          |
|
|
B.A. - Theatre Arts / Directing - St. Edward's
University, Austin, TX
M.Ed - Curriculum & Instruction - Lesley University,
Cambridge, MA
James Joyce's The Dead - Hunger Artists
Ensemble Theatre, 1999 - 2005
Traces of the Western Slopes - The Changing
Scene, 1998
The Women's Ward - The Changing Scene,
1992
Dreams That Money Can Buy - Theater On
Broadway, 1990
James Terry - University of Denver, 1988
...Cole's direction here achieves perfect pitch.
Though Joyce describes Gabriel touching Gretta and putting
his arm around her, the actors don't do these things.
They just stand facing each other, and their restraint
functions like silence in music or white space in art;
there's something extraordinarily moving about
it."
- Juliet Wittman, Westword
"As is evident in the Hunger Artists Theater Ensemble's enchanting production of Joyce's short story The Dead, the Irishman's fabled prose packs an impressive theatrical wallop. Now on stage at the LIDA Project Experimental Theatre, the near-two-hour play is smartly directed by Jeremy Cole, who has adapted Joyce's entertaining tale into a seamless, wholly engrossing reader's-theater-style piece for seven voices.
Cole and company's minimalist version enhances and personalizes the suggestive power of Joyce's incomparable imagery -- augmented throughout by several of the director's well-chosen musical selections -- in a splendid style that would be the envy of many a multi-media-minded auteur.
Cole elicits several understated portrayals from his solid cast of actors. Far from being hampered by the constraints of the small stage or hemmed in by the conventions of reader's theater itself (each actor reads from a black-bound script and rarely strays far from his or her chair), most of the performers seem liberated as they employ subtle glances, smallish gestures and slight vocal inflections to convey Joyce's soaring lyricism.
Cole's sensitive approach serves as a fitting tribute
to both the author's enjoyable yarn -- Joyce was fond of
referring to the sketches in Dubliners as
"epiphanies," for their insights into life -- and
the ensemble's accomplished interpretation. Indeed, as
the play concludes, our souls swoon with Gabriel's as he
stares out an imaginary window and observes, with Ibsenesque
aplomb, the "snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon
all the living and the dead."
- Jim Lillie, Westword