It’s a busy fall! On top of directing A Bright Room Called Day, this week I start rehearsals for Associate Directing The Ford/Hill Project, first at BAM in Brooklyn and then at REDCAT in LA.

I saw this show when it was at Under the Radar at the start of the year, and I’m so thrilled to be joining the team as it travels around the US this fall.

Get tickets for the show at BAM and then come hang with me at REDCAT, where I’ll be leading the West Coast Premiere with an amazing cast.

The Ford/Hill Project transforms the Senate testimony of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford into a gripping evening of theater, performed by a cast of luminary LA actors, including Rosemarie DeWitt, Betty Gabriel, Dulé Hill, and Jerry O’Connell. Thirty years apart, Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford shared private, painful experiences on a national stage during nomination proceedings for the Supreme Court, speaking with clarity and confidence in the face of questioning and skepticism. With an ensemble of four actors speaking from the verbatim transcripts of these hearings, these two women’s stories resonate across decades, illuminating the emotional weight and historical significance of these pivotal hearings. Heard together now, their testimonies demonstrate the courage it takes to speak truth to power. 

After a sold-out run last year, Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day is coming back this October, this time in an artist’s townhouse in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

The play follows a group of artists and activists in 1930s Berlin as fascism takes hold around them, and they decide whether to wait or act, stay or go, fight or flee. Kushner originally wrote Bright Room in the 1980s as a direct response to Reagan’s America. Nearly 40 years later, the parallels between Hitler’s Germany and today feel even more eerily resonant.

I am so thrilled to bring this production back with the same incredible team, in a new home and for another small group of audiences.

Earlier this year, I started working with a wonderful writer, Elizabeth Hawes, on a play for prison abolition. It has been an exceptionally enlightening process, especially because Elizabeth is herself in prison in Minnesota. Elizabeth is extremely accomplished, having won prestigious awards and support through PEN America and the Writing Freedom Fellowship, to name just a few.

Elizabeth’s play, SUPERNOVA, is a fierce critique of our carceral systems and especially their impact on women, mothers, and families. I can’t say anything better than Elizabeth can herself, and I’m happy to share her words here. She was recently commissioned by the Mellon Foundation to write an essay about trying to realize a play while in prison:

“In 2017, when I started the endeavor of writing SuperNova, I lived in a unit of 60. So, I interviewed 59 people.

“I always thanked the women I interviewed for their stories. The response was always something to the effect of, ‘If this helps even one person, I am happy to do this.’ I think they want to be heard.”

— Elizabeth Hawes

I am honored to be helping make all of these stories heard. Read Elizabeth’s full story here. And reach out to learn more and help bring SUPERNOVA to life!

Happy opening to SeaChange, an incredible immersive installation by Deborah Pearson Feinn and Jerry Fried! I was lucky enough to be part of this project, directing its voice acting.

SeaChange is 360 degrees of environmentalist video and audio that takes the viewer surfing through New York’s waters.

Paddle out against the tide as waves crest and break around you. Pop up into a world where riotous color and enveloping sound blur the boundaries between land and sea, dream and reality. Through this shifting seascape, meditate on our planet's source of life, humanity’s deep connection to the ocean, and its urgent dependence on our care. See it this week in Brooklyn at the Voorhees Theater and learn more here.

There’s so much else in the mix for 2026, including continuing work on Gun Talk and A Bright Room Called Day. Stay tuned!

I am beyond honored to be directing Tony Kushner’s exceptional (and exceptionally timely) play A Bright Room Called Day.

A Bright Room Called Day was first produced in 1985 and has never felt more relevant. It’s a play about a group of leftist friends in Berlin in the early 1930s. As the Nazis gain more and more power, the friends all must make their own decisions about what to do, how seriously to take the political destruction around them, how to organize against fascism, and, above all, whether or not they are going to leave their homes, friends, and lives behind in search of safety and freedom. The production is staged as a hyper-intimate experience in a brownstone in Brooklyn. Get your tickets before they sell out.

Producers Portal Rose and Rebecca Friday invited me to join their journey and I’d so love to share it with you! Performances run October 3-19.

Join me on July 29 at Mabou Mines Theater for the first public workshop of my new project Gun Talk.

At home. At school. At work. At the movies. Everyone in America has a gun story. Gun Talk blends gun culture with guided conversation, inviting strangers to talk to each other about guns in America: to connect, reflect, and find new ways forward for one of our country’s most paralyzing problems.

Gun Talk is an interactive experience for exactly 21 people. I’ve been developing it for years and I’m so excited to have a chance to share it with folks, thanks to Mabou Mines and Re/Venue. I’m working on it with the best of the best, including Janice Amaya, Jeorge Bennett Watson, and more.

The very limited tickets will go on sale soon. Save the date!

How to Put On a Sock at La Jolla Playhouse’s WOW Festival was such a success.

The biggest thank yous to everyone at the festival, especially Amy Ashton and Mia Fiorella for programming the show. And of course to everyone who worked on the show:

• The actors who guided the experience and shared their personal, heartbreaking, hopeful stories with such vulnerability: Janice Amaya, Judy Bauerlein, Marcos Duran, and Clara Williams

• The designers who made sterile classrooms come alive: Natalie Barshow, Evan Frank, and Salvador Zamora

• The stage manager who had to manage so much more than a simple stage: Huai Huang

• And to all the audiences who joined, played, evaluated, and shared about their sex ed experiences and their journeys towards sexual citizenship.

I’m working on bringing the show around the country — if you have any ideas, reach out!

Photos by Xingyu She

I am THRILLED to share that my show How to Put On a Sock will be presented through La Jolla Playhouse’s WOW Festival this April!

I've been working on the show for about a decade (!), first at Carnegie Mellon, then through the Beatrice Terry Residency at The Drama League, and now for its first full (non-academic) production at LJP. It’s part of a festival focused on theater that doesn’t happen in theaters — such a perfect fit for my work.

It’s gone through quite a journey over the years and is such a different show now. Here’s all about it:

Abstinence pledges, birth videos, STI slideshows, condom demonstrations. Sex ed can have it all -- if sex ed is taught at all.

How to Put On a Sock takes the audience on a cross-country tour of US sex ed. Jumping state to state and featuring actual, in-use sex ed lessons from the California liberal to the Christian conservative, How to Put On a Sock exposes the highs, lows, and in-betweens of what teens are and are not taught about sex today.

Personal stories from a multigenerational ensemble mix with multiple opportunities for audiences to participate in the lessons being shared, to highlight the continuing consequences of our sex ed experiences and ask what we all still need to learn to become fully-realized sexual citizens.

If you’re in San Diego or Los Angeles, come through! It’s playing six shows April 24-27 — lots of opportunities to get your sex education on.

I am thrilled to share the return of TEMPORARY OCCUPANT.

In January 2021, I worked with Clubbed Thumb to create TEMPORARY OCCUPANT for the pre-vaccine COVID era. It was an experience for one person at a time, an opportunity for a personal inauguration following Biden’s presidential one. My team and I transformed The Connelly Theater into a sacred space where attendees reflected on the Trump administration and set intentions for what we thought was life after him. Participants shared hopes and fears, beautiful and vulnerable insights and admissions, and even a few tears.

As we neared the 2024 election, I knew I’d want to give people the same opportunity to share and release fears in a safe, sacred, supported space. The election results only underscored the need to come together and find a way forward. And so…

Please join me on Presidents Day — Monday, February 17 — from 8 - 9 pm at Judson Memorial Church, for a TEMPORARY OCCUPANT for you and this moment. Reservations required but pay what you wish and open on Monday (Inauguration Day).

Congrats to the team of PRISONCORE! We had a fantastic, full, and very eventful run. Thanks to everyone who turned out!

Special thanks to the core team of writer kanishk, actors Rory and Kayla, and media designer (and photographer!) Lauren. Check out some shots of us having entirely too much fun in rehearsals.

Get your tickets for PRISONCORE! written by kanishk pandey and directed by me, playing at The Brick through Exponential Festival this January.

I am overjoyed to share I’ll be part of the 2025 Exponential Festival!

About Exponential: “Exponential is a month-long January festival dedicated to New York City-based emerging artists working in experimental performance. The participants in this multi-artist, multi-venue festival are committed to ecstatic creativity in the face of commercialism. Exponential is driven by inclusiveness and a diversity of artists, forms, and ideas coupled with utopian resource-sharing, mentoring and the championing of risky, rigorous work in eclectic fields.”

In early January I’ll be directing kanishk pandey’s PRISONCORE! — the ecstaticly creative play that I’ve been workshopping with him and media designer Lauren Serafica for several months now.

From the Exponential team: “After receiving an incredible amount of wild applications, our curation team reviewed, voted, met, shook our fists in the air, watched samples, debated endlessly, circled and noodled, ruminated, moved things around and came to a vibrant group of artists and venues for 2025.”

Stay tuned for more info, and get excited for some very experimental theater at the start of next year!

So excited to be going into rehearsals this week to continue to workshop PRISONCORE! written by kanishk pandey with exceptional media design by Lauren Serafica. We had a blast presenting the project at LPAC — check out pictures below! And this week we’re presenting the next iteration through The Brick’s Gestating Baby program. Performances are May 1-4 at 8pm. Get your tickets and join us on this wild look at power and panopticons.

Shots from PRISONCORE! at LPAC’s Rough Draft Festival, featuring Sasha Diamond as Rain and Meade Morrison as Lucky.

P.S. Extra exciting news about PRISONCORE! coming soon!

I am so excited to be returning to the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center this month to present PRISONCORE! — a multimedia extravaganza I’ve been working on with kanishk pandey and Lauren Serafica. I had such an amazing time presenting Packing and Cracking online through LPAC back in the very first few weeks of COVID. It is a joy to be reunited with the amazingly supportive folks there, get to work with them in person as had been the plan for Packing and Cracking, and get to continue to work with kanishk and Lauren.

The three of us have been developing PRISONCORE! for a few months now, including workshopping it at Brick Aux in February. Come see what it’s shaping up to be!

I’ve also been continuing to develop GUN TALK, which brings together people from across gun backgrounds and views to find common ground and new ways forward. This has included on-the-ground research in more states and a ton of contextual and culture investigations, too. Check out my current read and watch.

I’m thrilled to be spending most of this beautiful Fall month at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska. I’m here to continue developing my newest project, tentatively titled Gun Talk, which brings people together from across gun experiences and views to find common ground and new ways forward.

I’ve been researching this project for just over a year now, traveling to places across the country to do field work and ethnographic study. I’ve visited a wide range of states, each with their own unique gun policies, practices, and cultures:

Research sites for Gun Talk, Sept 2022-Nov 2023

It’s been lovely to share my ideas with my exceptional fellow Kimmel residents, talk to Nebraska locals about their gun backgrounds, and get inspired every day to keep trying to tackle one of the most complicated issues our country faces.

More on the project as it continues to develop!

The first half of 2023 has been so full of so much fun — and the rest of the year will surely match. I got to work on great, hilarious short plays with rock stars Rory Kulz and Kanishk Pandey, at The Tank and The Brick, and next month I’ll get to direct Kanishk’s Clubbed Thumb writer fellowship reading (get tickets here!). Being a Clubbed Thumb directing fellow back in 2020-2021 was such a magical experience and I’m so happy to be working with them again .

I’ll also have three (!) residencies later this year: in June at Tofte Lake Center in Minnesota, in September at Wildacres in North Carolina, and in November at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska. I’ll be working on new projects about one of my favorite topics — bodily autonomy — but via different, exciting avenues. For months now I’ve been working on these new projects through embodied research all across the country, and I’m so thankful to have so much time coming up to sit down, sift through, synthesize, and start to create work to help keep our bodies safe, in such an unsafe time.

I’m still aglow after spending most of September in Dorset, Vermont, through a residency with Marble House Project. I was there to continue my (now) long-running research in and response to the past, present, and future of abortion access in the United States. The suite of projects I’ve produced around it, collectively known as VIP, asks if people getting abortions in the US have ever been treated as VIPs and how we can build a country in which they are.

A stamp from 1973 (the year of the Roe v. Wade decision) promoting the use of ZIP Codes, which were first introduced 10 years earlier.

While at Marble House Project, I focused on the fallout from the overturning of Roe, learned the history of ZIP Codes, and spent 10 hours listening to major Supreme Court cases involving reproductive justice and writing down every single ZIP Code (over 9,000) where abortion has become illegal since June 24, 2022. A huge determinant of abortion access has always been where a person lives, and this has become even more true as state after state bans access to this vital, life-saving care.

I also researched Judaism’s views on abortion, which are much more progressive and healing than what is typically associated with religion and abortion. Finally, I created a library with resources around abortion access and self defense, taking a stab at what I want to build out into something called the Sexual Risk Avoidance Camp… stay tuned for that.

I was in residence with some of the best artists and people I’ve ever met: Amy Ritter, Alexis Convento, Matt Siegle, Toisha Tucker, Asia Stewart, and Leilehua Lanzilotti.

Marble House Project - Residency Cohort #51

Deepest thanks to Marble House for having me, and to my fellow residents for being so inspiring, supportive, and engaged.

A book about one of the most impactful projects I’ve ever worked on, City Council Meeting, is out today!

The book, written by the City Council Meeting co-creators and general awesome inspiring theater folk, Aaron Landsman and Mallory Catlett, is called The City We Make Together. It looks at how we make art with communities, how we perform power and who gets to play which roles, and how we can use creativity and rigorous inquiry to look at our structures of government and democracy anew. I’ve been hyping it to folks for years; I’m so glad everyone will be able to read it now.

I started working on City Council Meeting right out of college and kept working on it for 5+ years. I was the assistant director, but over that long period I did all kinds of things (like transcribe dozens of hours of city council meetings, cold call powerful people working in various local governments, and figure out how to get a lot of those blue books you used to have to write essays in for standardized tests and then learn how to make real-looking fake standardized tests and shrink wrap a ton of them — good times!). Aaron and Mallory taught me so much, connected me with so many, and highly influenced the course of my life.

To focus in on one thing I was taught/learned: one day, in either 2012 or 2013, Aaron sent me a book about how to write a book proposal and told me to read it. So I did, and shared what I had learned, and then we all worked together on writing a book proposal, for this book, for a very long time. And then… ten short years later, there’s an actual book, all published and everything! So be sure to get your copy of this long-awaited, quite magical book today.

(Speaking of 10 years ago, check out this retro City Council Meeting website: www.citycouncilmeeting.org and in the bottom right you’ll see a picture of a much younger me wearing a shirt I loved when I was 22, and doing the kind of being-a-facilitator-in-political-theater style of acting I still love doing today.)

It’s been a whirlwind spring that turned into a whirlwind summer that, somehow, is nearly almost fall?!

In May I finished my Beatrice Terry Residency at the Drama League with a lovely presentation of How to Put On a Sock. So many thanks to the wonderful performers, managers, and designers who made it happen: Janice Amaya, Yonatan Gebeyehu, Aubyn Heglie, Rachel Sachnoff, Sean Byrum Leo, Jacob Russell, and Alex Haddad. And of course a HUGE thank you to The Drama League, who has been a beacon of support to me for so long.

In May I also created a utopic pro-abortion zine with incredible visual artist Becky Bailey, whom I got to know at my residency at Monson Arts in Maine last December. The zine was instigated by another incredible visual artist, Lydia Nobles. It happened to launch a few days after the leaked draft of the anti-abortion Supreme Court decision, featured in what turned out to be an especially well-timed Abortion Stories arts festival. Check out the zine here, and add what you want the future of abortion to be:

Speaking of abortion: I’m gearing up to go to Vermont for a month in September, as a resident at Marble House Project in Dorset. While I’m there I’ll be doing… something about abortion! So much has changed since my last residency for my VIP abortion project at Monson Arts in December. I’m looking forward to having a solid set of weeks to revisit what I made and rethink completely what is needed in this very new moment.

With my wonderful job at the Center for Artistic Activism — where I’ve worked since early COVID, and where, since the start of this year, I’ve been running its voting program — I’ve been getting to do a lot of travel, too: in May I worked with activists in Florida; in June I worked with activists in Texas and Kansas; and in the fall I’ll be going to Wisconsin and Ohio to work with student activists there. It’s been great to get to see so much of the country, and get inspired by people doing such good, hard work in so many places.

For the past 2 years, I’ve been redeveloping a project I first made in grad school: How to Put On a Sock. It takes the audience on a cross-country tour of U.S. 9th grade sex ed laws and lessons. Featuring actual, in-use sex ed curricula from the California liberal to the Christian conservative. How to Put On a Sock exposes the highs, lows, and in-betweens of what teens — and us all — are and are not taught about sex today.

On Monday, May 9, at 2pm, I’m sharing a workshop presentation at The Drama League in NY.

I’ve been so lucky to get to work yet again with The Drama League, this time through its Beatrice Terry Residency for writer-directors. I was the 2020-2021 Beatrice Terry Residency, which became the 2020-202? cycle thanks to Covid. It’s meant I’ve gotten even more time to work on the project and I’ve gotten to collaborate with some truly fantastic folks, including Janice Amaya, Yonatan Gebeyehu, Aubyn Heglie, Rachel Sachnoff, Sean Byrum Leo, Jacob Russell, Alex Haddad, and more.

It’s a project that’s very dear to my heart and helped set the course of my career. I’d love to share this new version with you!

You can learn more about the project here. And don’t forget to RSVP!