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co-written with Jim Petosa

Premiered Off-Broadway at The Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, produced by PTP/NYC

This play juxtaposes gay men’s stories from the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States with their stories of the Covid-19 pandemic. The first act resurrects Robert Chesley’s Dog Plays, a powerful, angry, jubilant autobiographical account of the end of his life, written in 1989. The second act, A Variant Strain, imagines a second act for the central character, haunting the current day with vital messages of fellowship and survival.

Resurfacing
co-written with Ana Bess Moyer Bell and Annie Brewster

Premiered at Boston College’s Robsham Theater

This play follows a father and son as they weather the vicissitudes of the son’s opioid addiction. Grounded in extensive interviews conducted as part of a course I co-teach at Harvard Medical School, the professional production was performed not only in theater contexts, but also in hospitals and Veterans’ Affairs medical centers and at medical conferences.

Storying Our Selves (2022) by students from Olin College and Babson College
The Empty Space Theater, Babson College

This series of solo performances grew out of the course Constructing and Performing the Self that I co-designed and co-taught with my colleague, Beth Wynstra. Grounded in the science of memory, students wrote monologues about key moments in their lives and experienced a full rehearsal and production schedule.

You can view selections from this play here.

The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by Rolin Jones
The Empty Space Theater mainstage, with support from a Babson-Olin-Wellesley Presidential Innovation Grant

This Fall Mainstage production was supported by a Presidential Innovation Grant from the Babson-Olin-Wellesley partnership. More than 10 courses across the three colleges — from Machine Learning at Olin, to Cross-Cultural Psychology at Wellesley, to Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship at Babson — assigned the performance as a required text and the cast held talk-backs after each performance (developed with our dramaturg) to discuss the themes of this provocative play.

Storying Our Selves (2019) by students from Olin College and Babson College
The Empty Space Theater, Babson College

This series of solo performances grew out of the course Constructing and Performing the Self that I co-designed and co-taught with my colleague, Beth Wynstra. Grounded in the science of memory, students wrote monologues about key moments in their lives and experienced a full rehearsal and production schedule.

You can view selections from this play here.

Storying Our Selves (2017) by students from Olin College and Babson College
The Empty Space Theater, Babson College

Supported by a Curricular Innovation Grant from the Babson-Olin-Wellesley partnership, this series of solo performances served as the capstone experience in the new course Constructing and Performing the Self that I co-designed and co-taught with my colleague, Beth Wynstra.

You can view selections from this play here.

Suppressed Desires by Susan Glaspell
The Empty Space Theater, Babson College

One of the many plays to emerge from the Provincetown Players (whose most famous member was Eugene O’Neill), this story is a provocative early satire of psychoanalyses, which had captured the zeitgeist in 1915, when it was first produced. The production was covered by WBUR.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Olin College

Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play about the fictional small New England town of Grover’s Corners provided a lens for understanding the Olin community. The cast of 18 included students, faculty, staff, and faculty members’ children. Performed promenade style, audience members intermingled with the cast on stage, blurring the lines between ensemble and community as the action unfolded.

Assassins by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman
Co-Directed with Di Glazer
Northwestern University

This musical by Stephen Sondheim focuses on the small cadre of people who have tried (successfully or not) to kill the President of the United States. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the others weave a story about the dark side of the American dream. My co-director, Di Glazer, has since gone on to be Co-Head of Theater at ICM Partners, one of world’s leading talent agencies!

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Co-Directed with Daniel Berwick
Harvard University

We gave Shakespeare’s recounting of the fall of Caesar and its aftermath an in-your-face treatment, with audience members seated only a few feet from the gory action in a gritty basement storage room-turned theater (yes, audience members got splattered with Caesar’s blood, which glowed in the dark).

The Day I Stood Still by Kevin Elyot
Bates College

Unrequited queer love was not nearly as common on college theater stages in 2000 as it is today. This time-traveling story traces longing and stunted development over three decades.

Chapter Two by Neil Simon
Bates College

Writing about this story in The New York Times, Sheridan Morley suggested that Chapter Two “was in some ways the turning-point for [Neil] Simon, the moment when he started to use his own life as something more than an excuse for a gag-fest...There is something very painful here, in among the gags, about a man trying to come to terms with death rather than a new life.” I think this is Neil Simon at his best — simultaneously sidesplitting and poignant.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Co-Directed with Daniel Berwick, Jacob Feldman, and Rachel Lisker
Day Middle School, Newton, MA

When my friends and I learned that the theater director at our former middle school had fallen ill and wouldn’t be able to direct the spring play, we sprung into action. After all, we had all met during our spring play in eighth grade! Working as a team, we led a cast of 25 tweens through the hilarious and dizzying story of the disconnect between reality and appearance, the peaks and perils of new love, and the transformative power of performance.

Later Life by A.R. Gurney
Bates College

I have always been a fan of A.R. Gurney, the Lifetime Achievement Obie-winning playwright. In fact, I grew up in his house — my parents bought my childhood home from the Gurneys (my Dad may or may not be the home-buying psychiatrist in his play The Dining Room, but the dining room is unequivocally our dining room!). After our initial run, this production of one of his lesser-known works had a brief tour (cut short by a blizzard-filled New England Winter).