Coming soon:
I'm directing the world premiere of In Vain, a new musical adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Music and Lyrics by Sharon Kenny and book by Christina Pippa.
April 13-16, Missouri State University.
As You Like It
Recently completed
(Public Works version adapted by Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery)
I directed this musical version of As You Like It as my MFA Directing thesis production at the UNC Greensboro School of Theatre. This adaptation was originally created for the Public Works program at the Public Theatre in NYC.
Recently completed
How We Got Here
There is power in our true stories. This is the engine behind How We Got Here: An Oral History Play, which is based entirely on transcripts from the Southern Oral History Database. Using four actors playing ten diverse characters, this show features stories of regular people who want ordinary things–lunch at the Greensboro Woolworth’s, to be pregnant and professional, to sit downstairs at a movie theatre–but who find they must fight for respect and for equal treatment. Using stories largely gathered in the Carolinas, this piece uses the immediacy of theatre to breathe life into oral and social history, and to help us understand where we are in the American struggle for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Photos by Becky VanderVeen
Actors pictured: Willa Bost (AEA), Russell Holt, Zach Radhuber
Production: University of North Carolina Greensboro School of Theatre
Assembled by Karen Sabo
Script Consultants: Mya Brown and Derek Davidson
Excerpt from
How We Got Here
An Oral History Play
Margaret Walker
All of us were scarred. Every person who has lived in the South and who has lived here up until 1965, unless you were born since then...that little baby of mine, he’s not scarred yet.
Bob Pierce
So at Biloxi, young black officers were not permitted to live off the base because it was too dangerous. There were incidents in the paper every day that were absolutely absurd. Stories about how black people had done so and so, and were tried and were convicted in a matter of hours. The KKK was still active in the adjoining states, as well as Mississippi. Well, that was a big eye-opener, obviously.
My young wife at the time came down with me. We had to do some laundry. So we pulled up in front of the laundromat. I was going to keep the baby. My wife went in to do the laundry. She took all our clothes. In a very short time she came back out. I said, “Honey, what’s the matter?” She said, “Well, we can’t do our laundry here.” I said, “What do you mean, we can’t do our laundry?” She said, “I brought all the clothes.” I said, “What do you mean, you brought all the clothes?” She said, “I brought the white clothes, I brought the colored clothes. And there is a big sign in there and it says, ‘No colored.’ You can’t do colored clothes in there.”