The Misanthrope                                 Asst to the Director     Shakespeare Theatre of NJ (dir. Bonnie J. Monte)
The Notorious Lady Susan (st. rdg.)     Asst to the Director      Shakespeare Theatre of NJ (dir. Bonnie J. Monte)
Henry VIII (staged reading)                Asst to the Director      Shakespeare Theatre of NJ (dir. Bonnie J. Monte)
The Lion in Winter                              Asst to the Director      Shakespeare Theatre of NJ (dir. Paul Mullins)
Titus Andronicus (staged reading)        Dramaturgical Asst      Shakespeare Theatre of NJ (dir. Brian B. Crowe)
Pericles (Senior Corps 2010)               Teaching Asst              Shakespeare Theatre of NJ (dir. Brian B. Crowe)
Macbeth (Junior Corps 2010)               Teaching Asst               Shakespeare Theatre of NJ (dir. Jamie Brink)
The Ramayana, Pt. 1 (Jr. Corps 2010)  Teaching Asst              Shakespeare Theatre of NJ (dir. Jamie Brink)
Love's Labour's Lost (Sr. Corps 2010)   Teaching Asst              Shakespeare Theatre of NJ (dir. Jamie Brink)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch                   Director                      College Avenue Players - New Brunswick, NJ
Drums in the Night (scene)                    Director                      Cabaret Theatre - New Brunswick, NJ
The Odd Couple                                   Assistant Director       College Avenue Players
Beauty and the Beast                           Musical Director          Bristol Pantomime Society - Bristol, UK
Reefer Madness! The Musical                Director                       College Avenue Players
Invisible Friends (scene)                       Director                      Cabaret Theatre

In the fall of 2010, I directed a production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask) for The College Avenue Players.

This extremely unique performance experience is a stand-up comedy performance/one-person show/rock musical about Hedwig (East Berlin refugee and victim of a botched sex-change operation), and her epic search for her "other half".

Scott Thompson - vocalist and guitarist for the band Meet/Pause - lent particular energy and authenticity to his role with his musical background and genuine rock expertise.

Through this project I was especially excited to play with unconventional theatrical genres, to support and explore LGBTQ issues in my community, to strengthen my research and dramaturgical skills, and to develop my makeup and costuming experience.

Read a blog post about the production.
View the photo gallery.
View the program.

For my final project for the seminar "Politics, Literature and Arts: Bertolt Brecht, Dramatist and Marxist" (taught by Professor Michael Levine), I directed a scene from Brecht's Drums in the Night.  One of his earlier and less well-known plays, Drums in the Night is a new telling of an old story: Anna, assuming her lover Kragler is dead, has become engaged to another man.  Kragler, however, was merely missing in action (not dead), and returns for Anna on the very night of her new engagement.  The simple fable is told with particular attention to socially tenuous issues of the politics of war, class, and gender.

Having grappled with Brechtian text for several semesters, my inspiration for this project stemmed from the desire to practically (rather than theoretically) apply Brecht's own descriptions of the Alienation-effect and Didactic Theatre to performance.  I wanted to know if I could really grasp Brechtian theory, if I could communicate it to actors, if it could really be applied to live performance, and what effect it really would have on an audience.  I chose to work on Drums in the Night because it was the first play I’d read of Brecht’s that really spoke to me.  I could visualize how it might actually be staged.  I empathized with Anna and Kragler.  I was intrigued by its historical specificity, and the way in which Brecht was using the medium of performance to speak about contemporary social issues.  Since it was one of his earlier pieces, written before he had fully devoted himself to Marxism or wholly developed his theory of Epic Theatre, I thought it would be all the more interesting to apply his later theory to his earlier work.  I wanted to emphasize the play's unique aspects (attention to the limitations of performance space, episodic structure, cryptic and metaphoric dialogue), and further apply Brechtian disassociation strategy to the performance.

Read a blog post about the production.