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

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As a director, I'm a returning Lead Artist and mentor at the Mercury Store, and some of my recent projects include Faust with Heartbeat Opera, Oresteia with NYU Grad Acting, As You Like It with the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival, Black Snow with Atlantic Acting School, Cymbeline with NYU Grad Acting, and Three Sisters and Twelfth Night at Two River Theater. Concurrently with my directing work, I am the theater critic for New York magazine and Vulture, a position I held from 2017-2019 and to which I returned in the late summer of 2023. I was a 2024-2025 Pulitzer Finalist for Criticism, as well as 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. In 2022 we took our original production MIDSUMMER to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Other directing projects include: As You Like It at SUNY Purchase; The Merchant of Venice at CWRU MFA/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 2018-2020); Macbeth and The Comedy of Errors with A Little Shakespeare at Two River Theater; and, at Yale School of Drama, 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 where I currently teach in the Directing program.

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I love big plays — expansive, wild-hearted stories with 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, our daughter Revel, and our cat friends, Masha and Danny.

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Need a resume? Download one here.