Introducing Shana Cooper

Shana Cooper

Shana Cooper makes her PlayMakers' directorial debut with

A Midsummer Night's Dream. She brings a wealth of Shakespeare directorial experience with credits including Romeo and Juliet at Yale Repertory Theatre, Love’s Labor’s Lost at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Taming of the Shrew at California Shakespeare Theater, and Richard III at the Yale School of Drama.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shana’s favorites, being the first play she ever directed. She recently created an “audacious” production of Midsummer for Berkeley’s California Shakespeare Theater. Shana says she’s especially drawn to Midsummer because of Shakespeare’s exploration of the metaphysical in the play; how he portrays the human world as the surface of an unseen world that affects and sometimes overrules human actions. She feels the unseen world, the world of the fairies and the dream, seems like the unconscious. Shana explains that one of the challenges of staging Midsummer is establishing differentiation between dream and reality. She says she loves that imagination itself is the very foundation of the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.


Come see Into the Woods and A Midsummer Night's Dream at PlayMakers November 1 - December 7. For tickets, call 919.962.PLAY (7529) or visit our website.

Creating Lighting Designs

By Josh Epstein, lighting designer, Into the Woods and A Midsummer Nights Dream

Josh Epstein

Theater design of all types often begins by thinking about metaphors. As designers we try to get to the heart of what the playwright is saying and find a visual way to enhance or clarify that message. Sometimes it is about establishing a grounded, “real” place to set the play in and sometimes it is about creating an abstraction. When you are working on two plays at once there is an additional challenge of trying to find the commonalities between two completely separate works to create some sort of through-line between the two: from Shakespeare to Sondheim and back again. In the case of both of these plays the most obvious commonality is the woods. As a designer I have spent a lot of time thinking 

Working on the lighting for the Rep. Photo by Laura Pates.

about how these woods should feel for the actors and the audience. And in the end I came to the realization that it is less about literal trees and bushes and more about the idea of journey. And from a lighting point of view that meant finding a way to evolve the space and embrace the exploration without grounding the location too specifically. I have tried to create an environment where we can evolve from a starting point where there the lighting reveals everything and has a sense of solidity and architecture to a world that is full of shadow and texture. The characters adventure from what feels like a world with a clear and steady footing to a place that hides mysteries and the unknown and they emerge on the other side. I hope the audience joins them as they discover and relate to the journey for themselves.

Come see Into the Woods and A Midsummer Night's Dream at PlayMakers November 1 - December 7. For tickets, call 919.962.PLAY (7529) or visit our website.

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine

By Gregory Kable, dramaturg, Into the Woods





Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine working on Into the Woods.


One of the most indispensable and influential artists in the contemporary theatre, Stephen Sondheim was born in New York City in 1930. Following his early mentorship by Oscar Hammerstein II, Sondheim attended Williams College in Massachusetts and studied with avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. Entering his professional career, Sondheim wrote the lyrics for the Broadway musicals West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), and Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965) as well as contributing to Candide (1973). In addition to Into the Woods, his works as composer-lyricist include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), The Frogs (1974, revised 2004), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd (1979), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Assassins (1990, expanded 1992), Passion (1994), and Road Show (2008). Sondheim’s numerous honors range from eight Tony Awards, including Best Score for Into the Woods, a 2008 Special Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, eight Grammys, and the Academy Award for Best Song for Dick Tracy (1990). He was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1983, a Kennedy Center Honoree for Lifetime Achievement in the Performing Arts a decade later, and awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1996. Along with James Lapine, Sondheim received the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Sunday in the Park with George, one of only eight musicals in Pulitzer history to earn that recognition. In commemoration of his eightieth birthday in 2010, Broadway’s former Henry Miller’s Theatre was renamed for Stephen Sondheim.


James Lapine was born in Mansfield, Ohio in 1949. He attended Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. While teaching advertising design at the Yale School of Drama, Lapine directed a production of Gertrude Stein’s Photograph which transferred to New York, winning him an Obie award. Lapine subsequently wrote and directed Table Settings (1980), Twelve Dreams (1985, revived 1995), and his stage adaptation of playwright Moss Hart’s autobiography Act One for the Lincoln Center Theatre (2014). On Broadway, Lapine has written the book for and directed Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods (1987, and its 2002 revival), Passion, the 2010 revue Sondheim on Sondheim, and directed a concert version of Merrily We Roll Along at New York City Center (2012). Lapine collaborated with composer-lyricist William Finn on the landmark March of the Falsettos (1982) and its sequel Falsettoland (1990) later combined on Broadway as Falsettos (1992), Finn’s A New Brain (1998), and Little Miss Sunshine (2013). Additional directing credits range from the 1997 revival of The Diary of Anne Frank and David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child (1998) to William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin’s The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005) and the 35th anniversary production of Annie (2012). Lapine co-produced and directed the Emmy nominated HBO documentary Six by Sondheim (2013), and wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film version of Disney’s Into the Woods. He has been nominated for twelve Tony Awards winning on three occasions, including two for Into the Woods, has received five Drama Desk Awards, the Peabody Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2011, Lapine was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.


Come see Into the Woods and A Midsummer Night's Dream at PlayMakers November 1 - December 7. For tickets, call 919.962.PLAY (7529) or visit our website.

“Something of Great Constancy”: Shakespeare to Sondheim: Part 3

By Gregory Kable, dramaturg, Into the Woods

The Witch and Tree. By Arthur Rackham; 1918.

But a third critical position warrants inclusion. Like Oscar Wilde, who both penned imaginative literature and often insisted that life imitates art far more than art imitates life, English fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett proposed a revisionist theory of fantasy, which serves as a provocative point of entry point for Into the Woods. As Pratchett maintains:

“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around. Stories exist independently of their players…And every time fresh actors tread the path of the

story, the groove runs deeper. That is why history keeps repeating all the time. So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grand-mother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story. Stories don’t care who takes part in them.

All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats.”

Pratchett’s thesis has clear resonance in the style and ideas of Into the Woods, where reason and imagination, the individual and his or her community, actions and consequences, and history and myth all converge in a freewheeling, moving demonstration of how we shape and are shaped by the stories we tell. 

Imaginative tales, then, once we seize their potential, like the theatre itself, help us to live more fully and intentionally, a truth that Shakespeare, along with Sondheim and Lapine, express in the very form of their respective works. Or as Shakespeare’s Queen Hippolyta affirms in embracing reports of the fantastical events in Midsummer’s enchanted forest:

“…All the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.” 

Come see Into the Woods and A Midsummer Night's Dream at PlayMakers November 1 - December 7. For tickets, call 919.962.PLAY (7529) or visit our website.