Theater

In addition to my other work, theater has been an important part of my life since childhood and I have been very fortunate to have continued opportunities for working in the theater. These days I am primarily engaged in theater in three ways:

Directing Plays

I have directed (or co-directed, or assistant-directed) more than a dozen plays at a variety of institutions, including: Olin College, Babson College, Northwestern University, Harvard University, and Bates College. I take a process-focused approach to directing, given that my work has exclusively been in educational contexts. I love engaging an ensemble in the process of developing and presenting a story for a specific audience.

My current directing project is The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, by Rolin Jones, which will have performances at Babson College October 24-26, 2019. More information can be found here:

https://www.babson.edu/student-life/babsonarts/theater/

Please come see it!

Crafting Scripts

In the past two years I have had the opportunity to be involved in crafting scripts for two plays.

The first, Resurfacing, began with life story interviews conducted by one of the students in my course at Harvard Medical School. The stories of a father and son wrestling with the son's opioid addiction were so compelling that my colleague Annie Brewster and I partnered with a theater company, COAAST, to turn them into a one-act play. The play has had several performances this fall around New England, most recently at Harvard Medical School and Boston College.

The second, a still-untitled project, is in the process of being developed right now. I am working with Jim Petosa of the Boston University College of Fine Arts to create a script focusing on the contemporary meaning of the 1980s AIDS crisis in New York City. We will premier this play in June 2020 in the off-Broadway theater Atlantic Stage Two, thanks to the Potomac Theater Project/NYC.

Teaching

My colleague from Babson, Beth Wynstra, and I used a Babson-Olin-Wellesley Curricular Innovation Fellowship to design and co-teach a psychology + theater course called "Constructing and Performing the Self," which combines the psychological science of identity and the theater of solo performance. Every other spring semester the course results in a fully-staged series of monologues students have written about key moments in their lives, which we call Storying Our Selves.