Dramaturg

Inside the musical guides

As a resident dramaturg at The 5th Avenue Theatre, I oversee the creation of our Inside the Musical Guides. Inside the Musical Guides offer supplementary curriculum containing educational content, articles, interactive activities, opportunities for reflection, and resources based on the content and themes of the show. The guides can be utilized before or after experiencing the show.

To learn more about this project, you can find all of the guides on The 5th’s website, or check out the guides that I have worked on and contributed to, linked below:

2024-2025 Season:

Disney & Cameron Mackintosh’s Mary Poppins

2023-24 Season:

Disney’s The Little Mermaid

Yoko’s Husband’s Killer’s Japanese Wife, Gloria

Cambodian Rock Band

Irving Berlin’s White Christmas

2022-23 Season:

Drum & Colours: Henry IV

Seattle Shakespeare Company’s ambitious adaptation distills both parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV into a single play. This sleek and modern version of the play calls on the audience to witness Prince Hal’s complex journey toward the throne of England while employing a queer lens to examine the relationships and politics of the play.

For this production, I stretched a few of my new-play-dramaturg muscles by providing feedback on the adaptation during its workshop period and advising on further cuts and alterations during tablework with the cast and creative team. I also assembled my typical packets of character information, historical context (both for the events of the play and Shakespeare’s lifetime), and visual reference material for both the cast and design team. The education team and I collaborated on their educator guide for the production, a tool available to audiences to help them deepen their understanding and enhance their experience of the play.

Regarding Seattle Shakespeare’s Drum and Colours productions:

Henry IV is a continuation of the Drum and Colours project that was first launched in winter of 2022 with presentations of Hamlet and As You Like It in repertory. Furthering the work of previous projects like the Shakespeare Equity Engagement program (SEE) and the Holding Space project, Drum and Colours aims to meet the community’s needs with an all-BIPOC company with 360-degree representation, including actors, directors, and production team. It explores BIPOC company members’ personal connections to the classics and sheds new light on familiar works. SSC believes that art that is open—to adaptation, interpretation, and the recognition of the wonderful vastness of the human experience—is stronger and more long-lasting than art which ignores that complexity.

The 5th Avenue theatre’s radio play style musicals

Isabella Dawis & Tidtaya Sinutoke adapted their new musical Half the Sky for The 5th Avenue Theatre’s radio play style musical series. The episodic audio musical version of Half the Sky will premiere in January 2021. To learn more, buy your tickets, and peruse the dramturgical information I curated, visit The 5th Avenue Theatre’s website.

“A year after her sister's death, Aurelie sets out to fulfill her childhood dream of climbing Mount Everest. She joins an international group of mountaineers, led by a teenage Sherpa. As Aurelie embarks on her path to the top of the world, memories of her Thai American past and the unresolved rift between herself and her sister begin to surface. Borders between countries and cultures, past and present, and waking and dreaming blur in this epic journey of ambition, survival and reconciliation. A contemporary American musical on a global scale, Half the Sky is infused with the sounds of traditional Thai and Himalayan folk music.”

yarn: unraveled

I put aside my overactive imagination and tendency to be a little ‘stitious in order to examine the legends of the Pacific Northwest and why certain people get so stuck on investigating things that go bump in the night. For this production, I worked in conjunction with fellow dramaturg Ryan Long. They headed up our research into the superstitions, cryptids, and other mysterious goings-on while I broke down ghost- and monster-hunting shows to find a structure that we could lovingly spoof.

”Join Dacha's intrepid explorers as we unravel the Pacific Northwest's most prolific mysteries! Our favorite rag-tag team of cryptid-hunters takes a deep dive into all things bugaboo in Yarn: Unraveled, a recurring webseries dead set on uncovering the world's greatest secrets... and handling the consequences!

In the final installment of Yarn: Unraveled we are coming to you live on Friday the 13th to Unravel some superstitions. We're confident that nothing will go wrong, no ancient horrors will be awakened, and no beloved characters will face mortal peril with only the Yarn team and the live Twitch audience there to save them... But join us just in case.”

Watch episodes of Yarn: Unraveled here!

:robot_face:

Dacha took the plunge into virtual theatre and we didn’t hold back. In :robot_face: a team of actors, designers, and technicians took on the challenge of creating a fully immersive virtual theatre experience. I assembled and presented research about reality tv genres, competition styles, tropes, famous figures, and structures to the cast in order to help actors devise characters that they could fully inhabit while interacting with audience members. I also helped directors Nick O’Leary and Nathan Whitehouse devise and clarify the structure of the reality tv show that framed the production and worked closely with associate director Kate Drummond to make sure that our reality program was as real as it gets.

“Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, neural networks, and deepfake algorithms mean that it’s no longer a question of if chatbots will be able to hold convincing conversations with humans — it’s a question of when. But if we’re not even sure what exactly we want from our human partners, then how are we supposed to know what to ask of our robot companions?

In this virtual interactive experience, audience contestants compete as they attempt to reprogram cutting-edge (but still buggy) AI chatbots to complete a series of reality-TV style challenges, with a winning prize for the ‘Most Human’ bot on the show.”

TimeOut New York raves, “The company has risen to the moment ingeniously with its highly amusing new online show :robot_face:, a mock reality-TV competition show centered on designing realistic artificial-intelligence chatbots. Instead of trying to ignore or work around the inherent limitations of online theater, Dacha cleverly puts technology front and center." (read the full review here!)

The Moors

Jen Silverman’s fresh, bizarre, and unexpected script demands that the small cast have a comprehensive understanding of gothic literature and its accompanying tropes. I assembled research for the company to better help them grasp their human and animal characters, and finally read Wuthering Heights in the process.

“The wind-swept moors are a bleak and vicious landscape, and their inhabitants are no less wild. Two sisters, an erratic maid, and a rather large mastiff strategize, scrub, and sigh in a labyrinthine Victorian mansion. The entrance of a governess and crash-landing of a moor-hen set all four on a strange trajectory, one step closer to the thrill and danger of being truly seen.

Dacha Theatre, in association with Theatre Off Jackson, is proud to present the Pacific Northwest premiere of Jen Silverman’s dark comedy. This touching, violent, and relentlessly funny love letter to the life and work of the Brontë sisters will delight anyone who has curled up with a British novel, toured a haunted house, or giggled at an unlikely animal friendship.”

Metamorphoses

Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses not only calls upon the company to thoroughly understand sometimes obscure myths, it also specifically calls for the addition of further stories in transitions. I worked with director Mike Lion and the full company, bringing in research about the myths Zimmerman included in her text, and also assisting in providing further information, research, images, and stories for the team to work with in devising rehearsals.

“Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses is a contemporary retelling of Ovid’s classic tales. Each story draws us into a different corner of human emotion, from joy to despair, to horror and disgust, consistently mixing the profound with the silly. The stories are connected by the theme of unstoppable change, and set in and around a large body of water.

Dacha’s site-specific production will bring Metamorphoses to the shores of Lake Washington. We will explore these myths through a devised, movement-driven process, finding personal connections and developing unique physical languages for each story.”

The Salem Witch Orgasms

The final production by Ghost Light Theatricals, The Salem Witch Orgasms was the winner of Battle of the Bards XII: The Final Battle in 2018. I helped playwright Alexandra Davis and director Lia Sima Fakhouri turn the original excerpt of the play that appeared during Battle of the Bards into a full length, fully produced play.

“Come and experience the final show produced by Ghost Light Theatricals, in the newly minted Copious space in Ballard. After a decade of residency at the formerly known Ballard Underground, this production culminates the vision of Ghost Light's 15 years of productions producing modern adaptations of classical stories.

The Salem Witch Orgasms by Alexandra Davis (Winner of Battle of the Bards XII; The Final Battle) presents a comedic view into the lives of American women in the Puritanical Northeast. Stylistically a mashup of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Mel Brooks and The Princess Bride; this frank, hilarious and sex-positive representation of female-identifying sexuality will have you gasping for breath from laughter.

As tween boy Given learns about his family history from his sexually liberated hippie Grandma Carol, the story borrows the framework of William Goldman's The Princess Bride to plunge into the experiences of a group of women identified as witches because they explored that most forbidden and misunderstood of fruits; the mysterious and alluring female orgasm. At times ridiculous, filled with large scale song & dance numbers, and relevant to our modern cultural fixation with purity; this show will tickle more than your funny bone *eyebrows* *eyebrows*.”

roman tragedies festival

After graduating from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, professor Kristin Horton asked me to curate information for a dramaturgical installation to accompany the fall production, a Roman Tragedies Festival. I did research and compiled information on Shakespeare, Roman history, and the works that were included in the festival:

Two productions running in repertory: The Rape of Lucrece directed by Kristin Horton and an all-student Julius Caesar (from Gallatin Arts Festival 2014)
A National Theatre Live screening of Coriolanus (the Donmar Warehouse production in London)
A reading of Antony & Cleopatra by Fiasco Theater

“From November 6 through the 16th, Theater at Gallatin will present The Roman Tragedies Festival,which includes two mainstage theatrical performances, as well as a staged reading, an expert panel, and a film screening—all based on Shakespeare’s rich renditions of sex, violence, and politics in ancient Rome. Professor Kristin Horton, the festival’s producer, asks “What does it mean to evoke Rome today in 2014? What are some of these earlier ideas and how can they help us reflect on the present?”

Two mainstage Shakespearean productions will run in repertory. The festival will open with an original theatrical adaptation of the Bard’s lesser known narrative poem, “The Rape of Lucrece,” directed by Professor Horton. An all-female, all-Gallatin cast will perform Julius Caesar. While "Lucrece" looks back to the Roman Republic’s origins in the heroine’s rape and suicide, Caesar captures the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic with its hero’s assassination.

The urgent questions posed by this staging of Lucrece will be addressed by the Urban Democracy Lab’s panel, “I Am Lucrece: Rethinking Sexual Violence,” featuring Vanessa Grigoriadis of New York Magazine, activist Marybeth Seitz-Brown, and Gallatin associate faculty member and adviser, Cyd Cipolla.

Also on deck is a film screening of National Theatre Live's rendition of Shakespeare’s caustic play of class warfare, Coriolanus, starring Tom Hiddleston (The Avengers) and Mark Gatiss (BBC’s Sherlock). Finally, Fiasco Theater, a professional ensemble-in-residence at Gallatin, will do a staged reading of Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s Mediterranean play of love and death on the eve of the Roman Empire.”