PCPA (since 2004): Director: The Trojan Women, Merchant of Venice, Gidion’s Knot, And When Love Speaks…, The Circuit, Oliver Button is a Sissy, Henry VI; Actor: William Joad, Mother Road, Caius Cassius, Julius Caesar; Mal, The Addams Family; Henslowe, Shakespeare In Love; The D’Ysquith Family, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder; John Proctor, The Crucible; Malvolio, Twelfth Night; Lumiere, Beauty and the Beast; Colonel Brandon, Sense and Sensibility; Major-General Stanley, The Pirates of Penzance; Richard III, Richard III; Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady; Darius Wheeler, 36 Views; George Banks, Mary Poppins; Karl/Steve, Clybourne Park; Prospero, The Tempest; Professor Bhaer, Little Women; UPS Man, Legally Blonde; Vershinin, Three Sisters; Friar Lawrence, Romeo and Juliet; Marley/Fezziwig, A Christmas Carol; Richard Hannay, The 39 Steps; Lt. Frank Cioffi, Curtains; Thenardier, Les Misérables; Harold Hill, Tateh, Ragtime; Iago, Othello; Henry, The Real Thing; Daddy Warbucks, Annie; Stage Manager, Our Town; Sky Masterson, Guys and Dolls
Other Theatres: Denver Center Theater, Pasadena Playhouse, Mark Taper Forum
Television: The Practice, Frasier, Columbo, Empty Nest
Awards: 2013 Ten Chimney’s Fellowship, LA Drama Critics Circle Award: Cloud 9, LA Ovation Nominee: The Swan, Dramalogue Award: Don’t Go Back to Rockville
Teaches: Shakespeare
Training: BA, UC Irvine; MFA, Academy for Classical Acting in Washington, DC
Member: SAG; *Actors’ Equity Association
Teaching Philosophy
Speech is an act of defiance; when you commit to language with your body and mind, you are casting words out into the world never to be retrieved. It is this kind of ownership that I strive for in my class.
2nd Year Voice and Speech is primarily about harnessing the energizing power of words. Speech is action. I want our students to delight in the use of words, to inhabit the texture, color and muscularity of them; the very particularness of speech. Using a variety of physical exercises, we connect vocalization to deep impulses of breath. We work to make the mechanisms for vocal production and articulated speech habitual, so we can deliver language clearly, precisely and effectively. And our study of heightened texts such as poetry, rhetoric and oratory is designed to lead us to a greater command of the power of language to persuade a listener.
Throughout this work, we seek not just to master language, but to re-experience it. We listen with a fresh ear. We understand that the actor’s job is to tell a story…to paint pictures for the blind. It is your need to paint these pictures vividly and with detail that makes speech exciting – when you have a stake in the telling of them. Ask yourself, just how important is it to tell this story and to tell it well?