Salomé
by Oscar Wilde
August and September 2022, Stag & Lion Theatre Company, New York, New York
This sweltering, gothic rendition of Wilde’s symbolist drama was derived from deep thinking I had been doing on romantic love. Why do we love the people we love? Why do we withhold our love from others? And what do we do when we find our love is unrequited? My cast did heroic work of wringing every bit of romance, passion, and pain from this riddling and enigmatic play, and they didn’t miss a step as they found the Wildean humor that other productions of Salomé have too often missed out on. It was my privilege to be the first guest director at the Stag & Lion Theatre Company in its ten-year history.
Featuring: Gillian Britt, Lee Collins, Nicolas Cristino, Nicholas De Phares, Charlie Ferrara, Linus Gelber, Kara Gordon, Don McManus, Abhishek Ojha, Heather Rogers, Karina Verna, Maren Westgard
Playwright: Oscar Wilde
Assistant director and scenic designer: Sarah Villegas
Costume designer: Joshua Koehn
Choreographer: Maren Westgard
The Gods of the Mountain
by Lord Dunsany
August 2021, Columbus Park Pavilion, New York, New York
This unfairly forgotten 1911 fantasy-drama has long been a favorite of mine. When the New York Foundation for the Arts gave me a grant to produce public art, I knew immediately which play I wanted to put on. Dunsany’s chaotic and malleable world reminds one of Lovecraft and Tolkien, his crafty beggars and rogues reminds one of Brecht, and the sly humor involved in their ceaseless waiting, opining, and dreading reminds one of Beckett. Yet for all this piece’s literary and aesthetic value, it was important for me to draw out its resonances with the experiences of homeless people. Though Dunsany’s beggars have the literary color of Dickensian guttersnipes, they are indeed homeless and poor, and have the same desperation and needs that many homeless people do. So we performed this play outdoors, free to the public, and left a parcel of food out for the homeless with whom we shared the park once the show was over.
Featuring: Alex Aguirre, Abram Blau, Nicolas Cristino, Matthew DeCostanza, Beth Griffith, Sean Phillips, Taite Pierson, Annie Saenger, and Nick Walther
Playwright: Lord Dunsany
Designer: Meg Powers
Penis Inspection Day, or, the Ape of Naples
by Matthew DeCostanza
October 2021, The Yale Cabaret, New Haven, Connecticut
Seeing plays at the Yale Cabaret was an earlier theatre-going experience for me as a kid, and so I found it quite moving to direct there as an adult. What’s more, I got to direct a play of my own writ, and on very personal subject matter– scheming, suffering, and whiling away the hours at a boarding school so far from the comforts of home. The school depicted in this play is far more grand and prestigious than the downmarket institutional therapy school I attended, but they share the same level of hidden rot; there is many a hoary institution that claims to aid the common good, and yet is best suited to aiding itself. Penis Inspection Day is a playful comedy on serious themes, and moreover a swaggering pastiche of Shakespeare, Wilde, Schiller, Wedekind, Brecht, etc.– a “spiritual autobiography” of my imaginative and wayward youth.
Featuring: Chesed Chap, Matthew DeCostanza, Patrick Denney, Noelle Mercer, Clara Montgomery, and Bradley Nowacek
Playwright: Matthew DeCostanza
Scenic designer and costume designer: Stephen Marks
Costume designer: Aidan Griffiths
Lighting designer: Riva Fairhall
Sound designer: Bryn Scharenberg
Intimacy coordinator: Kelsey Rainwater
Producer: Natalie King
Technical director: Cam Camden
Stage manager: Maya Li
Wolves, or, The Perils of the Flower Bed
by Steven Glavey
April 2016, SUNY Purchase College, Purchase, New York
Wolves (now known as The Perils of the Flower Bed) is a Gothic romance adapted from a script Steven Glavey, Meg Powers and I developed for student radio. It is a heart-fluttering melodrama in the old tradition, mixing stories like Dracula, Bluebeard, the Grimm fairy tales, and the fiction of Angela Carter to ask a queer question: what if the Big Bad Wolf loved the little riding girl? what if Count Dracula actually loved Mina Harker? In refocalizing Gothic fiction to examine questions of queer desire and unreal bodies, we presented a thesis on isolation, loneliness, and monstrosity.
Featuring: Jane Coty, Riley Stanzione, and Alejandro Torres
Playwright: Steven Glavey
Costume design: Meg Powers
Scenic design: Corinne Gologursky
Lighting design: Sophie Porter-Hyatt
Composer and sound designer: Jack Tomascak
Special effects makeup: Alanson Keenan
Stage manager: Emily Scott
…odds and ends…
