The Play’s the Thing!

Louis Fantasia (Series Editor) is Artistic Associate at the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles. He has served as Dean of the Faculty of the New York Film Academy and President of Deep Springs College. His books include Instant Shakespeare (published by Ivan R. Dee), Tragedy in the Age of Oprah, (Scarecrow Press), and Talking Shakespeare: Notes from a Journey (Peter Lang Publishers). In 2003, the Council of Europe named the theater collection at its library in the European Parliament in honor of Louis Fantasia, who holds both U.S. and European Union passports. In 2016 he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland) for his contributions to German culture and theater.

Timothy Harris has lived in Japan for 46 years. His translations and essays on poetry, drama, music and art have appeared in PN Review (Manchester), Agenda (London), SNOW (Lewes), Quadrant (Melbourne), Plays International (London), Art International (Lugano), the Asian edition of The Financial Times, and The Chicago Review; he also contributed to The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (Oxford University Press). He acts and directs, lectures on British and Irish literature, and works as a diction coach for (English) opera, oratorio and song, at the New National Theater, Tokyo, and elsewhere.

Baron Kelly, Ph.D., is a critic, historian, practitioner, and scholar. In addition to his long list of acting and directing credits on and off Broadway, he is a four-time Fulbright Scholar. Formerly Professor and Head of the Graduate Acting Program at the University of Louisville, he is Vilas Distinguished Professor of Theater and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Brian Lohmann is currently on the faculty at Pepperdine University, and teaches Shakespeare through Improvisation for the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles. Brian also directs, acts and teaches for Impro Theater, Los Angeles. Stage credits include A.C.T., The Old Globe, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Laguna Playhouse and The Magic Theater. He has received Garland, Drama-Logue, and StageScene LA Awards. Brian was core faculty for the American Conservatory Theater’s MFA program, and has been a guest instructor at Stanford, The Guthrie Theater, The Public Theater’s Shakespeare Lab, The Old Globe/USD, Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Dr. Janna Segal is an Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at the University of Louisville. Prior to U of L, she was an Assistant Professor of Theater and Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University, and an IHUM Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Drama and Theater from the UC Irvine/UC San Diego joint doctoral program, her MA in Theater from CSUN, and her BA in Theater Arts from UC Santa Cruz. She has published single- and co-authored works on Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, Midsummer, The Roaring Girl, and Fo and Rame’s Elisabetta. Dr. Segal is also a freelance dramaturg and the Resident Dramaturg for the Comparative Drama Conference’s Staged Reading Series.

Armin Shimerman is mostly known to the public as a television actor with over eighty major television roles, notably Quark on Star Trek and Principal Snyder on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. With an English degree from UCLA, his primary focus has always been on Shakespeare and Elizabethan studies. He is a sought-after Shakespeare coach for actors and is a current associate professor at the University of Southern California. He is the author of the Science fiction trilogy, “The Merchant Prince”, with its Tudor mathematician hero, Dr. John Dee. On stage, he has acted in over a third of the Bard’s canon, appeared several times on Broadway as well as major regional theater stages. He helps run a small theater in Glendale, the Antaeus Company, and has directed several Shakespeare productions. He lives with his wife, Kitty Swink, in Los Angeles.

Susan Gayle Todd, Ph.D., was the Producing Artistic Director of Austin (TX) Scottish Rite Theater and co-founder/director of The Weird Sisters Women’s Theater Collective. Since 2003, she has taught Shakespeare Through Performance pedagogy in various settings, including the Huntington Library and The University of Texas at Austin.

Edit Villarreal’s play The Language of Flowers, a contemporary Chicano adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, received its equity premiere at A Contemporary Theater ACT in Seattle. Other plays include Marriage is Forever, and My Visits With MGM (My Grandmother Marta). For television, she co-wrote three scripts for the award winning series, “Foto-Novelas” produced by PBS. Other PBS credits include “La Carpa”, a one hour drama about Chicano vaudevillians in the 1930’s.. She is one of only two Latino playwrights to be included in the Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, Oxford University Press. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, she is Vice-Chair Graduate Studies and Professor in Playwriting at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.