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Directing

 

 

Antigone Arkhe

By Caridad Svich

(From Antigone Project: a Play in Five Parts)

 

[Director]

Produced by Profile Theatre in collaboration with with String House Theatre

​

To me, Antigone Arkhe is a story about a woman who has had her story stolen.  Here, in death, she is been relegated to pieces

of what she once was– shards of memory, artifacts of experience, and bits and pieces of hearsay.  In her absence these pieces have been collected and commodified (without her consent) in order to reshape the story of what happened to her.  The character of the Archivist embodies this act of appropriation.  She has taken ownership of everything that once belonged to Antigone, primary of which is the trauma of her experience, and neatly packaged it all so that it can be delivered to us, the audience, in a palatable form.  The journey of Antigone Arkhe, therefore, is that of Antigone’s attempt to reclaim what is rightfully hers.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard

 

[Director]

Produced by Anon It Moves in collaboration with String House Theatre

Note: this piece was produced in rotating repertory with Hamlet with the same cast

Portland, Oregon 2014

 

It should perhaps first be said that Tom Stoppard is a playwright of voracious curiosity, imaginative intellect, exacting wit, and masterfully crafted language– all of which make a chance to direct any one of his plays both an absolute challenge and a joy for any director.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, however, seems to me to be the most daunting of them all– an impression which perhaps has less to do with the difficultness of the text and more to 

do with the immense responsbility one feels to these two hapless characters whom the playwright loved so much he plucked them from the dusty shadow ofHamlet’s greatness and gave them their own play.  The plight of the blundering, well-meaning ordinary man is what interests Stoppard here; his form, Shakespearean fanfiction.  Above even the tightly circular Absurdist stylings or the wonderful wordplays and punny misunderstandings, this is the ultimate puzzle Stoppard poses us: is the tragedy for these two attendant lords really that they meet a terrible end?  Or that we as the audience are informed secondhand of their fate and, in the end...don’t really care?  Do we begrudge them their unglamorousness next to the terribly interesting, inwardly-consuming genius of Hamlet?  Does their tactless naivete make them somehow deserving of what befalls them?  What, after all, makes a person forgettable?  His or her trials unnoteworthy?  Certainly there is no better way to explore these questions than to perform the play in rep with its origin work; investigating the shadows of monolithic greatness is most successfully done with that greatness in the room.  Sometimes the most interesting things are happening just outside the frame to the people you’d least expect.  Sometimes the ghosts that follow greatness have subtle things to say.

Edgar & Annabel

by Sam Holcroft

 

[Director]

Produced by the Lewis & Clark Fir Acres Theatre Department

Portland, Oregon 2014

 

It is obvious from Edgar & Annabel's title–a fitting nod to the Edgar Allen Poe poem, Annabel Lee–that the play before you is about a relationship.  Equally obvious at first read is the inspiration the play takes from George Orwell’s 1984 and the other paranoia-drenched dystopias of the political thriller genre it resolutely inhabits.  However, whose relationship the play is about is a more complex question than you’d think, and despite the reverberations of familiar classics the play undoubtedly thrums to a modern string very much of this time. This problematic characterization is perfect for a play that is really,

at its core, a story about the dangers of not breaking the mold.  What happens, the play asks us, when our social order demands the individual conform to the point of anonymity?  When it censors self-expression to a point where ownership of our own language is lost?  The answers, I can guarantee, are nothing like what you'd expect.

Akhmatova

by Romulus Linney

 

[Director]

Produced by the Lewis & Clark Fir Acres Theatre Department

Portland, Oregon 2010

 

In this short one act, Romulus Linney juxtaposes two historical events: the creation of Anna Akhmatova's seminal poem Requiem- written by the poet while mourning the imprisonment of her son- and the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. In actuality, Requiem was written between the years of 1935 and 1940, and Akhmatova would have been in her early sixties at the time of Stalin’s death in 1953.  The play is, in effect, a situational question posed by Linney: what if Akhmatova had written Requiem at a critical moment of 

 

political instability and had been forced to defend its content in the face of Soviet censorship?  What arises from this re-imagining of events is a dialogue about the personal significance of the poem to Akhmatova and an exploration of what it expresses about the experiences of the people of the time.

Yankee Dawg You Die (staged reading)

by Philip Kan Gotanda

 

[Director]

Produced by Theater Diaspora as part of a series of staged readings by and about the Asian American community, presented in partnership with Portland Center Stage

Portland, Oregon 2014

Maleficia

An ensemble devised piece directed by Joel Harmon

 

[Assistant Director/Deviser]

Produced by String House Theatre

Portland, OR 2013

 

“Maleficia:” singular maleficium; a Latin term meaning wrongdoing or mischief used to describe malevolent, dangerous, or harmful magic, evildoing, or malevolent sorcery.

From the well-documented trials of the European and American Witch Panics to the 1980s hysteria over Satanic ritual abuse within child care centers, Maleficia is a time-travelling, non-verbal exploration of how fear of the unknown can lead well-meaning citizens to commit horrific acts of cruelty.

Songbird

A solo devised piece

 

[Director]

First devised by Alex Leigh Ramirez through the Portland Playhouse apprenticeship showcase, this piece was further developed with String House, expanded to 30 min., and performed as part of Water In the Desert's 1Festival.

Portland, OR 2012

 

An autobiographical, solo devised piece about Alex Leigh Ramirez's relationship to voice and voicelessness.

Night Breezes and the Ballerina (staged reading)

by Heath Hyun

 

[Director]

Produced by String House and PDX Playwrights for the Portland Fertile Ground Festival

Portland, Oregon 2013

 

An abduction on the other side of the world. While the Santa Anas howl, a young girl and her family struggle through a tough night worrying, remembering, and waiting.

Dead Man's Cell Phone

by Sarah Ruhl

 

[Student Director]

Produced by the Lewis & Clark Fir Acres Theatre Department (senior thesis project).

Portland, Oregon 2010

 

The worlds of Sarah Ruhl’s plays often have a stubborn habit of floating somewhere just above the floor.  It seems to me that directing Dead Man’s Cell Phone was one ongoing struggle between giving my actors wings and roping them back down to earth—an image in which Ruhl would undoubtedly delight, as she so values the transformative power of contradiction.  This particular play is a mad romp through the absurd contradictions of the modern technological age.  In the words of our heroine, “we’re all disappearing the more we’re there”—neatly atomized into fantastically mobile, social-networking dust.  The crystalline poetry of Ruhl’s characters gives voice to timely questions: How far can we drift into the ether and still manage to connect?  Where do we strike the balance?  All questions that we will doubtlessly be struggling to answer for some time.

 

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