For a long time I've thought about ensembles—not just the collaborative work of actors in a play or film but ensemble narratives and how balancing multiple stories or subjectivities affects the experience of a story and its political implications. This extends to the production circumstances—how collaboration is approached and how (and whether) profits are shared. In this 50th anniversary year of the brilliant ensemble film, Robert Altman's Nashville, I decided to write about the many meanings of "ensemble" as applied to film. The whole piece is at The Write Launch. "Against Protagonism: Why We Need More Ensemble Films."

In March of 2025, I sat in the Radio Kingston studio with Lisa Barnard Kelly, one of the hosts of Dream Life Radio, to talk about my poems and performance pieces—somniloquies, which I make while reading aloud at night and drifting into sleeptalk. In Part I, we discuss the genesis of this practice in reading to my kids at bedtime and reminisce about the Dream Festivals of the 2000s, hosted by Lisa, Ione, and Pauline Oliveros of the Deep Listening Institute, for many years a Kingston institution. In Part II, we are joined by Ione, who reads from her work on dream incubation. We also talk about playing around with dreams I experienced in the morning while listening to podcasts, kind of a reverse of somniloquies at the other end of sleep. I'm a big fan of partnering with dreams in any creative process. If you are too, you might want to listen.

Theatremaker, educator, and playwright Kairos Looney is the author of House of Telescopes, which completed its Off-Broadway premiere run in April 2024, produced by Pipeline Theatre Company, presented at ART/New York, and directed by Lyam Gabel. I was extremely fortunate to be among the ensemble of 16 performers that brought this story to life, with original music composed by Aya Aziz. Described as a "coming-of-age transgender fantasia"—where the age in question ranges from 18 to 58—​House of Telescopes tells a story of people and families in transition. In this interview, Kairos shares their thoughts about writing for multiple characters from creative, ethical, and political perspectives, how stories of gender transition are currently being told in theatre, how playwriting helps them make sense of the world, how this whole business of pretend play relates to making the world a better place, why trans people fight for Palestinian freedom, and what kind of kale they grow in their garden.

During the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found an online class being offered by arthaus berlin and taught by my guest for this episode, Ariel Gutierrez Torres, who is a member of their faculty. The class was called Manifesto, and we explored that concept both in terms of the history of the manifesto in many art forms and in terms of our own artistic practice and how we talk about it. I loved this class so much I took it three times.

In this interview, my prompt about actors standing in a circle brings to Ariel’s mind a performance of Il libro delle danze (The Book of Dances) by the Danish theatre company, Odin Teatret, on the outskirts of a village in the Peruvian Andes in 1978. This is a well-known image for Odin Teatret, which was founded by Eugenio Barba and with whom Ariel has worked repeatedly.

​From this image, Ariel riffs on horizontal and vertical arrangements as they show up in theatre devising, considering everything from whether a group of actors needs a director to how funding affects choices made by theatre companies and schools to notions of the collective in political theory and grassroots organizing in Europe and Ariel’s home continent of Latin America. He even throws a skipping stone across theatre history to touch on the horizontal and vertical in dramaturgy. At one point he reminisces about hearing Jerry Grotowski lecture for six hours at a time in Paris. I think he shares Grotowski's gift for eloquence; I whittled this down to under 90 minutes, but could easily have listened to him for six. He’s one of my all-time favorite teachers.

Some people/topics Ariel discusses: 
arthaus berlin (formerly LISPA, the London International School of Performing Arts)
Eugenio Barba, Italian founder of the Danish company Odin Teatret and formerly apprenticed to Polish director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski
Jacques LeCoq
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Henri Bergson, author of Matter and Memory
Tadeusz Kantor, Polish artist and theatremaker (see The Dead Class)
The Frankfurt School of critical theorists: Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin
Buffon (French: bouffon), the jester, satire, sacred madness
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rose Burnett Bonczek joins me in this episode to talk about the book she co-authored with her colleague David Storck, Ensemble Theatre Making: A Practical Guide. Rose directed the BFA acting program for over 20 years at Brooklyn College/CUNY and is the producing artist director of Gi60 US—the one-minute theatre festival. She works as a director and theatre consultant in addition to being an educator.

A conversation with Fern Sloan and Ted Pugh, both actors and longtime teachers of the Michael Chekhov technique. Studying with them has been one of the great experiences of my life, and I feel fortunate to have taken two five-week immersions at the school before the COVID-19 pandemic changed the possibilities for in-person classes. You can learn more about them, the school's offerings, and the technique on the website of the Michael Chekhov School, which offers classes online and in the area of the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people, also known as Hudson, NY. Also be sure to check out the searchable Michael Chekhov Archive. Below, I am flanked by Fern and Ted in Ted's light- and book-filled living room.

For a while, I've been thinking it would be fun to talk to various people who have taught me, inspired me, or with whom I have worked about ensembles. It feels like a fundamental aspect of acting that we cultivate a "sense of the whole," as Michael Chekhov referred to it. We tune in to other actors onstage but also to crew members and anyone who happens to be watching. I've been enjoying these conversations and I hope you do, too.

​Podcast theme music by Alexi Action.

I was very fortunate to join the cast of Paula Vogel's Indecent for a run at Playhouse on Park in West Hartford, CT January 25–February 26, 2023. The play is devastating, vibrant, and thematically rich. A joyful surprise this summer was our being awarded Best Ensemble (as well as Best Director and Best Lighting Design) by the Connecticut Critics Circle for the 2023 season. What made this especially gratifying—apart from my belief that an ensemble award is the best award actors could hope to win, since we are by nature collaborative and social—is that the play is itself about an acting ensemble. The play begins with a ghostly company of actors coming to life to tell the story of Sholem Asch's play, God of Vengeance: how it was written, how it traveled, and how it wound up in the crosshairs of intolerance. It's hard to choose a single protagonist in Indecent—it could be any of several characters or the play within the play...In my opinion, it's the ensemble. Photo by Meredith Longo.

Premiering at the Palm Springs 2023 ShortFest with a subsequent screening at Raindance in London in the fall, You Know Where to Find Me is described by director Sam A. Davis as the story of a day its protagonist, Frankie, has waited for "for 23 years. With his mom’s help, he packs up everything he owns and sets out to start a new life alone. The euphoria of newfound independence is short-lived; as the night falls, he misses his mom." We shot it outside Lansing, Michigan over the course of a week. Grayson Deeney, who played Frankie, was indefatigable, experiencing long shoot days for the first time. I loved working with him and the crew of this and hope it will find more festival audiences as well as an online home for streaming. You Know Where to Find Me is a staff pick on Vimeo and you can view it here.

During April I was hired to be one of a small ensemble of actor/devisers developing a scene enacting a hiring committee meeting to review applications for the position of  assistant professor in chemical engineering. The project is part of a million-dollar grant awarded by the National Science Foundation to the University of Louisville to advance women of color in STEM fields. Using Augusto Boal's theatre of the oppressed as a model and adapting it to Zoom, we performed the scene twice to a pilot group of faculty and deans who had written the grant, facilitated by our director, Sidney Monroe, who was charged with the challenging work of conceptualizing the piece, figuring out what this particular hiring process would entail, shepherding our script through a process of increasing complexity and relevance, and delivering it by Zoom at a time of year when faculty were eagerly leaving campus after a profoundly difficult year. We were charged with fashioning a believable group of academic chemical engineers, about which we went in knowing exactly nothing. 

During the second run-through of each performance we  stopped whenever a spect-actor (Boal's term that called in the audience as active participants) interrupted the action to share thoughts about how implicit bias was evident in the workings of the committee meeting, identifying everything from how prioritizing publications over service favors some applicants to the frequency or ease with which some committee members cut off others or ignored their suggestions. For me this was an instructive adventure in applied theatre with the potential to increase transparency and change real-world systems, and it was a joy to work with artists from Kentucky, Virginia, and New York.

Also this month I took bystander training with Hollaback, which I highly recommend. Bystander intervention training gives us the tools to step in during episodes of harassment rather than just freezing—it's a bit analogous to Boal's spect-actor/active problem solver rather than a passive audience member. Historically this is a time of taking ownership and stepping into stories as they unroll, for the common good. The relationship between acting-as-performance and moving out of bystander mode in order to intervene in situations of harm is one way in which actors have the opportunity to make our profession a study of becoming a more effective human. I'm thinking a lot these days about what we mean when we say "make strong choices."