I am a practitioner and a professor of theater—a craft that I consider sacred. Therefore, each time I step into a rehearsal room or a classroom I do so with a combined sense of great responsibility and extreme good fortune.

Concurrently with directing professionally around the country, I taught various aspects of theater on the college level, primarily as an adjunct instructor, for approximately ten years prior to coming to the University of Massachusetts. For the most part my classes were well structured, well executed and well received. And I, as most conscientious teachers do, experienced greater and lesser degrees of satisfaction with my process at the end of each term. However, it was not until my second year of teaching here at the University that I began to tap into an understanding of my process that continues to inform and expand the work I do in academia. A colleague introduced me to the work of Parker J. Palmer, a noted teaching consultant and theorist. Though Mr. Parker's primary assertion that "we teach who we are," seemed a bit oversimplified at first, his further elucidation of the ramifications of applying that assertion to preparation, execution and evaluation of classes, presented me with a complex but useful means of assessing and honing my instructional procedures.

These days I am more comfortable teaching the one theater art that many practitioners say "can be learned but cannot be taught." I know that my continual, sometimes agonizing investigations of the directing process (mine in particular, and the field in general) and my ongoing successes and failures as a working director are precisely what I must share with my students. I challenge them to fully embrace a director's number one responsibility-to shape the experience that an audience has by shaping and unifying the efforts and output of all the artists working on a given production. At the same time, I make sure that they understand that "responsibility" is, in essence, the ability to respond creatively to a situation. I continually clarify that my class is not an occasion to learn a set of rules, but rather an opportunity to cultivate an array of intimate and effective tools with which to work.

With my undergraduate students I fashion assignments and situations that allow them to develop a true facility with the building blocks of playmaking: storytelling, analysis, conceptualization, composition, picturization, working with actors and especially action(the core of any play). I prepare them to take a scene or a short play(depending upon the course), discover the central action and the world that makes that action possible and demonstrate it all in their presentations.

The goal of the graduate directing program is to prepare students to direct professionally and/or on the college level in an academic situation.
Students are accepted into the program with the understanding that they have a fundamental grasp of the directing process and, at least, some practical directing experience. My job with them then becomes to challenge, cajole and push them to the limits of their existing craft in order to help them enlarge it. I engage their work in studio and their production and teaching assignments(a time-consuming endeavor involving countless hours of observation and consultation), always with the intention of getting on the inside of their process. The idea is not to tell them what to do so much as to assist them in doing what they are attempting to do while offering as many alternatives as possible. Along with this, I stress the development of techniques that have more to do with the business and survival side of the profession, such as, soliciting support(of all kinds, from all sources), sharing knowledge(with students, actors and collaborators) and marketing(of self, as artist, in various settings and formats). I focus on this aspect of a director's work because the study of directing is actually a lifelong study. And the only way to get better as a director is to work as a director.

What I hope to awaken in all of my students is what my best teachers and mentors awakened in me-a passion for knowing more about myself, my craft and the world around me coupled with a commitment to using the theater as a means to do so. It is this awakening of the intellect, emotion and spirit that I consider sacred, and it is this that continually compels me to enter the rehearsal room and the classroom.