As a director and devisor, my work is driven by collaborative, socially and civically engaged theatre making that centers marginalized identities, communities, and experiences through performance. I am invested personally and politically in the development and staging of stories from underrepresented groups in theatre, especially women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ playwrights. While studying at Cornell University, I have worked towards this goal by advocating, directing, dramaturging, and producing new student work within the Department of Performing and Media Arts (PMA). While serving on the PMA Performance and Events committee, that determines department season selection, production calendar, and budget distribution, I successfully pushed for expanded opportunities for student written and directed work. I have served as either producer, director, or dramaturg for four PMA 10-Minute Play Festivals, an annual theatre festival of student written work. Additionally, I directed the world premiere of Two Truth and Allie, which explores trans masculine experiences through a supernatural tale of haunting love, mental health, and uncanny doppelgängers. This production brought together trans and queer actors and allies from Cornell’s campus and the Ithaca community to collaboratively develop trans inclusive rehearsal and performance strategies.

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My recent directing projects have, like my scholarship, focused on queer and trans narratives. Productions of Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England by queer, feminist, playwright Madeline George, Two Truth and Allie, and my project An Evening at the Caffe Cino, which staged four plays from the 1960s pioneering, queer, Off-Off-Broadway venue Caffe Cino, highlight my experience in queer/trans theatre forms and practices. Even when staging texts from the classical cannon, one of my directorial goals is to explore how these plays might be reimagined through production to advance, or at the very least raise issues of, social justice. For example, in Much Ado About Nothing it has always been a source of frustration for me that Hero would so willingly marry Claudio in the resolution of the play after all that he has accused and done to her. This has always seemed particularly jarring given Beatrice’s agency in the play. In preparing to direct Much Ado for Cornell University, a production sadly prevented by the pandemic, I cut the play so that Hero refuses to wed Claudio. This, it turns out, is easily achieved without adding a single word of new text and allows Hero to share in Beatrice’s agency, rather than conforming to centuries old notions of “happy” comedic endings. In so doing, my hope was that the play would resonate with the contemporary moment, particularly the #metoo movement, where women are not only speaking out against sexual harassment but demanding that their truths—like Hero’s truth—be heard, acknowledged and acted upon.  

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Working towards justice in theatre, requires close attention to not only the stories presented through performance, but the identities of characters and actors represented onstage as well. I am deeply committed to expanding the availability of roles for actors from underrepresented identities, particularly BIPOC and trans/queer performers. Such efforts begin with those stated above—staging more narratives from marginalized communities—however this alone cannot make up the lack of equity in casting practices. For each production I direct, I utilize an identity conscious casting practice that attempts to openly and honestly address the casting of actors with identities that may or may not align with those of a given character. This process occurs mostly through callback auditions, in which I have a one on one conversation with each actor about the role(s) they are auditioning for and how they align with their personal identities. To be clear, actors are never forced to disclose their identities, rather I engage actors in conversations about how, if at all, they relate to the role in question. For instance, in one such conversation while casting Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, an actor self-identified as a queer, non-binary, woman of color. We then had a productive and meaningful conversation about the play and about how this actor would feel taking on the role of a queer woman of unspecified race. We discussed how the lack of racial/ethnic specification in scripts often leads to a presumptive whiteness; this was a conversation we were later able to expand upon with the whole cast. This identity conscious process of casting and rehearsal is particularly effective in working with students, as it asks them to think critically about the play and their role in it.  

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Both my professional and pedagogic work as a director tends towards devised methods of theatre making. Rather than adhering to a particular style or method of direction, I consider myself a magpie director, collecting and using techniques and styles form a wide range of theatre making traditions. Two years of classes at Chicago’s School for Theatre Creators, has given me a strong background in Leqoc Physical Theatre and clown. Along with these techniques I have training in and often use elements of Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints, Tectonic Theatre’s Moment Work, and Spolin-based improvisational games in my devising and directing. I am drawn to devising because I find collaboration yields more dynamic, engaged, and diverse performances. Collaborative devising is productively disruptive, it challenges our preconceived notions about a text and its staging and reorients rehearsals towards discovery and surprise. At its best, collaborative devising enables collective imagining of new possibilities. Devising can also be frustrating and time consuming, yet taking time (when production calendars and budgets allow) and working through frustration is deeply productive in the development and rehearsal process. As a more egalitarian mode of theatre making, I believe some devising practices offer more inclusive, justice-oriented ways of working. I find a collaborative approach to theatre making particularly rewarding when working with undergraduates as this allows them to explore and hone their own creative impulses in a supportive, structured environment.

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Believing the separation between theatre practice and scholarship to be a false binary, I employ a practice as research modality that informs my theatre work. Performance provides a laboratory where ideas can be put into practice and help shape my research and writing. An example of this is An Evening at the Caffe Cino, which I directed in Cornell’s Performing and Media Arts Department in the spring of 2019. This archival based show developed out of my research on avant-garde queer performance and the pioneering Off-Off-Broadway theatre, Caffe Cino, the first explicitly gay theatre space in the U.S. The online archival work of playwright Robert Patrick and my interviews with playwright Robert Heide helped shape this production that featured four short plays originally premiered at the Cino interspersed with found images, sounds, and recounted memories.

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My theatre work is deeply entwined with my scholarship and pedagogy and I anticipate continuing a robust artistic practice both within and outside of academia. I firmly believe that theatre can be a tool for marginalized communities to rehearse identity and share overlooked and unacknowledged narratives. From directing classics to developing new work, my theatre practice as both teacher and working professional will continue to experiment with the vital role of performance in imagining and staging more just, varied, and vibrant social futures.