STAFF

Benjamin Evett, Artistic Director, is the founder of the Actors' Shakespeare Project and directed the company's inaugural production, Richard III, as well as All’s Well That Ends Well and Love’s Labour’s Lost. He played Cassius in Julius Caesar, Edmund in King Lear, and the title role in Hamlet, . In 2005, he won the Elliot Norton Award for performances in Permanent Collection (Paul Barrow) and Quills (Abbe de Coulmier) at the New Rep Theatre and Richard III (Richmond) at Actors' Shakespeare Project. He was a member of the Resident Acting Company at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge from 1983 to 2003, acting in more than 50 productions including Waiting for Godot, The Bacchae, Phaedra, Ivanov, The King Stag and Six Characters in Search of an Author. He has also performed at the Huntington Theatre, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, Hartford Stage Company, Missouri Repertory Theatre, Virginia Stage Company, Great Lakes Theatre Festival, Cleveland Play House and others. He has performed at the Festivale Biennale in Venice, the Festival d'Automne in Paris, at the Taiwan National Theatre and The Moscow Art Theatre. He is a graduate of Harvard College with a degree in Classics. He and Executive Producer Sara Stackhouse were selected to be part of the Executive Leadership Program for Massachusetts arts leaders at the Kennedy School at Harvard University.

Sara Stackhouse, Executive Producer, was the Supervising Producer of four seasons of INSIDE This Old House for the A&E television network.  She served as Project Manager for cellist Yo-Yo Ma for nearly six years, where her work included educational projects, contracts, recordings, tours, scripting and staging, and collaborations with artists such as Edgar Meyer, Mark O'Connor, Bobby McFerrin, Mark Morrris, Toni Morrison, Torvill & Dean, Atom Egoyan and others.  She served as Associate Producer on eight films, including Yo-Yo Ma:  Inspired by Bach, which received international awards including several Emmys.  She was the Director of Education for NPR's From the Top for nearly six years where she designed curriculum, trained teachers, and created a national Make Your Own Radio Program and a Cultural Ambassador Program for teenage artists.  As a freelancer, Sara produced A Taste of Chanukah for PBS, PRI, and Rounder Records in 1998 and was the Executive Producer of the MIT Media Lab's Toy Symphony, an international project run by Tod Machover and featuring violinist Joshua Bell and conductor Kent Nagano.  She serves as a consultant to The Berkshire Institute for Theology and the Arts. Sara received a degree in theater from Oberlin College and interned as a director at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre in 1992.

Jennie Israel, Associate Artistic Director. Actors’ Shakespeare Project: Helena in All's Well That Ends Well, Goneril in King Lear, Calpurnia/Trebonius/Pindarus in Julius Caesar, Elizabeth in Richard III. Other local credits include Lady Macbeth for Commonwealth Shakespeare Company; Tartuffe at New Repertory Theater; Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Huntington Theatre; Living in Exile at the Vineyard Playhouse; Molly Maguire at the Sugan Theatre; Undine's Valediction, Summer, The Scarlet Letter and Macbeth with Shakespeare & Company. Regional credits include Yale Repertory Theatre, Actors' Theatre of Louisville, The Greenwich Street Theatre, Lincoln Center Theatre, Theatre Building Chicago, Ohio Theatre Soho, Sun Valley Shakespeare Festival, and Chautauqua Theatre Festival. Film and television credits include Rudy for TriStar Pictures, Guiding Light, and Coming to Litchfield, an independent film. Most recently Jennie directed Romeo and Juliet for The Hyperion Shakespeare Company at Harvard College.  In 1992 Jennie founded Chicago's Eclipse Theatre, still in existence today.  She has taught Shakespearean text, voice and acting at Bowdoin College, Boston College, SUNY/Purchase, The Boston Conservatory, Harvard, and is currently on the faculty of Emerson College. She holds an MFA in Acting from the Yale School of Drama.

Lori Taylor, Director of Education & Outreach, was the founder of ASP’s Incarcerated Youth at Play, and also runs ASP’s community programs, after school collaborations, school partnerships, Discovering Justice through Shakespeare, and Cambridge Neighborhood Projects.  During her first season with ASP, ASP received the Social Innovations Award, the Massachusetts Cultural Council Gold Star Award, and a New England Family Institute Award for ASP Education and Outreach Programs.  Before working with ASP, Lori directed the Teacher  Residency Program at The MET (Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center) in Providence, R.I., a teacher training program that targets young adults from urban communities who aspire to be teachers.  In addition, Lori taught Shakespeare to the high school population at The MET.  She worked for nine years at The Cambridge School of Weston, where she taught history, was Dean of Faculty, and founded The Shakespeare Ensemble.  She has also traveled to Bosnia, where she taught Shakespeare. Taylor received her M.A.T. from Brown University in 1993, where she helped to create S.P.A.C.E., an arts program at the Swearer Center that does work with incarcerated women in Rhode Island.

Jayson Zeeman, Director of Marketing & Communications, joined ASP as of 2008 in preparation for their 5th Anniversary Season. He earned his BA in English & Vocal Performance from Michigan State University. As a child actor, he performed in several professional productions of musicals like Oliver, Gypsy and of course Annie before moving on to more adult roles such as Che in the musical Evita, Johnny in Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny and The Prince of Verona in Romeo & Juliet. As a singer, he enjoyed performing solos along side famed mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne as well as The Canadian Brass. Jayson worked for 10 years at Borders Group Inc. running marketing events for authors, music artists & politicians such as Barack Obama, Stephen King, Hillary Clinton, Madonna, Salman Rushdie, David Sedaris, Jimmy Carter, Tony Kushner, Al Franken, Renee Fleming and every other famous person he could ever hope to meet. His marketing experience has also given him the chance to work on projects alongside VH1, The Food Network, The New Yorker & The Royal Shakespeare Company.

Joanna K. Hoch, Box Office and Office Manager, has been the General Manager and a performer for the past 10 years at the Weathervane Theatre, an AEA rotating repertory summer stock in Whitefield, NH. As a Stage Manager, she has worked at The Palace Theatre, Seacoast Repertory Theatre and ART (ASM), but her favorite work has been with children in theatre at both Seacoast Repertory Theatre and the Hampstead Players. Joanna has an MEd in Drama and the Arts in Education from the University of Exeter in Exeter, England.

Jason Ries, Production Manager, moved from San Francisco to Boston in 2004 to collaborate and partner with choreographer Karen Krolak and Monkeyhouse, working as Resident Designer on such dance and illumination creations as Always and a Day and & Now What? He has been with ASP in various production capacities since the beginning of the 2006-07 season, including lighting design for ASP's Love's Labours Lost and has had the opportunity to design for several other local dance and theater groups during his tenure at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center from 2005-07. From 1997-2004 he served as Production Manager at EXIT Theatre and the San Francisco Fringe Festival, where he directed and designed performances with award-winning itinerant theatre companies and staged his own ensemble piece, in3. Jason has trained in Latvia and Ukraine with director Sergei Ostrenko and in neon sculpture with Christian Shiess.

Adele Nadine Traub, Manager of Artistic Operations. Actors' Shakespeare Project: Stage Manager for The Tempest, Henry V, Love's Labour's Lost, The Winter's Tale, All's Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, King Lear (both in Boston and at LaMama in NYC), Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure and Richard III. Other stage manager credits include It Ain't Nothin' But the Blues, Capital Repertory Theatre, Albany; Man of LaMancha and 1776, Lyric Stage; La Clemenza di Tito, Opera Boston: Seven Rabbits on a Pole. Stoneham Theater; Living Room in Africa and Dinner With Friends, Gloucester Stage Company; Life x 3. The Vineyard Playhouse; a summer with Pioneer Valley Summer Theater; The Order of Things, CentaStage; Point of Departure, Huntington Theatre Company; Kindertransport, New Repertory Theatre (assistant s.m.). During her four years as Production Stage Manager at The Boston Conservatory, she worked on over 40 productions. She received her B.A. from Brandeis University.

Meghan Coleman, Grants Manager , has worked as a grantwriter and development officer for companies ranging from the Wooster Group to the Drama League to the Westport Country Playhouse and now, ASP. In New York, she trained in non-profit development for five years at the John O'Donnell Company, and in Connecticut, managed a performing arts series for four years at a community college, presenting artists such as Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Claire Bloom, Danny Hoch, Christine Lavin and Wesla Whitfield. "Who is Meghan Coleman?" is the Jeopardy- question to the answer, "The only person to (also) appear in two Spalding Gray monologues: as the Timekeeper in his third, 1978's 'India and After (America),' and as The Disembodied Voice of Death in his final, 2000's joyous 'Morning, Noon and Night.' Meghan recently returned to her childhood hometown of Marblehead, which she calls "the where who I am." Her new home there began life as a barn in the late 18th century, then was a stable for hearse horses, later Marblehead's first automobile repair shop, and finally, a port in the storm, perched on a granite precipice overlooking the town's rooftops, narrow streets and harbor. A lifelong Red Sox fan, Meghan moved from Massachusetts in 1966, when the Sox finished ninth in what was then a ten-team league. Next year, of course, was the Impossible Dream season, but she bore no grudge, maintaining faith through the decades, until The Year of the Idiots. She shared every pitch of Game Four while on the phone with a childhood friend now living in Hawaii, and watched the Duck Boat celebration from a bad video feed from redsox.com, on her laptop. But it is even better to be home, and working for the Bard in Beantown.

Brian McVicker, Technical Director, is a third year graduate candidate majoring in Technical Production in the School of Theatre at Boston University. Previous Technical Direction credits include; The Magic Flute, Rhinoceros & Fifth of July. This past summer Brian was the Technical Director of Boston Midsummer Opera's production of Carmen.

Marianne Evett, Director of Publicity, was theater critic of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland from 1984-2000. Before becoming a full-time journalist she was a contributing editor on theater for Northern Ohio Live magazine  and Professor of Humanities at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She served as president of the American Theater Critics Association, a member of its executive committee, president of the ATCA Foundation and a member of its play awards committee.  She won Cleveland Press Club awards for excellence in journalism, and a Northern Ohio Live Special Achievement Award for theater criticism and arts advocacy.  She has also taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has a PhD in English drama from Harvard University.

David Evett, Scholar in Residence, has served as dramaturg for many of the company’s productions; he writes the company’s program notes and contributes regularly to the company blog. He earned his Ph.D. in English at Harvard and is now Professor Emeritus of English, Cleveland State University, where he was the Shakespeare specialist; he has also taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Babson College, MIT, and Boston University. His most recent book, Discourses of Service in Shakespeare's England, was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2005.  On the theatrical side, he has seen every play in the Shakespeare canon on the stage (most of them many times), acted in and directed many college and community theater productions of plays from The Bacchae to Curse of the Starving Class, and played Lord Grey and the Bishop of Ely in the ASP's inaugural production of Richard III and an assortment of supporting roles in Julius Caesar.