Featured Productions

O’Neill Reimagined: Warnings Before Breakfast and A Wife for a Life: A Backstage Story, Adaptor and Director

The year 2024 was devoted to adapting early plays by Eugene O’Neill. As the new year approached, I decided to blend two plays that previously held no interest for me. Eugene O’Neill’s Warnings is a play about an isolated man and his play Before Breakfast is about an isolated woman. The challenge of putting the two plays in conversation with each other by toggling back and forth sparked my imagination. To make this work, I needed to write short scenes that allowed the audience to see the two stories of isolation as a larger story of a relationship in crisis. This new take on the two plays entitled Warnings Before Breakfast was performed January 12-14 at the Museum of the San Ramon Valley in Danville, CA. In the spring, WBB was approved for a remount in New Ross, Ireland but needed another one-act to fill out the bill. I decided to contextualize Eugene O’Neill’s first play A Wife for a Life by writing new scenes that framed the original play in the biography of Eugene O’Neill and his relationship to his father, the famous actor James O’Neill. A Wife for a Life: A Backstage Story begins with aspiring young playwright Eugene O’Neill knocking on his father’s dressing room door with his first play in hand. The two men discuss the play, argue about the play and ultimately play out the play in the dressing room. The program “O’Neill Reimagined” featuring Warnings Before Breakfast and A Wife for a Life: A Backstage Story was performed at the Eugene O’Neill International Festival of Theatre in New Ross, Ireland in October. 2024 marked a big step in my creative growth as I gained confidence in my ability to write theatrically.

The First Man, Director

Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play The First Man received its first American production in over a century at the Museum of the San Ramon Valley in Danville, CA in January 2023. The heart of the play, a marital conflict over the role of work and motherhood, underscored by personal trauma, proved to be universal and timely. The patriarchal system that surrounds and informs the couple’s conflict was heightened by the theatrical use of a Greek chorus representing the family. In October 2023, Washington University in St. Louis invited EONF to remount its production for its Eugene O’Neill Symposium. Four actors from the original production were joined on stage by five St. Louis actors for this special performance.

Welded, Director

The January 2022 production of Welded by Eugene O’Neill took on a life of its own in 2022. First produced at the Museum of the San Ramon Valley in Danville, CA, it went on to be the featured event on the opening night of the Eugene O’Neill International Festival of Theatre in New Ross, Ireland in October 2022. The January incarnation  was staged for an intimate 50-seat house and relied on spotlighting and the use of actors as audience to tell the story. In New Ross, the play was reimagined for the large proscenium space of the St. Michael’s Theatre and was explored through sound. The play became more like a lyrical dance piece which leaned further into symbolism.The marital crisis at the center of the play retained the intensity of the first production, but the emotions of the play were more sweeping with the heightened importance of sound and movement.

In November and December of 2022, Welded was filmed in the intimate space of the old barn at Tao House. A neutral stage space (or nowhere space) strategy was employed to emphasize that the story was about relationship and emotion and not about place. With the filming, lighting, and in particular the use of shadows, became important again to highlight the internal life, the emotional journeys, within the play. The film was released in the spring of 2023 and can be viewed on this website.

Hughie Adaptor, Director

During the year 2018, I worked with dramaturg William Davies King and three Bay Area actors to explore ways to work the rich text found in Eugene O’Neill’s stage directions into the action of the play. Ultimately, creating the device of a third character out of the stage directions yielded a re-imagined production of Eugene O’Neill’s one-act play. Our process consisted of a couple of week-long workshops, six weeks of rehearsal, two weeks of performances at the Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site (Tao House), and a tour of Ireland, highlighted by an International debut at the Eugene O’Neill International Festival of Theatre in New Ross, Ireland.

To read the article about the process of adapting and directing Hughie, which was published in the Eugene O’Neill Review in 2019, click here to open the PDF.

Animal Farm Adaptor, Director

Adapted George Orwell’s book Animal Farm into a stage play. After studying various stage adaptations of Orwell’s book and finding these portrayals static, I set about to break the story into chapters and then created a more action-oriented approach to telling the story of each chapter. My goal was to show the audience the story, not tell it. I wrote extensive dialogue to activate the scenes and utilized Benjamin the donkey as the guide to the story. I collaborated with local visual artist John Osgood to create an original aesthetic for the set and masks constructed for the show. Produced in Danville, CA in 2018.