I love finding work that centers difficult and powerful women, because I see myself in them. I take the stereotypes: bitchy, combative, argumentative, and use them to reveal the truth of how women are perceived in our culture. Directing Ashes and Curds at The Chain was an experiment in practicing grief, race dynamics, and the never-ending conflict of dealing with sisters. Directing isn't a method of power. It's a widely collaborative art: enabling actors to make strong, clear choices, building relationships on and off stage, empowering other artists to create something extraordinary. Most importantly, it's an exercise in listening, to actors, to designers, to the needs of an audience and a community. At essence, it's a communal practice.
The work I direct deals with issues of power and male-female relationships, and how convention has dictated these relationships. I'm drawn to quirky comedies and striking dramas, think alien abductions meet political power plays, characters navigating totalitarian leaders abusing power. My background as a working sound designer and dancer shapes how I direct. I build sound and rhythm into a piece from the earliest stages of blocking, and I approach staging with a dancer's attention to weight, level, and the physical relationships between bodies in space. I play with triangular blocking and unique level dynamics to create striking contrasts. I work in the genres of punk rock, horror, thriller, absurdism, and experimental theatre, and I combine poetry and prose within the same piece. This has taken shape when directing Triangle: Scenes from a Prosecution with Theatre 68, and May and June with my company, Space Cowgirl Productions.
“Lauren offers constructive and insightful feedback to support effective performances.”
— Darlene Elizabeth Joiner, Actor and Writer
MOONBODIES, an erotic horror play I am writing and directing, is set in a nightmarish near-future New York. Shelley, a nightclub performer battling lifelong body dysmorphia and eating disorders, enrolls in an experimental drug trial that slowly transforms her into a werewolf, but the drug only works if she eats. She uses the trial to reconnect with Rumi, a chef and former lover struggling with his own changing body, and proposes a secret arrangement of sex, caretaking, feeding, and kink that spirals into a volatile romance as they both transform. Blending visceral body horror and surreal puppetry, MOONBODIES interrogates shame, body politics, and being fully seen.
This work requires intimacy direction grounded in care and respect for my collaborators. I prioritize collaborating with and listening to my actors about their own experiences, and building a room where it is safe to be vulnerable in front of one another. I also practice accessible directing: staying flexible with movement abilities, rethinking memorization tactics for actors who need a different way in, and accepting actors where they are.
Our work features actually autistic actors and writers in meaningful creative roles, whose lived experience shapes the work from the inside, how it's written, rehearsed, and performed. Every member of our current producing team identifies within one or more of these categories: neurodivergent, disabled, and/or LGBTQ+. Our work is driven by questions about love, connection, and belonging, and our new pieces often focus on mismatched partners and unconventional relationships in worlds that don't always cooperate with them. Our published sci-fi romantic drama May and June asks what might happen if you could meet your soulmate in real time, and how certainty might complicate, rather than simplify, intimacy. We also enjoy reworking familiar material in unexpected ways, our latest musical, Just Little Women, is a pop-punk-scored, modern adaptation of the girlhood classic. Across our projects, we focus on characters who are usually overlooked, letting them succeed, fail, and take up space without apology.
My performance art deals with the self, and how my body navigates the issues of female and male, power, tradition, and family conventions. I experiment with the voice and its disembodiment from the self. I do performances based on my own trauma. I address my own issues of Body Dysmorphia with performative recreations of my rituals in front of the mirror. I address my issues of a transitive childhood by addressing suitcases and culture. I am not a mere spectator or reporter of the experiences of other, rather I use my work to understand the world from my perspective and make sense of it.
I approach new projects with joy. I am scrappy, and persistent, but most of all resilient. It's the eighth home, the new school, the friends I had to make from scratch every eighteen months. When something doesn't work, an idea, a piece of blocking, a section of text, I try something new. I've dug into the work of playwrights, but also studied alongside performance artists, dancers, filmmakers, watching what they do and stealing their tactics. It's not about doing things right. It's about telling the story. As a queer, millennial woman raised by Kentucky-bred parents in the military, I have a vision of the world unlike most. And yet my experience mirrors so many of the people in my world, and that connection is what fuels my passion for theatre. Now is the time my voice has a place.