BARLOW ADAMSON* is delighted to return SpeakEasy where he has appeared in Reckless, Theater District, Almost Maine, Fuddy Meers, and An American Daughter. He has performed on many other local stages including, among others: Huntington Theatre Company (The Maiden’s Prayer, A Month In The Country); Lyric Stage Company (Chinglish, Time Stands Still, The Scene, Private Lives, Noises Off, Red Herring); Underground Railway (Yesterday Happened: Remembering H.M.); Nora Theatre Company (Operation Epsilon, On The Verge, The Swan); Gloucester Stage Company (The Norman Conquests, Dinner With Friends); New Repertory Theatre (A Christmas Story). Barlow is an artistic associate of the Mill 6 Collaborative and has directed productions for them including Shakespeare’s R+J; Bunburry: A Serious Play For Trivial People; and The Monster Tales. He has also directed the world premieres of From Denmark With Love and Bear Patrol for Vaquero Playground.

KARL BAKER OLSEN* returns to SpeakEasy Stage where he has appeared in Scott Edmiston’s productions The History Boysand Reckless. For director David R. Gammons he has previously acted in The Lieutenant of Inishmore (New Repertory Theatre) and The Duchess of Malfi (Actors’ Shakespeare Project). Other Boston area stage credits include Vengeance is the Lord’s (Huntington); A Moon for the Misbegotten (Merrimack Rep); The Comedy of Errors(Commonwealth Shakespeare); Little Black Dress, Gary (Boston Playwrights’ Theatre); afterlife, The Misanthrope (New Rep); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ASP). He received a 2008 Independent Reviewers of New England award for his performances in History Boys and Lieutenant of Inishmore. Film work includes the upcoming Frank the Bastard. Karl has trained at the Boston University School of Theatre, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Tony Award-winning Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. This spring he will join the company of Arthur Nauzyciel’s production of Julius Caesar at the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro in Bogota, Colombia. He lives in Brooklyn.

MARIANNA BASSHAM* (Claire) SpeakEasy: Blackbird (Elliot Norton Award), Reckless (IRNE Award), and In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play).  Other theaters include Commonwealth Shakespeare, Huntington Theatre, The Lyric, New Rep, The Nora, Central Square Theater, Stoneham Theatre, The Gamm Theatre in Rhode Island, and The Actors’ Shakespeare Project where she is a Resident Acting Company member. Film/TV includes Olive Kitteridge, Rubberneck, and Moonrise Kingdom.

LARRY COEN received a 2010 Elliot Norton Award for directing Phantom of the Oprah for Gold Dust Orphans. Additional directing credits: The Understudy for Lyric Stage Co; Ruthless! for Speakeasy; Twilight Zone and Willie Wanker and the Hershey Highway (co-directed with James Byrne) for Gold Dust Orphans; Shel Shocked, by the late Shel Silverstein, for Market Theater;MLK: We Are The Dream for American Place Theater; FAX of Life for Manhattan Punchline. With David Crane, he wrote the Broadway comedy Epic Proportions. Larry is Artistic Director of City Stage Co., which provides free arts education programs and performances for low-income kids and families.

PAUL DAIGNEAULT (Producing Artistic Director) was the recipient of the 2014 Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence by the Boston Theater Critics Association. Since founding SpeakEasy in 1992, he has produced over 100 Boston premieres. SpeakEasy directing highlights include: The Color Purple; In the Heights; Xanadu; Next to Normal; Nine; Body Awareness; The Great American Trailer Park Musical; [title of show]; The Savannah Disputation; Jerry Springer – The Opera; The New Century; Some Men; Zanna, Don’t!; Parade (2008 Elliot Norton Award – Outstanding Director, Midsize Company); Almost, Maine; Caroline, or Change; Take Me Out; Company; A Man of No Importance (co-production Súgán); Bat Boy: The Musical (2003 Elliot Norton Award – Outstanding Director, Small Company); Passion; A New Brain; Violet; Songs for a New World; Floyd Collins; Jeffrey; and Love! Valour! Compassion! Regional credits: Grand Hotel and Nine (The Boston Conservatory and Cincinnati Conservatory of Music); Rent, City of Angels, Sunday in the Park with George, and Merrily We Roll Along (The Boston Conservatory); and Into the Woods, Urinetown, and Blue Window (Boston College). Paul is also on the faculty at The Boston Conservatory where he teaches musical theatre and directing. He has also been honored with the Boston College Arts Council’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Achievement in 2007, and served as the 2011-2012 Rev. J. Donald Monan S.J. Professor in Theatre Arts. Outside the theatre, Paul serves on the Boards of the Barbara C. Harris Camp and Conference Center and the ICU Patient & Family Advisory Council at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

KERRY A. DOWLING* (Rita)returns to SpeakEasy having performed in Carrie; Far From Heaven; Clybourne Park; Next to Normal;The Drowsy Chaperone; Nine; The Great American Trailer Park Musical; Reckless; Jerry Springer – the Opera; The New Century; The Mystery of Edwin Drood; Parade; The Women; Bat Boy; Company; Elegies; A New Brain; Triumph of Love; Lips Together, Teeth Apart; Songs for a New World(SpeakEasy); Nicholas Nickleby, Follies(Lyric Stage); A Man of No Importance (Súgán/SpeakEasy); Steel Magnolias, Pal Joey (Stoneham);The Most Happy Fella, Dueling Divas (Gloucester);Distracted(Underground Railway);Gypsy(Next Door). Kerry is the recipient of the 2010 SpeakEasy Stage Outstanding Artist Award.

SCOTT EDMISTON (Director) returns to SpeakEasy where he directed Far from Heaven; The History Boys; The Light in the Piazza; Five by Tenn; Other Desert Cities; Next Fall; In the Next Room (or the vibrator play); Reckless; The Women; The Last Sunday in June; and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told. He has directed more than 60 productions across New England for Lyric Stage, A.R.T., Huntington Theatre, and New Rep, among others. Highlights: Long Day’s Journey into Night, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Time Stands Still, Sunday in the Park with George, Water by the Spoonful, A Marvelous Party, Nixon in China, Private Lives, and Betrayal.  Scott is the recipient of SpeakEasy’s Outstanding Artist Award, three Elliot Norton Awards, two IRNE Awards, the StageSource Theatre Hero Award, and the Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence in Theatre. He is a Professor of the Practice and Chair of the Theatre Department at Northeastern University.  

SANDY HEFFLEY is pleased to be back at SpeakEasy and working with Scott after appearing as Maggie/and the Nurse in The Women and as Jane in The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told. Other regional credits include Arthur Miller’s The Price (Ester), Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (Martha) and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (Madame Arcati). Sandy also directed Edward Albee’s Seascape and Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother for the Alley Theatre; and Holly Hughes’ The Well of Horniness and Claudia Allen’s Movie Queens for the Triangle Theater. Television: Lee Kantor in the award-winning lesbian soap opera “Two in Twenty.”

NATALIE KEARNS is thrilled to return to SpeakEasy, where she got her professional start with Parade. Other SpeakEasy credits as Props Master include The Little Dog Laughed, Some Men, Zanna Don’t!, Reckless, and [title of show], as well as Assistant Props Master for The Vibrator Play. Natalie is currently the staff Properties Artisan at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island and also serves as Props Master for the Brown/Trinity MFA Program. Local credits include props for Lyric Stage (Irma Vep, Follies), Nora Theatre (Not Enough Air), Opera Boston (Madame White Snake, La Grande Duchesse), Brown Summer Playwright’s Rep (2011, 2012 seasons), and Shakespeare & Co. (2010 summer season). Beyond New England, she’s had work featured at the Beijing Music Festival in China, Royal Shakespeare Company in England, and Central City Opera in Colorado. She was a Professional Intern at the Huntington Theatre Company for the 2008-2009 season and has her BFA in Theater Design/Technology from Emerson College. www.nataliekearns.com

Acts of Hope

Craig Lucas in his own words

“I’m an abandoned baby. I was literally left on the back-seat of a parked car in a gas station. With a little note pinned onto me.”

“Deep down most artists I know know full well that art and artists are born in trauma. Painful, scary things kick our innate talents into gear, otherwise why would we ever put up with all the mishegas and bullshit and naysaying. We have to express these things, no matter how, no matter what: that loneliness and injustice and untrammeled sense of ourselves! I was here, goddammit! Listen up! Look!”

“I’ve been lucky enough at one time or another to be an actor, singer, puppeteer, magician, poet, film critic, playwright, screenwriter, theater director, movie director, opera librettist and book writer.”

“In college I was a poet. My teacher Anne Sexton chanted at me: ‘Make it strange!’ Use words to shock us back to the truth and immediacy of our own experience.”

“As technology penetrates deeper and deeper into the space between us, theatre remains as much in the now as any art form could ever be – alive as a kiss.”

“I love actors and nothing makes me happier than being in a rehearsal room with actors. I told my boyfriend once that it was the closest one could get to being in an orgy while remaining clothed, because you are in a room with all these interesting, sexy, smart, talented people and you are all collectively sharing intimacy and creating something that is a consensual act.”

“From Greek tragedy to our own largely unseen ones, man’s ability to choose his or her countenance in the face of fatal blows is the noblest testament to our deepest humanity. Suffering may be inevitable, but what we do about it is not.”

“My lover, my best friend, my closest colleague over decades, my mother, my father-in-law and several dozen other friends and colleagues all died rather horrible deaths in rapid succession, and I did not find myself ascending into a compassionate, giving place, but instead a significantly meaner and less generous one.”

“The trouble with experience, of course, is you have to have it yourself, you never take it on faith.”

“Everything that is worth doing artistically is scary. I have had the best results in my life as an artist by going past what I think is my limit, by putting myself in some danger. That’s the place I trust the most. I often fall on my face. But I prefer that to writing the same play over and over.”

“I do think that that’s our job as artists, to show the mess of life and to shine a light into people and to never ever – ever – ever judge them.”

“I think understanding is the important thing. That’s the nature of drama – people doing the wrong thing. There’d be no play, you know, if everybody did the right thing.”

“The act of writing is itself an act of hope. Art isn’t therapy, but when you face terror, you have the primary building blocks out of which to create art. You need to have optimism and pessimism, wariness about life and hopefulness about life.”

WILL MCGARRAHAN* (Isadore/Charlotte) is happy to return to SpeakEasy Stage where he performed in Big Fish; Far From Heaven; Next Fall; The Drowsy Chaperone; Reckless; Some Men; The Mystery of Edwin Drood; Five By Tenn; Company; The Last Sunday in June; Elegies: A Song Cycle; Ruthless!; A Class Act; and A New Brain. Other local credits include Light Up The Sky, Into The Woods, Death of a Salesman, Becky’s New Car, 33 Variations, The Chosen, The Temperamentals, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Grey Gardens, November, Souvenir, and Dirty Blonde. (Lyric Stage); A Raisin in the Sun (Huntington Theatre), The Wind in the Willows and Happy Days (Gloucester Stage); Nine Circles (Publick Theatre and Gloucester Stage); A Moon For The Misbegotten and Buried Child (Nora Theater); and The Wrestling Patient (SpeakEasy Stage/Boston Playwrights/40 Magnolias). Will worked as an actor, singer and pianist for many years in Seattle before moving to Boston’s South End in 2001.

KAREN PERLOW (Lighting Design) is ecstatic to be back at SpeakEasy, where her favorite productions include: The Color Purple, In the Heights, Reckless, The Great American Trailer Park Musical, The History Boys, Five by Tenn, Bat Boy, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, A New Brain, and A Man of No Importance, the last a co-production with Súgán Theatre Company. Upcoming productions include: Dear Elizabeth at Lyric Stage, Reconsidering Hannah at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, and Arabian Nights at Central Square Theater. Karen teaches English to speakers of other languages, as well as Lighting Design at Northeastern University.  She is a three-time IRNE Award-winner for Best Lighting Design. karenperlowlightdesign.com

PAULA PLUM* has appeared at SpeakEasy Stage as Bev/Kathy in Clybourne Park, Doctors One through Six/Woman Patient in Reckless, Helene in The New Century, Margaret in The Savannah Disputation, Dorothy in The History Boys, and Joyce in Body Awareness. In 2009, she was one of five actors nation-wide to receive the prestigious Fox Actor Fellowship in association with SpeakEasy, and enjoyed three years here as “actor in residence.” As part of that Fellowship, she created What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, a theatre piece based on the life of poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ms. Plum is the recipient of four IRNE Awards, the 1995 Eliot Norton Award for Best Actress for her work in Lost in Yonkers, the 2007 Eliot Norton Award for Best Actress in Miss Witherspoon, the 2004 Eliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence, and the 2003 Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University. She is an actress, director, writer, and teacher and has created seven one-person shows for the Unadilla Theatre of Vermont, most notably Plum Pudding (IRNE Best Solo Performance, 2004). For Actors’ Shakespeare Project she has played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, Beatrice inMuch Ado About Nothing, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, and The Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well. She has appeared at Lyric West as Vivian Bearing in Wit; at Gloucester Stage Company as Grace inFaith Healer, Molly in Molly Sweeney, Winnie in Happy Days, and Mouth in Not I; at the American Repertory Theatre as Inez in No Exit; as Babakina in Ivanov, as Yvette in Mother Courage, as Belphragia in Lysistrata, as Soot in The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and as Germaine in Picasso at the Lapin Agile; at the Lyric Stage Company as Dr. Brandt in 33 Variations, as Stevie in The Goat, as Amanda in Private Lives, as Kath in Entertaining Mr. Sloane, as Terry in Sideman, in the title role in The Heiress, as Abby in Mercy Seat, and in the title role in Miss Witherspoon. In 1998 she was directed by Eric Engel in the award-winning production Sing Me to Sleep by John Kuntz and again in 1999 in Kuntz’s Miss Price. Film credits include: “Mermaids,” “Malice,” and “Next Stop Wonderland.” Television: “Sins of the Preacher” (ABC Lifetime), “Science Court” (three seasons ABC), and co-creator and star of “The Dick & Paula Celebrity Special” for FX. In January 2005, she premiered her new work Wigged OUT! with Leslie Dillen’s Dressed UP! directed by Karen MacDonald for which she received the IRNE for Best Solo Performance, 2005. Ms Plum is a cum laude graduate of Boston University. She is married to actor Richard Snee.

DAWN SCHALL SAGLIO* (Production Stage Manager) has stage managed 15 shows for SpeakEasy, among them: CARRIE the musical; The Motherf**ker with the Hat; Reckless; The Savannah Disputation; Jerry Springer – The Opera; The Light in the Piazza; The History Boys; The Women; Five by Tenn; and The Last Sunday in June. Other local credits include productions at the Huntington Theatre, Gloucester Stage, BPT, and The Nora. Her greatest credits are sons Nick, Eric, and Tucker. Dawn serves on SpeakEasy’s board of trustees and has been a member of Equity for 14 years. Love to Doug!

CRISTINA TODESCO** (Set Design) is pleased to be working with Speakeasy again after designing last season’s Tribes and The Whale. Previous Speakeasy credits:  Red, The Divine Sister, Body Awareness, The New Century, Reckless.  Other theaters include:  Lyric Stage Company, NewRep, Harbor Stage, Boston Playwright’s, Boston Conservatory, Commonwealth Shakespeare, Olney Theater Center, ART Institute, Actor’s Shakespeare Project, Huntington Theatre, Orfeo Group, Williamstown Theater Festival, Opera Boston, Stoneham Theater, Suffolk University, Boston University, and Boston College.  A four time winner of the Eliot Norton Award for Best Design, she is on the faculty at Boston University’s School of Theater Arts and a member of USA 829.