We are thrilled to partner with so many talented actors, directors, and teachers here at Mantua Theater Project. This is your opportunity to learn a bit about the professionals helping your child's stories come to life!

Damon Bonetti is an actor, director and teacher.  He has performed at many theaters in the Philly area and was nominated for a Barrymore Award for his performance as David in Orange Flower Water for Luna Theater Company.  He will be directing the world premiere of EM Lewis’s If I Did This for Passage Theater this fall and in early 2014 playing Mortimer in Arsenic and Old Lace in a co-production between the Walnut Street Theater and Fulton Theater. Damon is the Co-Founding Artistic Director of the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective. The PAC is dedicated to producing rarely performed classic plays in site-specific locations.  He played Duke Ferdinand in their critically acclaimed inaugural production of The Duchess of Malfi and Gustav in the 2012 Philly Fringe hit, Creditors.  He directed Pierre de Marivaux’s Changes of Heart (The Double Inconstancy) and Eugene O’Neill’s Sea Plays aboard Philly’s Tall Ship Gazela. He has appeared in many commercials and films and is an adjunct professor at Drexel University. MFA: Florida State University/Asolo Conservatory.

Adam Immerwahr is a director. He is the Associate Artistic Director at McCarter Theatre Center.  As a director, Adam’s off-Broadway credits include: The Chimes (SPF—The Public) and Missing Celia Rose (SPF—Theater Row). International credits include The Convert at Almasi Collaborative Arts in Zimbabwe.  He has directed productions for Ensemble Studio Theatre (Going to the River Festival), Luna Stage, Hangar Theatre, Premiere Stages, Princeton Summer Theater, Westminster Choir College, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Theatre Masters (both at The Wild Project and in Aspen, CO), as well as for Passage Theatre Company in Trenton, where he has served as Resident Director since 2009. He has developed work at Philadelphia Artists Collective, Playwrights' Theatre of NJ, McCarter Theatre, and served as a guest artist at Princeton University, Rider University, Kean University, Arcadia University, and others. Adam is also the Artistic Director of OnStage, a company of Mercer County senior citizens who collect and perform the stories of their community. At McCarter, Adam was a member of the producing team that developed and premiered Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (starring David Hyde Pierce and Sigourney Weaver), which later transferred to Lincoln Center and to Broadway (Tony Award: Best Play). Other producing credits include productions led by Mary Zimmerman, Phylicia Rashad, Emily Mann, Stephen Wadsworth, Liesl Tommy, Will Power, Nicholas Martin, Sam Buntrock, and others. Luna Stage Directors’ Lab alumnus, 2005 Weston Award for Directing, 2008 Drama League Directing Fellowship, and 2010 NJ Theatre Alliance “Applause Award.”

 

Janelle A. Kauffman is our slide and video designer. She has been designing video for the stage since her sophomore year at Drexel. Now graduated, she continues to work in and around the city.Aside from her handdrawn slides with the Mantua Project, you may have also seen her work in The Hand of Gaul (Inis Nua), Hope Street and Other Lonely Places (Azuka Theatre), How I Learned to Drive (Theatre Horizon), Kimberly Akimbo (Theatre Horizon),  Que[e]ry (Temple University), RENT (11th Hour Theatre & Drexel University), 12th Nite (Drexel University), and Our Town (Drexel University).

 

Adrienne Mackey is a director. She is the founder of Swim Pony Performing Arts, dedicated to works that are loud, strange and  never seen before on earth! In the spring of 2010 she directed SURVIVE! - a 22,000 square ft choose-your-own adventure installation on humankind's place in the universe. For Fringe Arts she has premiered LADY M and recitatif. In 2012, she received a Knight Arts Challenge for her performance series “Outside the (Black) Box” which included The Ballad of Joe Hill and The Giant Squid. In 2013 she received a second Knight Arts Challenge for “Cross-Pollination” to explore mash ups of different artistic genres in performance. Adrienne has received an Independence Fellowship, LAB fellowship and New Edge Residency. Watch for her newest traveling sound installation The Game of Regret as part of the Mandell Residency at Drexel University in early 2014.

Charlotte Northeast is an actor and director. Graduate of Circle in the Square Theatre School and proud Philadelphia Artists' Collective Artistic Associate.  Charlotte has worked with Act II Playhouse, CCTC, GreenLight, TOW Theatre, Act Out Theatre, Crooked Mirror, Theatre Exile, New City Stage, Passage, Swim Pony, InterAct (Barrymore Award), Gas & Electric Arts and Walnut Street Theatre.  With the PAC: Duchess of Malfi, Changes of Heart and director of the critically acclaimed Creditors. 

David O'Connor is a director, designer and teacher. He has directed for the Arden, the Lantern, Philadelphia Shakespeare, and several other area companies. He is the Resident Director for Philadelphia Young Playwrights, a Master Teaching Artist at Philadelphia Theatre Company, and an Adjunct Faculty member of UPenn and Temple, where he teaches classes in Acting, Directing, Playwriting and Creativity. He thinks everyone has the capacity for creativity, and that the young writers of the Mantua Theatre Project are a great example of that!

 

 

Peter Reynolds is a director. Artistic Director – Mauckingbird Theatre Company, Philadelphia; Head of Musical Theater, Temple University. Philadelphia area: Act II Playhouse, Media Theatre, Hedgerow Theatre, Philadelphia Theatre Company, Philadelphia Young Playwrights, Walnut Street Theatre, Cape May Stage and the Lenape Regional Performing Arts Center in New Jersey. Regionally: 6 years as Artistic Director of HealthWorks Theatre-Chicago, winner of the Award of Excellence in Prevention Education; Oregon Shakespeare Festival, HotCity Theatre-St. Louis, Arrow Rock Lyceum Theatre, Chicago Dramatists, Theatre Building Chicago, Maples Repertory; Villanova Theatre, University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, Drexel University, Arcadia University, and Southern Illinois University.

Greg Romero is a dramaturg, originally from Louisiana.  His plays, site-specific projects, and sound-art collaborations have been performed in theaters, found spaces, and airwaves in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Dallas, Austin, Baltimore, Washington DC, Louisville, and New Orleans, as well as in other awesome places outside the country like Canada (Toronto and Victoria) and Switzerland (Zürich).  Romero has been a finalist for the Heideman Award, a semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Award, and was selected as the first-ever Resident Writer of the ArtsEdge Residency, created by The Kelly Writers House and The University of Pennsylvania, as well as one of three playwrights to inaugurate the PDC/Plays & Players Playwriting Residency.  He is an alum of the 2012 WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory and his works are published by Heinemann Press, YouthPLAYS, and Playscripts.  Romero received a BA in Liberal Arts from the Louisiana Scholars College and an MFA in Playwriting from The University of Texas-Austin where he held the James A. Michener Fellowship.

Jeffrey Stanley is a dramaturg. His play Tesla's Letters (published by Samuel French, 2000) premiered to rave reviews Off Broadway in 1999 and went on to national and international productions including the Edinburgh Fringe and most recently a Chicago premiere. He writes about religion for the Washington Post, and is a screenwriting and theatre faculty at both New York University Tisch School of the Arts and at Drexel University Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. Other plays include the 2003 Medicine, Man commissioned by the Mill Mountain Theatre in Virginia and most recently produced at Theatre Three Dallas, and Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead which premiered in the 2011 Philly Fringe. In the 2012 Philly Fringe he produced Bidisha Dasgupta's classical Indian dance show Einstein/Tagore: Seashore of Endless Worlds. He was a 2011-12 PDC artist-in-residence at Plays & Players Theatre, and served for 2 years as Plays & Players' board secretary. Stanley is a past president of the board of directors of the New York Neo-Futurists experimental theatre ensemble. He has been a resident of prestigious artists' colony Yaddo, a Copeland Fellow in playwriting at Amherst College, and a guest lecturer at the Imaginary Academy summer theatre and film workshop in Croatia sponsored by the Soros Foundation. He has appeared as a guest writer in The New York Times, New York Press and Time Out New York, and he was an editorial adviser to Boston University's Center for Millennial Studies' book on apocalypse movements The End That Does (Equinox Books, 2006). Stanley holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU Tisch and a BFA from Tisch in Film & Television.