Hi there. I'm Sara — a director, teacher, and writer-about-theater, originally from the Blue Ridge foothills outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. 

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I'm a returning Lead Artist and mentor at the Mercury Store, and this August, I'll be directing As You Like It with the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival. Some recent directing includes Black Snow at Atlantic Acting School, Cymbeline with the NYU Grad Acting Program, Three Sisters at Two River Theater, and As You Like It at SUNY Purchase. Concurrently with my directing work, I am the theater critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, a position I held from 2017-2019 and to which I returned in the late summer of 2023. I am also the recipient of the 2016-2017 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.

 

In 2016 I co-founded the theater project Tiltyard, a malleable, joy-seeking collective with roots all over the east coast. We recently we took our original production MIDSUMMER to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Other directing include: Twelfth Night at Two River; The Merchant of Venice at Cleveland Play House; The Winter's Tale at Shakespeare Academy @ Stratford (a summer training program in Shakespeare and ensemble theater for college students, where I served as Artistic Director from 2017-2019); Macbeth and The Comedy of Errors with A Little Shakespeare at Two River Theater; Deer and the Lovers by Emily Zemba; The Zero Scenario by Ryan Campbell; Virginia Woolf's Orlando, adapted by Sarah Ruhl; and The Master and Margarita, adapted by Edward Kemp from the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. 

 

I'm a Drama League Fellow, a graduate of the Acting Shakespeare Program at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and I hold a BA in Theater from Yale University and an MFA in Directing from Yale School of Drama. Recently, I've taught courses at Primary Stages' Einhorn School of the Performing Arts and with the MFA Acting program at the New School.

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I love big plays — expansive, wild-hearted stories with a vibrant visual landscapes, a sense of humor, a regard for the vast unknown, and a visceral, intrinsic need to be expressed on a stage and nowhere else. In both the rehearsal room and the classroom, I strive for an ensemble ethos, characterized by generosity, rigor, courage, and a spirit of joy, collaboration, and play. I also love bicycles (in the first fall of the pandemic, my partner and I rode across the country), E. M. Forster, Russian and Victorian lit, vegetarian cooking, coveralls, and ridiculous British television. I live with my beloved partner, Beau, a writer and enthusiastic amateur mycologist, and our cat friends, Masha and Danny.

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Need a resume? Download one here.