black cultural experiences on stage, helping them become artistic leaders in the American theatre. The residency provides unique exposure to the responsibilities of being an artistic director and to the internal structure and workings of a theatrical institution by forging or deepening a relationship between the recipient artist and an artistic leader. Royal served as Resident Artist at St. Louis Black Repertory Theatre, where he worked with Founder and Producing Director Ron Himes from December 2023 to December 2024.
“It’s been a real privilege,” Royal said, “to work with all the talented artists who I’ve had a chance to interact with over the last year. Some who are just beginning their journey as artists, and some who have worked here at The Black Rep for years and years and years. To see multi-generations really, really honor this tradition of telling Black stories is everything that I want to do; it’s every reason that I’m an artist.”
Noting that he was currently in rehearsal at the theatre with a production of August Wilson’s Radio Golf, Royal also noted that “telling stories from throughout the diaspora
nicHi douglas
PHOTO RYAN PFLUGER
D. Woods + company in the Ars Nova/National Black Theatre coproduction of (pray), written, directed + choreographed by nicHi douglas
PHOTO BEN ARONS
Daniel Aukin
and telling different points of view and perspectives, particularly of Black folks, never gets old—but is so vital in the current moment. I want to thank SDCF for allowing me to be here, for facilitating this.”
Vivienne Benesch introduced the Zelda Fichandler Award portion of the evening. Given annually in recognition of directors and choreographers who have demonstrated great accomplishment to date with singular creativity and deep investment in a particular community or region, the Fichandler Award focuses each year on a different region; all the nominees for this year’s award were directors and choreographers from the Western United States.
“I congratulate this year’s Zelda Fichandler Award winner and finalist,” Benesch said, after taking a moment to recognize Fichandler’s legacy and inspiration. “You are a part of a great continuum and legacy of directors who are deeply impacting the communities in which you have chosen to tell stories. May you flourish in what Zelda called our ‘conspiracy of belief.’”
Fichandler Committee Chair M. Graham Smith took the screen next, and thanked his fellow committee members Sara Bruner, Karina Gutiérrez, Jeffrey Lo, and Chip Miller for their thoughtful contributions to choosing winner Leslie Ishii and finalist Snehal Desai. “In our conversations,” Smith noted, “we found ourselves uplifted by all the candidates’ work, and the many ways that our Members are making important contributions to the field through innovative storytelling, social impact, modeling leadership, and exploring new ways for our art form to make meaningful change. This served as a reminder to us that, despite the very real challenges our field is facing in this moment, there’s no shortage of
creativity, compassion, or civic service among our Members.”
Desai, the Artistic Director of Center Theatre Group since August 2024, spoke in his remarks of Fichandler’s belief “in the power of theatre not just as an art form, but as a civic act.” Fichandler, he noted, “said it is our job to awaken the humanity of the audience, and then they have to figure out what to do with that. I think a lot about that in our current moment...Here in LA, first at East West Players, and now at Center Theatre Group, I have seen firsthand the power of theatre to activate, reflect, and to heal. That work is never done in isolation; it is always collective. It is always communal.”
The theme of community continued as Tim Dang and Molly Smith co-presented the Fichandler Award to winner Leslie Ishii, the Artistic Director of Perseverance Theatre, which Smith founded in Juneau, Alaska, in 1979. Smith praised Ishii as “a breathtaking combination of forces which have shaped her. She’s a fourth-generation Japanese American theatremaker in acting, directing, producing, and leading. She’s a social justice warrior who stands in the fire of her ideas.
“What I love about Leslie is her infinite curiosity,” she continued. “She wants to know who you are. She asks probing questions. She digs into the script that is you to find out the why, and the how of who you are. Leslie probes; she’s insightful.” Reflecting on the award’s beloved namesake, Smith concluded her remarks by noting, “This sense of curiosity, this sense of probing is exactly how I always felt about Zelda, whether she was speaking to artists or students or in the rehearsal hall…I think Leslie is the perfect embodiment of this award, and I can only imagine Zelda would be very pleased.”
In her acceptance speech, Ishii shared her “deepest gratitude to our late Zelda Fichandler, the matriarch of our regional theatre movement. Her vision affirmed my calling to create theatre for public good that contributes to the healing justice of our communities, and to the health and wellbeing of our ecologies. I am humbled and moved by this recognition.”
Next, Neel Keller, representing the Gordon Davidson Award Committee (which also included Sheldon Epps, Michael John Garcés, Laura Penn, Lisa Peterson, and Warner Shook), spoke about the Davidson Award, which recognizes a director or choreographer for lifetime achievement and distinguished service in the national notfor-profit theatre. Keller also thanked Rachel Davidson, Gordon Davidson’s daughter, for serving as an advisor to the committee.
“Gordon’s beliefs and accomplishments always guide us and guide our conversations about selecting an awardee,” Keller noted. “Gordon ran a large institution for decades, managing to sustain it through the good times and the tough ones. Throughout all those years, he maintained and spread his passionate belief in the importance and power of theatre to improve our society and strengthen our communities.
“As the committee reflected on Gordon’s legacy over the last year, we came to feel it was important to honor a colleague who had also kept an institution alive through difficult times, someone who shared Gordon’s commitment to nurturing and broadening the community of artists and audiences. Then in January, as the committee met in the days of the aftermath of the LA fires, the critical need to rebuild communities there led us to believe it would be especially meaningful this year to honor someone
Jon Royal
Leslie Ishii
PHOTO JOVELL PHOTOGRAPHY, ALASKA
Snehal Desai
PHOTO JEFFREY FITERMAN
whose life’s work had been dedicated to the city that Gordon loved so much. We reached consensus easily.”
Bill Rauch then took the Zoom to introduce the recipient of this year’s Gordon Davidson Award, José Luis Valenzuela, the Artistic Director of the Latino Theater Company, which operates the five-theatre complex at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Valenzuela created the Latino Theatre Lab at LATC in 1985 and established the Latino Theater Initiative at the Mark Taper Forum, which ran from 1991 to 2005.
“It’s not a coincidence,” Rauch said, “that José Luis started the impactful Latino Theater Initiative at Center Theatre Group during Gordon’s tenure, which of course influenced José Luis’s leadership of his Latino Theater Company, now with a remarkable field-changing 40-year history. I find it so elegant that the man who began the Latino Theatre Lab at the Los Angeles Theatre Center four decades ago is now the Artistic Director of that entire multi-theatre complex.
“When I think of LA,” Rauch continued, “I think of resilience. From the aftermath of the ’92 riots, which is the year that I met our honoree, to the devastating fires a few months ago, José Luis’s leadership perfectly embodies that Los Angeles spirit of resilience. He also embodies the concept of leadership as service as well as anyone I’ve ever met.
“What would the Los Angeles theatre scene, what would the entire national Latinx theatre scene, what would our entire field be without José Luis’s influence? I am so happy, and I am so humbled to present the Gordon Davidson Award to my colleague, and my friend, José Luis Valenzuela.”
Valenzuela accepted the award and delivered remarks that appear in full on this page.
After that, it was time for Silverman to end the evening. “Congratulations to José Luis, and to all the extraordinary artists who have been honored here tonight. And thank you for being here. I know I’ve loved getting to hear from my peers, and to be reminded why we do what we do. As you continue your journeys as artists or artistic supporters, I hope you too can feel the positive impact of our work. Artists, particularly during this hard and unpredictable time, provide inspiration, hope, and joy for society. It’s work we’ve been called to do, and I’m honored to do it alongside all of you, and I’ve loved hosting you tonight. Congratulations again to all our awardees and finalists for the 2024 SDCF Awards. Good night.”
THE GORDON DAVIDSON AWARD ACCEPTANCE REMARKS BY JOSÉ LUIS VALENZUELA
I’m so honored and I’m so grateful to the committee for this incredible honor. I feel humbled and honored to receive the Gordon Davidson Award. I want to express my heartfelt thanks to his family, especially Judith and Rachel. This award is a huge recognition, and I’m thrilled to be part of this esteemed group. I firmly believe that Gordon Davidson was one of the greatest theatremakers of the 20th century. He was an amazing leader and a dedicated visionary who had a huge impact on the American theatre. His philosophy, which emphasized the importance of producing plays that matter and focusing on important issues, has stayed with me. Gordon taught me that theatre that matters can create community, foster innovation, and spark conversations. This award is a testament to the power of theatre to bring about positive change and shed light on the hidden truths of American culture.
I’m proud to represent Latino/Chicano theatre, which I believe is theatre that truly matters. I have the privilege of working with one of the greatest ensembles in the American theatre, the Latino Theater Company. Five of the original members are still together, creating and making decisions after four decades of collaboration. This year, we celebrate our 40th anniversary, and we’re not only talking about the context of the world, but also the stylistic choices that reflect contemporary times in the United States. Theatre making is not just about entertainment, it’s a powerful medium that fosters intellectual and emotional
dialogue, bringing people together no matter the size of the venue. I’ve always been curious about humanity, the specific parts of humanity, the community, and the moment captured through the theatre. How can theatre offer a glimpse of enlightenment to an audience in this turbulent time when people are discussing the challenges of our society? This is an important time for the theatre to confront its reality, and the role that it plays in shaping culture.
I agree that it will be challenging, but theatre will always exist because it can adapt to any space, a small room, on the street, a plaza, a stadium, or even a grand theatre. There’s a lot of talk about the decline of the American theatre: tickets aren’t selling, young people aren’t coming, some even go as far as to blame DEI for the theatres losing their audience. We have conferences and symposiums to discuss this, but I believe we need more conversations about the art form, and why theatre is important. Shall we blame the audience, or shall we take a deeper look at our institutions, and the plays we are producing for the 21st century? The American theatre is very young in its form and its style; we have a long way to go for a young country that’s just beginning to understand its identity. Theatre can help gather us and inspire us to see the future of American culture. Today we have the great opportunity to understand who we are culturally as a country, because our beautiful diversity will lead us into the culture of revolution needed in American theatre.
Theatre is about thoughts, ideas, dreams, aspirations, conflicts, and resolutions; it offers comfort and becomes a special place. For people of color and other marginalized communities, plays are becoming historical documents. In dark times like this, theatre becomes even more meaningful. For someone like me, who dedicates their life to creating meaningful works for their community, being recognized by you and my colleagues is an honor. I’m so proud to be in the company of past recipients, and to be part of this incredibly brilliant group of people. Let’s continue doing theatre that matters, as Gordon would say. Thank you so much.
José Luis Valenzuela PHOTO LATINO THEATER COMPANY – DAVIDSON WINTER
Denis Arndt
DIRECTOR
Member since 1995
Diana Baffa-Brill
CHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1976
Hinton Battle DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 2006
Keith Baxter DIRECTOR
Member since 2003
Martin Benson DIRECTOR
Member since 1986
Michael Blakemore DIRECTOR
Member since 1968
Dan Bonnell DIRECTOR
Member since 1987
Adam Brace DIRECTOR
Member since 2023
Mark Brokaw DIRECTOR
Member since 1991
Robert Brustein DIRECTOR
Member since 1987
Allan Carlsen
DIRECTOR
IN MEMORIAM
July 1, 2023 – June 30, 2025
Member since 1987
Jacques Cartier DIRECTOR
Member since 1987
Wallace Chappell DIRECTOR
Member since 1980
Edie Cowan DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1982
John Dillon DIRECTOR
Member since 1974
James Edmondson
DIRECTOR
Member since 1995
Arthur Faria
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1977
Shirley Jo Finney DIRECTOR
Member since 1992
Richard Foreman DIRECTOR
Member since 1976
William Friedkin DIRECTOR
Member since 1981
Athol Fugard
DIRECTOR
Member since 1975
Charles Gray
DIRECTOR
Member since 1967
Bill Guske
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1976
Joseph Hardy DIRECTOR
Member since 1979
Maurice Hines
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1986
Nagle Jackson DIRECTOR
Member since 1977
James Earl Jones
DIRECTOR
Member since 1972
Tom Jones DIRECTOR
Member since 1968
Dan Kern
DIRECTOR
Member since 2014
Robert Lanchester
DIRECTOR
Member since 1978
Alan Langdon
DIRECTOR
Member since 1994
John David Lutz
DIRECTOR
Member since 1989
Marti Maraden
DIRECTOR
Member since 2007
Jonathan Marks DIRECTOR
Member since 2015
Howard Millman DIRECTOR
Member since 1985
Richard Natkowski
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1977
Mike Nussbaum
DIRECTOR
Member since 1979
Ken Page DIRECTOR
Member since 2017
Joel Paley
DIRECTOR
Member since 1992
Tina Paul CHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1985
Adrienne Posner
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1996
Robert Richmond
DIRECTOR
Member since 2012
Eric Riley
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1996
Dennis Rosa
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1966
David Schweizer
DIRECTOR
Member since 1994
Bruce K. Sevy
DIRECTOR
Member since 1988
Mel Shapiro
DIRECTOR
Member since 1969
Sande Shurin
DIRECTOR
Member since 1990
Buff Shurr
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1966
Lynne TaylorCorbett
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 1981
Russell Treyz
DIRECTOR
Member since 1972
Jonathan Warman
DIRECTORCHOREOGRAPHER
Member since 2009
Ted Weiant
DIRECTOR
Member since 1977
Jonathan Wilson
DIRECTOR
Member since 1991
Steven Yuhasz
DIRECTOR
Member since 1991
SDC LEGACY
MARTIN BENSON
1937–2024
Martin Benson was, in partnership with his longtime friend and colleague David Emmes, the Founding Artistic Director of South Coast Repertory and the company’s co-artistic director for 46 years. The first paid employee in the theatre’s history, Benson made his SCR directorial debut with the company’s first official production, Molière’s Tartuffe, in November 1964. He directed 126 SCR productions and was honored seven times (a record) with the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Distinguished Achievement in Directing. Three of those awards were for works by Shaw, a playwright for whom he had a particular affinity and acknowledged mastery: Major Barbara, Misalliance, and Heartbreak House. Benson was also honored for Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, Miller’s The Crucible, Sally Nemeth’s Holy Days, and the world premiere of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit, which he also directed at Seattle Repertory Theatre and Houston’s Alley Theatre. Under his leadership with Emmes, South Coast Rep received the 1988 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. In 2014, the company’s theatre complex was renamed the David Emmes/Martin Benson Theatre Center in their honor.
JAMES
EDMONDSON
1938–2025
James Edmondson was a director, actor, and educator who devoted much of his theatrical life to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he directed 38 productions and performed in more than 100. His directing work at OSF included Well, Rabbit Hole, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, King Lear, Wild Oats, Titus Andronicus, and Fuddy Meers. In addition to his work with OSF, Edmondson directed at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, Great River Shakespeare Festival, Southern Oregon University, and more. In 1988 Edmondson founded, with OSF Artistic Director Emeritus Jerry Turner, the Daedalus Project, an annual OSF fundraiser for local, regional, national, and international HIV/AIDS organizations. It raised over $1.8 million in its more than 30-year history. Each Daedalus fundraiser ended with Edmondson reciting the closing lines from Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey in honor of those lost to the AIDS epidemic. The play’s last line is “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
RICHARD FOREMAN
1937–2025
Richard Foreman was a director, playwright, and founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, an OffOff-Broadway company for which he wrote, directed, and designed more than 50 plays. Influential, iconoclastic, and a legend of the downtown theatre scene, Foreman’s many awards include 10 Obies and a MacArthur Fellowship. His directing work outside OHT included Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center Theater, Woyzeck at Hartford Stage Company, and Don Juan at the Guthrie Theater and New York Shakespeare Festival, where he also directed multiple productions including The Golem and the premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus. He collaborated (as librettist and stage director) with composer Stanley Silverman on eight music-theatre pieces produced by the Music-Theatre Group and New York City Opera. His final play, Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, directed by Kara Feely, premiered at La MaMa in December of 2024.
TOP LEFT Martin Benson (standing) directing Adam Haas Hunter in South Coast Rep’s 2015 production of The Whipping Man PHOTO C/O SOUTH COAST REPERTORY; TOP RIGHT Richard Foreman PHOTO LEBRECHT MUSIC & ARTS / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; BOTTOM James Edmondson (standing) + Dennis Robertson in King Lear at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 1997 PHOTO DAVID COOPER
SDC LEGACY
HOWARD MILLMAN
1931–2025
Howard Millman was a director and artistic leader who over the course of his career held leadership positions at Asolo Repertory Theatre, Geva Theatre, and Pittsburgh Public Theater. He became the Managing Director of Sarasota’s Asolo Theatre Festival in 1968, where he directed a dozen plays along with his managerial duties before he became the Executive Director of the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1980. Following a stint as the Producing Artistic Director at Geva Theatre, Millman returned to a struggling Asolo Rep in 1995 and was integral to returning it to financial and artistic health. At Asolo, he directed The Immigrant, Visiting Mr. Green, The Diary of Anne Frank, and many more. Millman directed regionally at Meadow Brook Theatre, Syracuse Stage, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Peterborough Players, Florida Studio Theatre, and the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, where he was also on the Board of Trustees and directed his last production, Driving Miss Daisy, in 2016.
ATHOL FUGARD
1932–2025
Playwright, director, and actor Athol Fugard will be remembered for a body of work that exposed and indicted the cruelties of apartheid in his homeland of South Africa. The author of more than 30 plays, Fugard frequently directed his own work, illuminating the harrowing consequences of apartheid and racism—both institutional and personal— with incisive clarity. The first of his plays to be performed outside of South Africa, “Master Harold”…and the boys, premiered in 1982 at Yale Repertory Theatre, which became a home for his work and presented eight of his plays, both premieres and revivals. Other theatres where he worked in the United States include La Jolla Playhouse, Manhattan Theatre Club, McCarter Theatre, and Signature Theatre Company, as well as Broadway, where he directed Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, The Island, A Lesson from Aloes, “Master Harold,” and Blood Knot. In 2011, he was honored with a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.
BRUCE K. SEVY
1953–2025
Bruce K. Sevy directed for theatres across the country, but he was most associated with the Denver Center Theatre Company, where he worked from 1982 to 1989, and (as Associate Artistic Director) 1996–2002 and 2006–2016. Sevy was responsible for new play development at the company, first developing its TheatreFest new play program (which was discontinued due to funding cuts in 2002) and then overseeing the Colorado New Play Summit. Originally an actor and music director, Sevy also held positions as Artistic Director of Tacoma Actors Guild (1989–1996) and Associate Artistic Director of Alabama Shakespeare Festival (2002–2005), where he headed the Southern Writers’ Project. Among the productions he directed for Denver Center were Master Class, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Doubt, and All My Sons, and he staged the company’s annual production of A Christmas Carol from 2005 to 2014. His production of 2 Pianos 4 Hands was seen at more than 20 theatres across the country, including DCTC in 2003.
TOP Athol Fugard rehearsing ‘Master Harold’...and the Boys with Željko Ivanek + Danny Glover at Yale Rep, 1982 PHOTO T
REP; BOTTOM LEFT Howard Millman
SDC LEGACY
MEL SHAPIRO
1935–2024
Mel Shapiro, a past member of SDC’s Executive Board, was a theatre director, writer, and professor whose books include The Director’s Companion. Shapiro held positions as resident director at Arena Stage and coproducing director at the Guthrie Theater, and he directed for companies around the country and in New York. He was renowned for his collaborations with John Guare, which included the Off-Broadway premiere of The House of Blue Leaves and Two Gentlemen of Verona, a musical version of Shakespeare’s comedy (co-written by Shapiro and Guare, with lyrics by Guare and music by Galt MacDermot) that premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Delacorte Theater before moving to Broadway, where it won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical, and Shapiro was nominated for Best Direction. Before beginning his professional career, Shapiro trained at Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, receiving his BFA and MFA in 1961. A founding member of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1966, he returned to CMU as head of the School of Drama in 1980, serving in that role for a decade before joining the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, where he was head of graduate acting in the theater department until he retired in 2011.
LYNNE
TAYLOR-CORBETT
1946–2025
Lynne Taylor-Corbett was a choreographer and director whose eclectic career spanning theatre, ballet, and film was defined by her joy in movement and connection to the audience. As a young dancer, she danced on Broadway and toured Africa and the Middle East with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater before transitioning to choreography. In 1972 she helped found the Theatre Dance Collection, an ensemble whose goal was to make dance entertaining as well as artistic. Taylor-Corbett made her mark as a choreographer on Broadway with musicals including Chess, Titanic, and the musical revue Swing, which she directed and choreographed; for that show, she was nominated for both Best Direction of a Musical and Best Choreography at the 2000 Tony Awards. Over the course of her career, Taylor-Corbett also choreographed for ballet companies, including her 2011 New York City Ballet production of The Seven Deadly Sins with Wendy Whelan and Patti LuPone, modern dance groups, popular films such as Footloose, and commercials. She was the recipient of the 2008 Joe A. Callaway Award from SDC Foundation for her work on the musical Wanda’s World. In the final years of her life, Taylor-Corbett and her son Shaun Taylor-Corbett co-wrote a musical, Distant Thunder, which she directed and choreographed for Amas Musical Theatre in 2022, and for which she posthumously received the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreographer.
DAVID SCHWEIZER
1950–2024
Director David Schweizer was acclaimed for his extensive and eclectic range of work, with a particular affinity for new theatre, opera, and live performances. After graduating from Yale School of Drama, he made his New York debut in 1973, at the age of 24, opening the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center with Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida for producer Joseph Papp. In addition to radical, sometimes controversial interpretations of classic plays, he championed new writers, directing premieres by Sam Shepard, Lisa Loomer, and Austin Pendleton, among many others, in New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore, around the country and internationally. Working with his longtime collaborator, composer/ performer Rinde Eckert, Schweizer directed productions including And God Created Great Whales for The Foundry Theatre, Horizon for New York Theatre Workshop, and Pericles for Two River Theater.
SDC LEGACY
MARK BROKAW
1958–2025
Mark Brokaw was a fierce advocate for directors and choreographers. An SDC Member since 1991, he served on the SDC Executive Board for more than 20 years, including two terms as Vice President. He served as President of SDC Foundation from 2020 to 2024. His experience as a director of new work served the Union well as he co-chaired the groundbreaking LORT negotiations that secured coverage for Development work. For Off-Broadway he co-chaired the successful fight to cover Fight Choreography. Both negotiations made it possible for SDC to subsequently advance these protections in other jurisdictions.
Brokaw’s first major production in New York was a revival of Lanford Wilson’s The Rimers of Eldritch at Second Stage Theater, where he found his first artistic home and went on to direct the premiere of cartoonist Lynda Barry’s The Good Times Are Killing Me. He also helmed the original productions of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, Douglas Carter Beane’s As Bees in Honey Drown, Craig Lucas’s The Dying Gaul, Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride, and five plays by Nicky Silver including the Broadway production of The Lyons. Other Broadway productions included The Constant Wife, After Miss Julie, Cinderella, and Heisenberg. Brokaw’s work was seen at theatres across the country, including the O’Neill Theater Center, Williamstown, Yale Rep, Seattle Rep, and the Guthrie Theater. He trained at the Yale School of Drama and served as Artistic Director of the Yale Institute for Music Theatre from 2009 to 2017; he was a member of the Drama Dept. theatre company and an Artistic Associate at Roundabout Theatre. His honors include a Drama League Fellowship and the Alan Schneider Award. He received Drama Desk, Lortel, and Obie Awards for How I Learned to Drive Off-Broadway. He directed a revival of the play with members of the original cast in 2022; it was his final Broadway production.
EDIE COWAN
1942–2025
Director-choreographer Edie Cowan began her career as a performer. Soon after graduating from Butler University, she began auditioning for shows and got her first job, dancing in the ensemble of the original Broadway production of Funny Girl. She was also a member of the original company of Annie, playing several parts and understudying the role of Lily St. Regis, which she played in the national tour. Cowan continued to act throughout her career, appearing in productions Off-Broadway, as well as in movies and on television. She transitioned into choreography with the original production of Little Shop of Horrors, directed by Harold Ashman, which was produced as an Equity Showcase at the WPA Theatre before quickly transferring to the Orpheum Theatre. Cowan went on to direct and choreograph in New York (including productions of As You Like It and Love’s Labour’s Lost at New York Classical Theatre) and at many regional theatres and universities. She also worked internationally under the auspices of the State Department. For several years she was choreographer of the Inner Circle, the New York City journalists’ annual amateur show and roast. Cowan served on the Executive Board of SDC and as a Trustee for the SDC-League Pension & Health Funds.
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Kevin Ray • William E Ray • Preston A Raymer • Stephen Rayne • Pete Reader • Tiffany Rea-Fisher • Alice Reagan • Lee Roy Reams • Theresa Rebeck • Anna E Rebek Christopher P Reber • Vanessa Redgrave • Jessica Redish • David Reed • Logan G Reed • Maxx T Reed • Stephen Reed • Scot Reese • Austin Regan • Ariel Reich
Cara L Reichel • Ariel Reid • Jacqueline Reid • T. Oliver Reid • Andy Reiff • Patrick J Reilly • M. Seth Reines • Gordon D Reinhart • Randy Reinholz • David A Reiser
Eleanor Reissa • Sharon J Reives • Christopher Renshaw • Charles Repole • Krystyna Resavy • Lorraine Ressegger-Slone • Jack Reuler • Jonald Reyes • Veronica Reyes
Geoffrey E Reynolds • Marie Reynolds • Taylor Reynolds • Amy Reynolds-Reed • Brian Rhinehart • Todd A Rhoades • Josh Rhodes • Craig Rhyne • Lara N Rhyner
Jennifer Rias • Joe Ricci • Nicole Ricciardi • Kevin Rich • Bob P Richard • Jean-Paul Richard • Molly Richards • Desmond Richardson • Julie A. Richardson • Charles Richter
Ian Rickson • Tom Ridgely • Roger B Riggle • Glynis Rigsby • Laura Rikard • Ryan Rilette • Scott Rink • Lily Riopelle • Joseph Ritsch • Tlaloc Rivas • Jon Lawrence Rivera
Jesse Robb • Douglas P Robbins • Ilyse Robbins • Sanford Robbins • Tim Robbins • Ken L Roberson • Colette Robert • Guy Roberts • Samantha R Roberts
Zachary T Roberts • Richard Robichaux • Nancy Robillard • Marc Robin • Kelsey E Robins • Andrew J Robinson • Dori A. Robinson • Joshua A Robinson • Kelly Robinson Mabel Robinson • Mary B Robinson • Tom Robinson • Blake Robison • Steven Robman • Robbie Roby • James A Rocco • Juanita Rockwell • Gara Roda Cendra
Ashley Rodbro • Ray Roderick • Max Rodriguez • Robynn Rodriguez • Dámaso Rodríguez • Oscar O Rodriguez Quiroz • Alex Roe • Andy Rogow • Richard Roland
Stephanie Rolland • Dr. Emily Rollie • Lisa Marie M Rollins • Nancy Rominger • Danielle Roos • Rachel A Ropella • Mary Lou Rosato • Jennifer Rose • Judy Rose
Seth Roseman • Eric Rosen • Sharon Rosen • Amy Taylor Rosenblum • Susan Rosenstock • Celine Rosenthal • Debbie Roshe • Jordan E Rosin • Kaitlyn S Rosin
Wendy L Rosoff • Stuart H Ross • Justin Ross Cohen • Kat Ross Kline • Janet Roston • Arthur R Rotch • Jasmine N Roth • Maddie H Roth • Robert J Roth • Lisa M Rothe
Janet S Rothermel • Michael Rothhaar • Stephen Rothman • Peter Rothstein • William F Roudebush • Bruce S Rous • Mia Rovegno • Jennifer Rowe
Katie A Royse Ginther • Shawn Rozsa • Jon Rua • Barbara Rubin • John Gould Rubin • Jonathan E Rubin • Paul Rubin • John Rubinstein • Sara Rudner • Eric Ruffin Dom Ruggiero • Rob Ruggiero • Jerry Ruiz • Patricia Runcie • Michael Rupert • Joanna Rush • Darrell Scott Rushton • Andrew Russell • Brant Russell • Dylan Russell Ronald Russell • Scott Russell • Rusty W Ruth • Collette Rutherford • David Ruttura • Hannah Ryan • Josh T Ryan • Andrew Ryder • Jordan Ryder • Richard Sabellico
Karen A Sabo • Adam Karal Sahli • David Saint • Deborah Saivetz • Brian P Sajko • Christina J Sajous • Lainie Sakakura • Zeina Salame • David Saldivar • Norma Saldivar Courtney Sale • Luis Salgado • DJ Salisbury • Amy Saltz • Matt Saltzberg • Bobbie Saltzman • Samantha Saltzman • Peter Sampieri • Stephen D Sanborn • Alex Sanchez KJ Sanchez • Olga Sanchez • Roman D Sanchez • Andy Sandberg • Megan Sandberg-Zakian • Jennifer Sandella • Derrick Sanders • William Sanders • Kirsten Sanderson
Lee D Sankowich • Stephen Santa • Marcos Santana • Ruben Santiago-Hudson • Fiona Santos • Guy Sanville • Giovanna Sardelli • Marianne Savell • Kholoud Sawaf Jocelyn Sawyer • Madeline Sayet • Sam Scalamoni • Rebekah Scallet • Dick Scanlan • Don Scardino • Ryan Scarlata • Eric D Schaeffer • Kimberly Schafer Thomas Schall • David Schechter • Jay R Scheib • Troy Scheid • Danny Scheie • Erica Schmidt • Graham T Schmidt • Ken Rus Schmoll • Paul Schnee • Mark J Schneider
Robert W Schneider • Kiff Scholl • Or M Schraiber • Stephen A Schrum • Carol Schuberg • Arlene Schulman • Susan H Schulman • Joanie Schultz • Richard L Schultz
Marla A Schulz • Krista M Schwarting • Justin Schwartz • Justin Schwartz • Perry T Schwartz • Scott L Schwartz • Rose Schwietz Malla • David Schwimmer Brady Schwind • Sydney Schwindt • Angie Schworer • Eric Sciotto • David Scotchford • Christopher Scott • Ellenore Scott • Krista Scott • Oz Scott • Pamela Scott
Seret O Scott • Steve Scott • Vincent A Scott • Leslie M Scott-Jones • Christa Scott-Reed • Andrew Scoville • John Sebestyen • David S Sebren • Tim Seib Arthur Allan Seidelman • Serge Seiden • Scott Seidl • Jennifer Seigle • Danica Selem • Peter Sellars • Kimberly Senior • Joan Sergay • John F Serio • Dominique A Serrand Daniel Seth • Joanna Settle • Vanessa Severo • Jacob M Sexton • Michael Sexton • Wendy R Seyb • Richard L Seyd • Mary Seymour • Stephen Shade Matthew J Shaffer • Matt Shakman • Ann Shanahan • Mark Shanahan • Lester Thomas Shane • Adam M Shankman • John P Shanley • Peggy Shannon...
