Work Samples
OUTLYING ISLANDS - The Connelly Theater, NYC & Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin
A video extract from OUTLYING ISLANDS featuring Jefferson White (“Yellowstone”, “House of Cards”), Maeve O'Mahony (Malaprop) Lester St. Louis (Soho Rep's An Octoroon), and Leon Ingulsrud (SITI Company), Lara Gallagher and Peter Corboy (Rough Magic Theatre Company).
OUTLYING ISLANDS is a Second World War story, naturalistic on the page and set in an abandoned chapel. I reimagined it on an island of real earth. The clips below highlight my interest in staging which is pared down and symbolic in nature, minimising the number of props and naturalistic details in favour of symbolic elements and unadorned high-stakes performances. One of the thematic elements of the play is ownership of stolen land: by placing the characters on a piece of real earth, I hoped to evoke an ongoing battle between them over their individual claims to the territory. In a later scene where the protagonists get drunk and sing, the text suggested a storm outside. I brought the storm indoors. Rain poured onto stage, the musicians abandoned their scores, freaked out and wailed, and the actors danced. The image of young people ecstatically dancing while rain battered down onto their bodies and dirt caked their leg, making them slip, sweat, lose their breath, aimed to evoke the coming brutality of modernity - of the war.
Finally, this clip also illustrates my ongoing collaboration with composer/musician Lester St. Louis who is a major collaborator on CHILDREN OF THE SUN.
Photography: Carol Rosegg
Design: Colm McNally, Christopher Metzger
BEGINNING - The Gate Theatre
Images from my production of BEGINNING by David Eldridge at The Gate Theatre (featuring Eileen Walsh and Marty Rea). This two-person play is highly naturalistic and plays out in realtime with no scene breaks. Despite these requirements, I worked with the scenic designer to create a stretched-out space, wider than one might expect with a large, open area in the centre. This allowed me to use the proximity of the actors in a theatrical way while maintaining the naturalism of the play. Some sections played out with them extremely close together, while in other moments I had them play scenes across a huge 18ft gulf from either wall of the apartment, relying on heavy use of silence and stillness. I love working in this way: finding staging possibilities which are inherently theatrical (they’d look silly in a film) but which somehow feed the naturalism of the script. Mining non-verbal meaning from subtle gestures.
Unfortunately, a video archive is not yet available from the theatre for this production. I will update this page as soon as it becomes available.
Photography: Ros Kavanagh
Design: Sarah Bacon & Sinead McKenna
LITTLE GEM - Irish Repertory
LITTLE GEM is an Irish monologue play by Elaine Murphy. It depicts the lives of three inner-city, working-class Dublin women: Grandmother (Marsha Mason), Mother (Brenda Meaney) and Daughter (Lauren O’Leary). These monologues were written based on true testimony which the writer collected while working at a women’s health clinic in Dublin. Despite the fact that each character is in direct dialogue with the audience, in my staging I decided to have all three actors present onstage throughout the whole play. This allowed me to create moments of interaction within the monologues as the characters overheard each other and responded to one another’s stories. My intention was to create a deeper web of intimacy between the three women, their constant presence onstage highlighting their journeys from isolation from one another to connection. I also worked with the scenic designer to set the play in the waiting room of a naturalistic Dublin health clinic. My aim was to root the world of the production in the world from which the real-world stories had been collected, allowing the production to comment directly on the healthcare that was denied to Irish women for so long.
The theatre has not yet made further archival footage available to me, but I have included the promotional trailer below which includes video of my staging for the production. It helps illustrate my conceptual approach to the play: bringing all three actors into the same world, their constant presence informing each other’s monologues through non-verbal communication. Allowing for connection between the performers in a play which, on the surface, seems to keep the actors apart.
Photography: Carol Rosegg
Design: Meredith Ries & Christopher Metzger
HAMLET - St. Ann’s Warehouse (Associate Director)
Video Clips from HAMLET at St. Ann’s Warehouse. I served as Associate Director to Yaël Farber, working in close collaboration with her on the staging of the play.