Previews of Current and Coming Attractions

STAY
Brian Miskell, Actor: "I love working on new plays. I find collaborating with playwrights, directors, and actors on new work incredibly exciting (although that said, I'm also dying to work on some Chekhov). My soft spot is for plays and productions that explore the weird, awkward, inarticulate side of human nature, and how we behave as we're trying to reach out to other people."

WORLD WIDE LAB: A DIRECTORS' FEAST
Evan T. Cummings, Co-Artistic Director and one of 12 collaborating directors: "Collaborative director-driven theatre – where ideas are shared, cultures and styles are explored, and a diverse, eclectic, but unified vision is achieved."

TO FOOL THE EYE
Cailin Heffernan, Director: "In today's economics, it is customary to see the world in close-up only... a couple of characters on a single set, often housed in contemporary setting. This situation has heightened my desire for work of a more "epic" nature with many characters and locations. Boomerang provides me a venue to often travel abroad and in diverse time periods with many new friends."

CANDIDA
Sean Williams, Actor: "I was born in San Jose, California but we moved three weeks after to Cedar Rapids, Iowa and then just kept moving. My parents were musicians, my dad's a conductor and my mom's a composer, so we basically kept floating wherever the work took them. I ended up in the midwest, the south, the northeast, the west coast, London, Nairobi... just about anywhere you could land. So, we weren't really *raised* anywhere, we just sorta grew up wherever people were willing to pay musicians. And what's interesting about that, to me, is that it was never Los Angeles or New York or San Francisco or whatever - it was Norfolk, Virgina and Basking Ridge, New Jersey... those kinds of towns. I also ended up going to a whole string of colleges. After essentially dropping out of high school, I joined a performance troupe at Citrus College in Southern California, then studied music at The University of Iowa and then acting at UNC, Chapel Hill. I think I got *really* lucky because I began my career in Musical Theater, learning to project, to face the audience, just to understand physically what happens on stage. Then, when I got to Carolina, we did a lot more of the internal stuff, all of the stuff that actors talk about. I didn't plan it this way - honestly, I've barely planned anything in my life - but it means I spent *years* focused on creating instincts for stuff like finding my light and playing out and letting your voice resonate, and now I don't really think about it. Now, when I'm desperately trying to keep up with the brilliance of the actors around me, I know I don't have to worry about being seen or heard."

THE BONUS ARMY
Mark DiConzo, Choreographer and Performer: "Producing, writing, and creating innovative theater and film projects. Though the majority of my career has been spent as a performer, I am thoroughly exploring and enjoying producing my own work and collaborating with other artists."

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST HEMINGWAY
James Rutherford, Director: "I was born and raised in New York City — ostensibly in Greenwich Village but really at the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum. I went to college at Providence's Brown University and then returned to New York to receive my MFA in Directing from Columbia University. I've spent the last few years pinging around Eastern Europe, studying movement with Gardzienice in Poland and working with the incredible Teatrul Maghiar in Cluj-Napoca, Romania."

THE MIRACLE PLAY
Hannah Wolfe, Play the characer Miss A: "I love ensemble-driven pieces that stretch the limits of creative conscience and that think outside the box. Multi-media pieces are also very interesting to me, because we are in such an information age. As attention spans shorten, I think the value of theatre is more important than ever. The Miracle Play has a series of stream of consciousness scenes that are very current and engaging and tell a story in an interesting way. "

THE LIFE AND SORT OF DEATH OF ERIC ARGYLE
Ross Dungan, Playwright: "I think the type of theater that excites me the most is the one that has an emphasis on storytelling and the inevitable twists and turns that lie within. With our productions, we're always very keen that when you strip away the fantastic performances of the cast and the excellent productions values of the show that still at it's heart there is a central story that still engages with people and hooks them from that very first moment. Our productions in general are very much built this way and we'll only ever put something on stage if it can still work with just as a story being told by one person on a bare stage. That being said, having professional actors and essential props is definitely a bonus."

UPCOMING TRAIN/STOPPED CLOCK/UNTITLED WAITING
Dennis Yueh-Yeh Li, Playwright/Director: "Experimental Theatre. I do not believe theatre should be purely entertainment. Theatre has its function, political function. And yet, theatre is a form of art. Experimental theatre is what I can challenge myself aesthetically. There is futurity in experimental theatre, where you will see (un)tangible possibilities in the future."

BLITHE SPIRIT
Matt W. Cody, actor: "I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and raised in a suburb called Wauwatosa. It's an incredible coincidence, too; our director, Sue Glausen, is also from the Milwaukee area and went to the same high school as my mother and aunt! Sue would want me to mention that she's MUCH younger than they are. I went to college at UCLA and studied music."