Update 5/12/23

 It’s been a minute! I’ll be updating the site soon, but between COVID and some behind the scenes issues with site access, I haven’t been able to update in a while. Still going strong, with projects around Maryland, including at Johns Hopkins University, Sweet Tea Shakespeare, Harford College, and a lot more. I’ve guested on a few podcasts, and generally been teaching and making art for the last several years. More soon!

Timeline

October 2020: Theatre seems to exist (safely at least) on Zoom, so I keep Zooming along. Directing The Devil’s Charter for Sweet Tea Shakespeare. I’ve known Jeremy (AD of STS) for a few years now, and have wanted to do work for STS for even longer. They’re one of many companies born out of the Mary Baldwin/American Shakespeare Center MFA program, so there’s some comfort in working with people who already have a shared language. This one is happening live on a Zoom call, so there won’t be a YouTube link for a while, but I’ll post it here once it is.

September 2020: The promised “something big” is here- along with my dear friend and collaborator Merlyn Q. Sell, I have begun a podcast - The Horned Moon Presents, available wherever you listen to podcasts. THMP is a talk radio show set in the fictional Arden County, where Waddle and Daub discuss local arts events, present serialized radio productions of plays by Shakespeare, and interview members of the cast of said plays. Part scripted, part Shakespeare, part improv. I’m producing the whole show, so a lot of learning how to use editing and recording software, and as of now, I’m directing the radio plays. I’m also serving somewhere in the dramaturgical space for Merlyn as she writes the show. And … who knew?… I’m also performing! I play Daub every week on the show, and am playing Seyton in Macbeth this first season. I also am officially updating my tag to include “Podcaster.”

July 2020: Something potentially big in the works…. stay tuned…

June 2020: Through the myth of the ever- working artist, it’s tough to give an update after a few years’ silence. The fact is that I’ve been working, working a lot, but the work has been more on a producer level these last few years. Not to mention I had a kid in October 2018. But I’ve been working at Center Stage in the Artistic Producing team, fighting racism, uplifting artists, and in the last few months of COVID, serving as a webmaster for www.playathome.org. And while we’re talking about hard stuff, I’m sorry to say this is the end of my time on staff at Baltimore Center Stage. We’ll see what directing, teaching, and producing the future holds. I’m grateful for my time with these fantastic people, but ready for the next step in the journey.

May 2020: I directed a Zoom performance of Edward III at Brave Spirits Theatre - a wonderful chance to work with performers I love from all over the country - a mix of beloved collaborators, dear friends, and former students got together over a couple weeks and we put on a truly fun reading of an under-done play. And the most exciting thing is I can link you right to it here, and you can see it for youreself!

October 2018: A return to Baltimore Shakespeare Factory to direct A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton. The play had some unique challenges for me - first that while it’s quite funny in its way, the play has a deep misogyny in its DNA. To help combat that, I cast a company of entirely female and non-binary actors to tell the story - including the entire production team. Rather than being the uproarious comedy it likely was when written, the play became a biting satire of what life is (and was) in a world where women are only valued for sex and child bearing.

“The all-female cast takes a play that would sound misogynistic AF and makes it a play about women using their autonomy to get what they want, which is so powerful to watch as a woman in the audience.” -Audience member Micaela M.

August 2018: I directed Pericles with the American Shakespeare Center Theatre Camp. This is actually my favorite play, despite my protestations otherwise when I’m directing a different play. Pericles is particularly exciting to work on with teenagers who are away from home to figure out who they are. In this production, I began with the proposal that Pericles, having lost his father, goes out to seek a replacement, and all he can find is himself. The campers used modifications of Viewpoints, Grotowski, and some Michael Chekhov techniques to develop the physical and aural landscapes of each land (and sea) that Pericles travels to.

March 2018: I took a full time position at Baltimore Center Stage, which is going to slow down the directing a bit. I’m in the artistic department, working with [edited to add] Stephanie Ybarra, Hana S. Sharif, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Daniel Bryant, Gavin Witt, and Melody Easton, along with our intern staff. I’m company manager, which takes up a lot of time, of course, but I’m a part of the season planning team, and support each production through previews and tech.

February 2018: As anyone on this site has no doubt discovered, I do a lot of Shakespeare. So with utter joy, I took a step away from Shakespeare for a month to direct The Four of Us at Cecil College's Elkton Station.The Four of Us is a remarkable little play by Itamar Moses about a friendship between two young writers. I've loved this play since I saw it at Theatre J in 2010, and jumped at the chance to direct it with Charlie Johnson and Ryan Milliner, two of my frequent collaborators. 

January 2018: I directed The Tempest for Baltimore Shakespeare Factory, a production that took me back to a play I first visited in 2013 at the Milburn Stone Theatre. Now with Zach Brewster-Geisz as Prospero, Sian Edwards as Ariel, and Dean Carlson as both Ferdinand and Caliban, this was a production that falls into the "Original Practices" or "Shakespeare Staging Conditions" aesthetic. BSF has an approximation of an Elizabethan indoor playhouse (like the Blackfriars in Staunton or the Wanamaker in London), and we used the space to the fullest. Perhaps the greatest attention we've earned on this production is commentary on the audience participation: audiences play the ocean, sing along with the music, aid actors with their costumes, and are invited to "draw near" at the end of the play. MD Theatre Guide named The Tempest the top show of the week on January 16, 2018.
Reviews: Johanna Alonso, MD Theatre Guide: "Through their creative and unique approach to storytelling, BSF manages to present “The Tempest” in a way that is fresh, entertaining, and accessible—whether you are a lifelong Shakespeare lover or a first-time theatre-goer."
Joshua Engel, TheatreBloom: "...gold-standard Shakespeare that the Bard himself would enjoy, making great use of the stage and the space. The dialogue is clear and crisp, and easily followed even by the young children in the audience."
Tyler S., 6-year-old audience member: ""I liked this show because they talk to the crowd and because I got to do something":

October 2017: I produced Susquehanna Shakespeare Ensemble's second production, Hamlet, starring Charlie Johnson and directed by me. We've begun to zero in on an aesthetic, which unfortunately leads me to break the form of these updates I have established below, and put Amanda Gunther's apt description from Theatrebloom here: "DIY-BYO...leaving a modern relatability fresh on the palette for the audience to sample." SSE is actor and text driven, and we're determined that the audience should have a great time while also truly hearing the play.

August 2017: A return to my favorite gig of the year, directing for the American Shakespeare Center Theatre Camp! This year, for me, it was the American Beaumont Center, as I was directing Francis Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle, an early modern play written for young actors. Google indicates that this may well be the first time since the original production that it's been performed by young actors. 11 scrappy campers came together to put on this zany play about what it means to do theatre, who theatre is for, and what our responsibility is to the audience. Certainly one of the great joys of my life is working with these campers, all the more so when I get to do such a delightful play.

July 2017: Hoosier Shakes... I can't say enough good things about this company. Greg Fiebig and Duana Burby have a vision for Marion, IN, and are pursuing it with full hearts. The company is a master-journeyman-apprentice model, with a mix of professionals, local community members, and Indiana Wesleyan students. In just 3-1/2 weeks, we put up two very different productions to run in rep with a single company of actors. I directed Much Ado about Nothing, a production I've been itchy to do for a while now. Set in post-war Hawaii, we grounded the play in the heartfelt but troubling love story between Hero and Claudio, and allowed the antics of the rest of the play expand from that heart. Audiences doubled from Hoosier's inaugural season to this one. Starring Duana Burby as Beatrice, Ryan Akers as Benedick, Deon Releford-Lee as Claudio, and Katie Little as Hero.
Review: Shakespeareances.com's Eric Minton: " a production paying close attention to the play's text as well as its tone while emphasizing unabashed fun."

June 2017: I had the absolute pleasure to join the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory as assistant director of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by BSF Artistic Director Tom Delise. The production was well received - MD Theatre Guide named it as the #1 show in Baltimore for the week of July 19. My work mostly focused on working with the lovers, developing our magic vocabulary, and translating formalistic Shakespearean text analysis into Stanislavskian parlance (it's almost like I wrote a thesis about that at some point...)

May 2017: Back in Maryland, I directed the inaugural production of my new company, Susquehanna Shakespeare Ensemble. We started with Macbeth. Continuing my collaboration with composer J. Andrew Dickenson, Macbeth took place in a post-apocalyptic America. Starring Joe Grasso as Macbeth, Tess Garrett as Lady Macbeth, Ryan Milliner as Macduff, and Debra McGuire as First Witch/etc. We aimed to show a Macbeth couple that descended into evil rather than beginning there, and the awful corrupting power of evil and hubris.
Review: TheatreBloom by Amanda Gunther. "...ambitious and bold..." "the vision for this production... is striking."

April 2017: Directed the world premier of Sweet Are the Uses by Merlyn Q. Sell, with the College of Saint Mary. CSM is a women's college with an added mission of making higher education possible for single mothers. I was there as a visiting professor, teaching two sections of THEA 360: Performance in Production, and directing SAtU. I was asked to teach and direct Shakespeare (there's a shock) but to have an all female cast. While I'm certainly comfortable regendering characters or casting actors to play any part, regardless of the gender they were written as, I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to give my students/actors Shakespeare they could own. So I commissioned a female playwright (Merlyn) to create a play out of Shakespeare's texts, but for an all-female cast. SAtU is the story of 9 of Shakespeare's heroines in the Forest of Arden, resisting the evil and unseen Duke Angelo.

April 2017: Directed Julius Caesar for Rubber City Shakespeare. Starring Michael Gatto (AEA) as Brutus, Katie Wells as Cassius, John Sturdivant as Antony, and RCSC artistic director Dane CT Leasure as Caesar. Set in the modern day, the colorless world of Rome is infected by the viral influence of Cassius. At the death of Caesar, the world explodes in violence and color. In light of the 2016 election, we decided to play the role of Cassius as a woman (as well as most other roles played by women in the show) striking against a misogynistic Caesar. We found while playing with gendered words that the monosyllabic "girl" replacing "man" had a powerful effect. Managing director Casey Robinson noted that replacing the word "brother" with "sister" (the historical Cassius was married to Brutus' sister) highlighted the familial relationship between the leading characters.
Review: Rubber City Shakespeare staging strong Caesar by David Ritchey.
"Garrett is an excellent director"

Check out all the productions here.