Recipient of the
2012 American Theatre Wing
National Theatre Company Award

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Press

The Lady in the Looking Glass worth a good look

Review of The Lady in the Looking Glass by Kathleen Allen in the March 8 Arizona Daily Star

Laughing Virginia
Two plays give Tucson literary pleasure and comedy gold

Review of The Lady in the Looking Glass by Sherilyn Forrester in the March 5 Tucson Weekly

Rogue Theatre Woolf production is “magic”

Review of The Lady in the Looking Glass by Anna Mae Ludlum in the March 5 Arizona Daily Wildcat

Get swept up in this Looking Glass

Review of The Lady in the Looking Glass by Chuck Graham on March 2 in Let The Show Begin! at TucsonStage.com

The Lady in the Looking Glass at The Rogue

Preview of The Lady in the Looking Glass by Kathleen Allen in the January 8 Arizona Daily Star

Read others’ reviews of The Rogue Theatre, or write your own review on TripAdvisor!

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Direction

	Joseph McGrath (Director) is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Drama and is the Artistic Director for The Rogue Theatre.  For The Rogue Theatre, Joe authored and directed Immortal Longings, and directed Mistake of the Goddess, Mother Courage and Her Children, As I Lay Dying, The Real Inspector Hound (2010 Mac Award for Best Director), The Decameron, Our Town, Red Noses, Endymion, The Maids (winner of the Arizona Daily Star 2007 Mac Award for Best Play), and The Balcony. Joe was most recently seen as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, Johnnie ‘Rooster’ Byron in Jerusalem, Myron Berger in Awake and Sing, Bernard Nightingale in Arcadia, Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, Richard, Duke of Gloucester in Richard III, Griffin in The Night Heron and the Jade Emperor in Journey to the West. In 2009 Joe won the Arizona Daily Star Mac Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Tobias in A Delicate Balance. He has toured with John Houseman’s Acting Company, performed with the Utah Shakespearean Festival, and he is a frequent performer with Ballet Tucson appearing in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Cinderella, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dracula and The Nutcracker. He has also performed with Arizona Theatre Company, Arizona Opera, Tucson Art Theatre, and Arizona OnStage. Joe owns, with his wife Regina Gagliano, Sonora Theatre Works, which produces theatrical scenery and draperies. Joseph McGrath’s direction of The Lady in the Looking Glass is supported in part by a generous gift from an anonymous donor.

Notes from the Director

It’s been an enthralling experience bringing the words of Virginia Woolf to the stage. One that gives us her passions and wry sense of humor, along with her singular style. As we embody Woolf’s faceted and contradictory characters, her voice seems to fight against many of the conventions, habits, and training that all of us have lived by in a life of theatre and storytelling. For example, it has been an insistent practice of mine to encourage actors to drive through the sentence to the period for clarity and precision. But Woolf eschews conventional construction, to the point of making such punctuation distinctions often irrelevant and sometimes downright misleading. She loves the semi-colon, which is a nebulous mark that often leaves the actor in a doubtful zone of meaning and structure. Ah, but that is very much her plan, we suspect, as she leads us into the interior world, afloat in the stream of consciousness, and grasping images and ideas as they float by. As one idea leads to another and then to another, can any of them be said to come to a full stop? Hence, we must ride the stream with her, keeping faith that it will lead us—as it always does—to a discovery or revelation. That’s not to say that we leave it all alone and simply say the words dispassionately. By no means. Despite the fact that there are no sword fights and car chases—a conventional tale will indeed have high physical stakes, maybe life and death struggles, that will sweep us along in anticipation of those satisfying concluding events—Woolf writes with her own urgency: apprehensions and images that pass before our eyes in seemingly prosaic but revelatory “moments of being” and which are often, in fact, terrifying confrontations with self. There is passion, ecstasy, and terror in this world within. Cynthia Meier has put together a full range of Woolf’s writing here, and so we have the challenge of presenting along with stories that seem far closer to poetry than prose, stories that proceed in stream of consciousness on the thinnest thread of narrative, and one story that seems to be in the most conventional of Victorian linear styles. It is a fascinating and varied view of the author asking for a range of styles and approaches. There is a very interesting class of character here, too, as Woolf dives deep inside: that of the unreliable narrator. This has been an interesting problem, since bereft of an omniscient voice, we must take everything we hear with a grain, a barrel, or a mountain of salt, depending on who is speaking. It has been the source of no end of mischief in rehearsal, as we tried to figure out whether we are playing our own “true” character (what is truth, after all?) or some narrator’s notion of us. But is this, perhaps, truer to life than the fiction of omniscience? Are we not all the central characters in the drama of our lives, narrated by—well, by whom? And if we inadvertently glance in the mirror, does the looking glass cooperate with the tale being told? —Joseph McGrath, Director director@theroguetheatre.org

 

About the Author

Virginia Stephen Woolf (1882-1941) was born in London, one of four children of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth Stephen. The children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society. Between the World Wars, Woolf was a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) Orlando (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929) with its famous dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now termed bipolar disorder, and died by suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59. She is now recognized as one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.

 

Cynthia Meier and Ryan Parker Knox

 

Patty Gallagher

Photos by Tim Fuller

 

Preshow

Sonatine by Maurice Ravel
I. Modéré
II. Mouvement de menuet

Nocturne by Claude Debussy

Variations by Charles Zoll on Jeux d’eau by Maurice Ravel

Order of Stories

from Gymnopedies No. 1 by Erik Satie
Monday or Tuesday

from À la manière de Chabrier by Maurice Ravel
The Lady in the Looking Glass

from Contrapunctus No. 1 by J. S. Bach
Slater’s Pins Have No Points

from Poissons d’or by Claude Debussy
The Mark on the Wall

Ten Minute Intermission

from Jeux d’eau by Maurice Ravel
from Arabesque No. 1 by Claude Debussy
The New Dress

from Nocturne Op. 9 No. 1 by Friedrich Chopin
The Duchess and the Jeweler

from Claire de Lune by Claude Debussy
The Searchlight

from Gymnopedies No. 1 by Erik Satie
Monday or Tuesday (Reprise)

 

Post-show discussion with the cast and director

Photo by Tim Fuller

 

Cast
Connor Foster
Patty Gallagher*
Holly Griffith
Cynthia Jeffery
Kathryn Kellner Brown*
Ryan Parker Knox*
Cynthia Meier
*Member of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States, appearing under a Special Appearance Contract

 

	Connor Foster (Ensemble) is performing in his fifth show with The Rogue Theater. Connor first worked with The Rogue in 2008 when he appeared as The Boy in Six Characters in Search of an Author. In 2012 he worked as an ensemble character in Mother Courage, then in 2013 he played Claudio in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. He was last seen this season playing Davey in Jerusalem. He is currently attending the University of Arizona as a B.A. Theater major. Connor would like to thank his family and friends for the love and support they've shown him in pursuing his passion. Connor Foster’s performance is supported in part by a generous gift from Norma Davenport.
Patty Gallagher (Ensemble) is an Artistic Associate of The Rogue Theatre and Professor of Theatre Arts at University of California Santa Cruz where she teaches movement, mask, Balinese dance, and clown traditions. With The Rogue, she was last seen in the ensemble of Dante’s Purgatorio, and has performed the roles of Hannah Jarvis in Arcadia, Kali in Mistake of the Goddess (Hayavadana), Red Peter in Kafka’s Monkey, Mrs. Samsa in Metamorphosis, Monkey King in Journey to the West, Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, Player 1 in Shipwrecked!, Alibech in The Decameron, Ariel in The Tempest, Rani in Naga Mandala, Emilia in Othello, the Player in Act Without Words, Orlando in Orlando, Sonnerie and Scarron in Red Noses, Winnie in Happy Days, Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard and Shen Te in The Good Woman of Setzuan. She has worked with Shakespeare Santa Cruz, The Folger Shakespeare Theatre, California Shakespeare Theater, The New Pickle Circus, Ripe Time Theatre, Two River Theatre, Teatro Cronopio and Grupo Malayerba. She has performed, choreographed and directed workshops in Asia, South America, Europe, and the U.S. In 2006 she was Fulbright Scholar in Quito, Ecuador. In 2014 she was awarded the Pavel Machotka Chair in Creative Studies at UCSC’s Porter College. She holds a doctorate in Theatre from University of Wisconsin–Madison, and she is Director in Residence for the Clown Conservatory, San Francisco Circus Center. Patty Gallagher’s performance is supported in part by a generous gift from Bill & Barb Dantzler.
	Holly Griffith (Ensemble) has performed at The Rogue Theatre as Pea in Jerusalem, in the ensemble of Purgatorio and as Chloë Coverly in Arcadia. Holly has also served at The Rogue as a box office assistant, Stage Manager for Waiting for Godot and as dramaturg for Awake and Sing, Measure for Measure and Mistake of the Goddess. Holly is a Master’s student of English Literature at the University of Arizona where she also teaches Freshman Composition. Holly has worn many hats as a performing artist. She served as the President of Emerson Dance Company in Boston, MA, and choreographed a Student Dance Showcase at The Miami Valley School in Dayton, OH. Holly also directed Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, and co-directed Brian Friel’s Lovers for Rareworks Theatre Company in Boston, MA. Holly Griffith’s performance is supported in part by a generous gift from Susan Collinet.
Cynthia Jeffery (Ensemble) is an ASU graduate with a degree in Theatre Arts. Cynthia has appeared previously with The Rogue Theatre in Richard III and The New Electric Ballroom. Cynthia lived in Hawaii for 15 years where she owned and operated “Wide Eyed Theatre,” an after-school program, and co-produced three videos on Teen Crime Prevention with her husband, Tobin. She has worked as a DJ for “K-Hawaii’s Rock N’ Roll” and earned four Tiki Awards for Best Actress in such shows as A Streetcar Named Desire (Blanche), Macbeth (Lady Macbeth), Crimes of the Heart (Meg) and Beyond Therapy (Prudence). In Tucson, she received Mac Award nominations for her performances in Relatively Speaking, No Exit, and Death and The Maiden, and won recognition for her role as Amanda in LTW’s The Glass Menagerie. Favorite roles include Flora (Humble Boy) Nettie (The Subject was Roses), Mag (The Beauty Queen of Leenane),and Ruth (Collected Stories). Film credits include The Lost River, The Greening of Eritrea, Spin, Animal Planet’s I Shouldn't be Alive and Finley Wade. She currently works for KOLD News 13 as a Sales and Traffic Assistant and voiceover talent. Cynthia Jeffery’s performance is supported in part by a generous gift from Stu Salasche & Els Duvigneau.
	Kathryn Kellner Brown (Ensemble) performed with The Rogue Theatre as Dawn in Jerusalem, Lady Croom in Arcadia, Queen Margaret in Richard III, Paulina in A Winter’s Tale and Mrs. Baines in Major Barbara. Her professional acting career has included work in the areas of television, film, industrial film and training, voiceover, and musical theatre, as well as regional theatre and off-Broadway. Kathryn has a BFA from the University of Arizona and recently participated in the American Conservatory Theater's Summer Congress classical program in San Francisco, as well as past studies with the Royal National Theatre Studio, London. She is a member of the Screen Actor’s Guild. Kathryn Kellner Brown’s performance is supported in part by a generous gift from John & Joyce Ambruster.
Ryan Parker Knox (Ensemble)   The Rogue’s 10th Anniversary Season marks Ryan’s third as a member of the Resident Acting Company, having previously appeared in Awake and Sing, Journey to the West, The Night Heron, Mother Courage and her Children, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Richard III, Mistake of the Goddess (Hayavadana), Measure for Measure, Arcadia, Betrayal, Dante’s Purgatorio, and most recently as Ginger in Jerusalem. "RPK" is a native South Dakotan, but spent nearly eleven years in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area working for various theatres, including Gremlin Theatre, Children’s Theatre Company, Park Square Theatre, and Paul Bunyan Playhouse to name a few. But Ryan is pleased to now call Tucson home thanks to the fiercely intelligent Rogue audiences and his superb fellow ensemble members, a loyal day job that works with his Rogue schedule, and his lovely lady Shayna. Ryan Parker Knox’s performance is supported in part by a generous gift from Lillian Fisher.
	Cynthia Meier (Ensemble) is Co-Founder and Managing and Associate Artistic Director for The Rogue, and has appeared in Awake and Sing, Purgatorio, Measure for Measure, Mistake of the Goddess, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Night Heron, The New Electric Ballroom, As I Lay Dying, Major Barbara, The Real Inspector Hound, The Decameron, Ghosts, Not I, Our Town, A Delicate Balance, Immortal Longings, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Red Noses, The Goat (2008 Mac Award for Best Actress), The Maids, Endymion, and The Balcony. Cynthia has been nominated for seven Mac Awards for Best Actress from the Arizona Daily Star. She has also performed in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Arizona Repertory Theatre), A Streetcar Named Desire (Arizona Theatre Company), Blithe Spirit and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Michigan Repertory Theatre), Romeo & Juliet and Chicago Milagro (Borderlands Theatre) and A Namib Spring (1999 National Play Award winner). Cynthia co-founded Bloodhut Productions, which toured throughout the western United States. Cynthia holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of Arizona. Cynthia Meier’s performance is supported in part by a generous gift from Pam Shack.

 

 

Cynthia Jeffery and Holly Griffith

 

Patty Gallagher, Ryan Parker Knox, Charles Zoll, Cynthia Meier and Cynthia Jeffery

Photos by Tim Fuller

 

Music
Music Director		Jake Sorgen
Pianist		Charles Zoll

Music Director’s Notes

The delicacy, complexity, and urgent stillness in Virginia Woolf’s writing is so well exemplified by the Impressionist composers of the early 20th century. Except for Bach, whose fugue figures into the story itself, and Chopin, who many consider to be among the earliest predecessors of the Impressionist movement, all the music heard in this performance draws from Impressionism’s greatest heroes: Satie, Ravel, and Debussy. We’ve attempted to reflect the same searching, longing, and remembering found in Woolf’s writing in this music, which Woolf herself wrote in 1899 is the “nearest to truth.” My joy in working on this project is shared—with much gratitude—with our wonderful pianist, Charles Zoll, who has helped bring this music to life with his talent, knowledge, and sensitivity to these pieces. —Jake Sorgen, Music Director and Composer

 

 

	Jake Sorgen (Music Director) was music director for Waiting for Godot, Jerusalem and Awake and Sing at The Rogue Theatre, and has performed as a musician at The Rogue in Purgatorio and Betrayal. Jake is a musician/composer originally from Woodstock, New York. Trained as both a guitarist and saxophonist, Jake has performed on mandolin, bass, Irish and Native American flutes and whistles, and other plucked and wind instruments in styles including Medieval, Baroque, Classical, American and European folk, jazz, and contemporary improvisation. As a solo artist Jake has released two albums, Sudden Myth in 2012 and In Transit in 2013 and performed extensively throughout the Northeast. In 2012 Jake composed the score for Rareworks Theatre’s production of Lovers and By The Bog of Cats in Boston. He is currently adapting Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark for guitar and voice. Jake Sorgen’s music direction is supported in part by a generous gift from David Morden.
Charles Zoll (Pianist), a native of Tucson, began his formal studies in piano and composition at the University of Arizona, graduating with the Bachelors of Music in composition, summa cum laude, under the teaching of Daniel Asia, Craig Walsh, and Pamela Decker. He currently pursues the Masters of Music in composition at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he studies with Melissa Hui. Zoll’s music has been performed across the United States by top-level ensembles, and his recently commissioned work, Asimov at Star’s End, was premiered by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 2014.

Pianist Charles Zoll

 

Connor Foster and Ryan Parker Knox

Photos by Tim Fuller

 

Designers
Costume Design		Cynthia Meier & Kathryn Kellner Brown
Costume design is supported in part by a generous gift from Ellen & Warren Bodow.
Scenic Design		Joseph McGrath
Lighting Design		Don Fox
Production Staff
Stage Manager		Christopher Johnson
Set Construction		Joseph McGrath & Christopher Johnson
Costume Construction		Karen DeLay, Kathryn Kellner Brown & Cynthia Meier
Master Electrician		Peter Bleasby
Lighting Crew		Reinold Kellici
House Manager		Susan Collinet
Assistant House Manager		Caroline Ragano
Box Office Manager		Thomas Wentzel
Box Office Assistants		Matt Bowdren, Kara Clauser, Holly Griffith, Jake Sorgen & Rebekah Thimlar
Program Advertising		Karen DeLay
Poster, Program & Website		Thomas Wentzel

 

	Don Fox (Lighting Design) has designed lights for The Rogue Theatre for Awake and Sing, Dante’s Purgatorio, Betrayal, Arcadia, Measure for Measure, and Mistake of the Goddess. Don earned his MFA in Lighting Design from the University of Arizona and holds a B.A. in Theatre Administration from St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX. Don was the Lighting Designer and Production Manager for the 2014 West Coast tour of the Moscow Ballet's Great Russian Nutcracker and also toured nationally with Circus Electronica. Recently, he was the Summer 2014 season designer for the Post Playhouse at Ft. Robinson State Park in northwest Nebraska where he designed five musicals running concurrently. Prior to returning to grad school, Don was the Technical Director and Facilities manager for the Performing Arts Center of Wenatchee, in Washington’s Cascade Mountains. He has served as lighting and sound consultant for Silversea Cruises, twice designed Shakespeare in the Park for the San Antonio Botanical Gardens, and is resident lighting designer for Tucson’s Artifact Dance Project. Favorite Tucson designs include Arizona Onstage’s recent production of Les Miserables and SAAF’s Moda Provacateur fashion show/fundraiser. His complete portfolio is at www.djfox.biz.
Christopher Johnson (Stage Manager) has previously appeared at The Rogue in Jerusalem, Purgatorio, Richard III, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Night Heron, Journey to the West, The Winter’s Tale and As I Lay Dying. Recent local credits include turns with Winding Road Theater Ensemble as Pale (Burn This), Doug (Gruesome Playground Injuries) and The Master of Ceremonies (Cabaret) for which he received the 2013 Arizona Daily Star Mac Award for Best Actor in a Musical. Stage managing credits include productions of Oleanna, Steel Magnolias, Cowboy Mouth and two seasons of The Arizona Friends Of Chamber Music Winter Festival.
	Peter Bleasby (Master Electrician) lit his first show at 13, using near-lethal home-made equipment.  Professionally, he was with BBC-TV for several years, and then was an assistant to UK lighting designer Richard Pilbrow, including the inaugural production at the National Theatre in London (Hamlet, directed by Olivier). He later transferred to the general lighting industry, handling projects ranging from major sports stadia to cathedrals, but maintained his theatre interests by lighting innumerable shows on both sides of the Atlantic.  When the Rogue established itself at The Historic Y in 2009, he volunteered for the initial lighting “hang,” returning in 2013 to work with lighting designer Don Fox and later with Deanna Fitzgerald.  For the 2014-15 season, he planned and supervised the installation of an extensive permanent wiring system that enables the lighting crews to devote more time to the creative process.  In Tucson, he also directs the technical and logistical aspects of Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation fundraisers, including the fashion show Moda Provocateur.
Susan Collinet (House Manager) earned her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Arizona in 2008. Decades before returning to college as a non-traditional student, Susan spent twenty years in amateur theater, mostly on the East coast, as well as in Brussels, Belgium in the American Theater of Brussels, and the Theatre de Chenois in Waterloo. She has worked in such positions as a volunteer bi-lingual guide in the Children’s Museum of Brussels, the Bursar of a Naturopathic Medical school in Tempe, Arizona, an entrepreneur with two “Susan’s of Scottsdale” hotel gift shops in Scottsdale, Arizona, and as the volunteer assistant Director of Development of the Arizona Aids Project in Phoenix. Susan continues to work on collections of poetry and non-fiction. Her writing has won awards from Sandscript Magazine, the John Hearst Poetry Contest, the Salem College for Women’s Center for Writing, and was published in a Norton Anthology of Student’s Writing. In addition to being House Manager, Susan serves on the Board of Directors and acts as Volunteer Coordinator for the Rogue.

 

Charles Zoll, Cynthia Jeffery, Connor Foster, Cynthia Meier, Holly Griffith,
Patty Gallagher, Ryan Parker Knox and Kathryn Kellner Brown

 

Cynthia Meier

Photos by Tim Fuller

 

Our Thanks
Tim Fuller		Tucson Weekly
Chuck Graham		Jesse Greenberg
Arizona Daily Star		Shawn Burke
Chris Babbie		Peter Bleasby
Our Advertisers		Kathryn Kellner Brown
University of Arizona—School of Theatre, Film and Television

 

Cynthia Jeffery and Holly Griffith

Photo by Tim Fuller

 

 

Performance Schedule for The Lady in the Looking Glass

Location: The Rogue Theatre at The Historic Y, 300 East University Boulevard
Click here for information on free off-street parking

Performance run time is two hours, including one ten-minute intermission, and not including music preshow or post-show discussion.

Thursday, February 26, 2015, 7:30 pm DISCOUNT PREVIEW
Friday, February 27, 2015, 7:30 pm DISCOUNT PREVIEW
Saturday, February 28, 2015, 7:30pm DISCOUNT PREVIEW
Sunday, March 1, 2015, 2:00 pm matinee OPENING PERFORMANCE SOLD OUT

Thursday, March 5, 2015, 7:30 pm SOLD OUT
Friday, March 6, 2015, 7:30 pm SOLD OUT
Saturday, March 7, 2015, 7:30 pm SOLD OUT
Sunday, March 8, 2015, 2:00 pm matinee SOLD OUT

Thursday, March 12, 2015, 7:30 pm
Friday, March 13, 2015, 7:30 pm
Saturday, March 14, 2015, 2:00 pm matinee
Saturday, March 14, 2015, 7:30 pm
Sunday, March 15, 2015, 2:00 pm matinee

 

Patty Gallagher, Connor Foster, Kathryn Kellner Brown, Cynthia Meier and Holly Griffith

 

Patty Gallagher and Holly Griffith

 

Holly Griffith, Ryan Parker Knox, Cynthia Meier, Connor Foster, Kathryn Kellner Brown and Patty Gallagher

Photos by Tim Fuller