Academic Directing
The Tempest
by William ShakespeareSweet Briar College, 2023
DIRECTOR
William Shakespeare’s final solo-authored work, The Tempest takes as its subject human creative force – its magic and its art – and explores the limits of the writer’s own capacities. A tale of revenge, a ridiculous comedy, and an earnest story of burgeoning romance, The Tempest is both a celebration of theatrical illusion and a cautionary tale about its power. This innovative production incorporates live video and manipulated visuals inspired by the large canvases of Pop Art to consider the spells cast by the manipulation of images and the possibilities and dangers of our own everyday magic.
SLIDESHOW
A Doll’s House, Pt. 2
by Lucas HnathSweet Briar College, 2023
DIRECTOR
Lucas Hnath’s 2017 Tony Award-nominated play, described as “smart, funny, and utterly engrossing,” by The New York Times, is a contemporary sequel to the naturalist classic by Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (1879). In the Ibsen play, Nora Helmer recognizes her marriage to her husband Torvald to be a prison, and walks out on him, famously slamming the door at the end of the play. Hnath imagines Nora and Torvald fifteen years later, in a reckoning that expands on Ibsen’s searing exploration of marriage and demonstrates its continued relevance to contemporary life.
Love and Information
by Caryl ChurchillLewis & Clark, 2016
DIRECTOR
In Love and Information, Caryl Churchill asks us to consider whether the idea of information can adequately represent our experience of being in the world. Employing her trademark formal inventiveness, Churchill considers these ideas from dozens of perspectives, creating the theatrical equivalent of the barrage of status updates, shares, and notifications that have come to characterize daily life in an “information economy.” Perhaps Churchill also implicitly asks us to consider what it means to make live theater in a culture that is defined by digital consumption. In this production, presented in a “reverse round” of museum display boxes, we recognized the traditional communitarian rhetoric that often surrounds theatrical practice and at the same time called it into question. In a formally disjointed play like this, what do we share with one another? Or is our experience, even of something that we all do together, radically particular to each one of us?SLIDESHOW
Exit the King
by Eugène IonescoLewis & Clark, 2015
DIRECTOR & TRANSLATOR
The absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco wrote the witty, raucous, and ultimately deeply moving play Exit the King in 1962 after suffering from a serious illness in his middle age. He wrote that the illness and the fear that it provoked prompted him to see if “one could learn to die.” More than anything else, Exit the King is his attempt to come to grips with the inevitability of death. But it is at the same time a play that celebrates life, delighting in all of its ridiculousness, preposterousness, and fragile beauty.
SLIDESHOW