PCS Blog

The Santaland Diaries: Cast and Creative Team

Posted by KellyC | 07 November 2012 | Comments (0)

The Santaland Diaries

Cast

Darius Pierce*.....................................................................Crumpet the Elf

Creative Team

David Sedaris......................................................................Creator

Joe Mantello........................................................................Adaptor

Wendy Knox........................................................................Director

Jessica Ford.........................................................................Costume/Scenic Designer

Don Crossley........................................................................Lighting Designer

Sarah Pickett.......................................................................Sound Designer

Mark Tynan*.......................................................................Stage Manager

Karen Hill............................................................................Production Assistant

Rose Riordan........................................................................Casting

*Member of the Actors' Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States

Cast Biography

Darius Pierce (Crumpet the Elf)

Darius is thrilled be spending his fifth holiday season with PCS after two years with A Christmas Story and two with A Christmas Carol. Other productions at PCS include The Beard of Avon (Drammy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor), Twelfth Night, 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, Frost/Nixon, How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, Misalliance and the JAW Festival. Elsewhere, some of his favorite productions have been The Gaming Table and Comedy of Errors (Folger Theater); Lips Together, Teeth Apart (Profile Theatre); As You Like It (Portland Shakespeare Project); Les Miserables (Broadway Rose); Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Portland Playhouse); The Long Christmas Ride Home and A Devil Inside (Theatre Vertigo). Darius is a co-founder of the Anonymous Theatre Company, which produces the annual theatrical event Anonymous Theatre with Theatre Vertigo. He can also very occasionally be seen on screen, where his credits include Leverage, Mock Trials, Train Master II and Cell Count. He would like to thank PCS, Wendy and Mark for entrusting Crumpet to him – a Jew who loves Christmas. In fact, it has inspired him to write a similar one-man holiday show entitled The Maccabee Chronicles.

Creative Team Biographies

David Sedaris (Creator)

David Raymond Sedaris was born in Binghamton, New York on December 26, 1956. He was raised in Raleigh, North Carolina with his sister Amy, a comedic actress and writer. According to his writings, a lisp led to a love of all “s-less” words and to parents worried about his orientation while he was young. Sedaris has written that this led to him having an incredible vocabulary. In 1977 he left both Kent State University and Duke University without a degree but finally earned one in 1987 from the Art Institute of Chicago. He has often contributed his short works to The New Yorker and Esquire magazine as well as delivered them on a radio show entitled “This American Life,” a Public Radio International distribution. He has gained an international audience for his top-selling books and collections of stories such as Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day and Naked. He also gained mainstream attention in the US by appearing on shows such as “The David Letterman Show.” Sedaris was also the editor for the book Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories. Sedaris has worked with his sister Amy on the plays The Book of Liz, Stump the Host and One Woman Shoe, an Obie Award-winner. He was nominated for Grammy Awards in the categories of “Best Spoken Word Album” (for Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)and “Best Comedy Album” (for David Sedaris: Live at Carnegie Hall). He was the third writer to receive the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Time Magazine named Sedaris “Humorist of the Year” in 2001. Presently, Sedaris resides in France with his partner Hugh Hamrick.

Joe Mantello (Adaptor)

Joe’s directing credits include Other Desert Cities, The Pride, Pal Joey, 9 to 5, November, The Receptionist, The Ritz, Blackbird, Three Days of Rain, The Odd Couple, Glengarry Glen Ross (Tony nomination), Laugh Whore, Assassins (Tony Award), Wicked, Take Me Out (Tony Award), Frankie and Johnny in the Clair De Lune, A Man of No Importance, Design for Living and Love! Valour! Compassion! (Tony nomination). Acting credits include The Normal Heart (Tony nomination), Angels in America (Tony nomination) and The Baltimore Waltz. He is a recipient of Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Helen Hayes, Clarence Derwent, Obie and Joe A. Callaway Awards. He is a member of Naked Angels and an associate artist at Roundabout Theatre Company.

Wendy Knox (Director)

Wendy is the artistic director of Frank Theatre in Minneapolis, which she founded in 1989. Credits include Danai Gurira's Eclipsed, a company-developed adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis, an Ivey Award-winning production of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman and Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (both presented by the Guthrie Theatre), Brecht’s Mother Courage, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus, The Women of Troy (her own adaptation of Euripides’ texts, featuring a blues-based score by composer Marya Hart), Carson Kreitzer’s The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera and Arturo Ui, Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, Ruth MacKenzie’s Kalevala, Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom and Naomi Wallace’s The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek. For the Guthrie Theatre, she directed the sold-out production of Lysistrata. In addition to working at most Twin Cities theaters, her regional credits include productions at Syracuse Stage (Syracuse, NY), Berkshire Theatre Festival, Vermont Ensemble Theatre and Intiman Theatre. She has served as a guest director at Macalester College, the University of Minnesota, Grinnell College, Augsburg College and Hamline University. She works as a teaching artist for the Perpich Center for Arts Education and spent seven years teaching in the Children’s Theatre Company’s Neighborhood Bridges program, a partnership with the Minneapolis Public Schools. She was affiliated for ten years with Kulture Klub Collaborative, an arts-based organization that connects homeless teens with artists as role models. Knox was a Fulbright Fellow in Finland where she worked at Helsinki City Theatre, and she holds an MFA in Directing from the University of Washington (Seattle). She has received two McKnight Theatre Artist Fellowships recognizing outstanding work by professional theatre artists, two Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Fellowships, two Jerome Travel and Study Grants and two Diverse Visions grants from Intermedia Arts. She recently received an MRAC/McKnight Foundation "Next Step" grant to attend La Mama's International Directing Symposium in Italy next summer.

Jessica Ford (Costume and Scenic Designer)

Jessica is delighted to be returning to PCS for The Santaland Diaries. Other regional theatre credits include productions at The Long Wharf Theatre, Dallas Theatre Center, Baltimore Center Stage, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Two River Theatre, Syracuse Stage, People's Light and Theatre Company, Yale Rep, Barrington Stage, Hangar Theatre, Actor's Theatre of Louisville, and this season's production of Red at the Alley Theatre in Houston, TX. In New York she has worked with The Play Company, Second Stage, P73, Rattlestick Playwright's Theatre, Pearl Theatre and the Summer Play Festival, to name a few. Jessica received her MFA from the Yale School of Drama and is a recipient of the 2007-09 NEA/TCG fellowship for designers.

Don Crossley (Lighting Designer)

Don is excited to recreate his design for The SantaLand Diaries. Don serves as the Lighting Designer for JAW: A Playwright’s Festival, and was PCS’s Master Electrician from 1996-2007. Previous PCS lighting designs include The Receptionist, Act a Lady, The Thugs, Fully Committed, Another Fine Mess, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The SantaLand Diaries/A Christmas Memory which earned Don one of his 7 Drammy Awards for Lighting Design. Other recent design projects include Penelope (Third Rail Repertory Theatre, where he is a Core Company Member), Galileo Galilie (Portland Opera Association), and The Storm in the Barn (Oregon Children’s Theatre). Don has also designed lighting for Artists Repertory Theatre, CoHo Productions, Broadway Rose Theatre Company and The Miracle Theatre among others.

Sarah Pickett (Sound Designer)

Sarah’s recent theatrical credits in sound design and/or composition include Macbeth and Othello at Theatre for a New Audience (NYC), A Delicate Balance at Yale Repertory Theater, Of Mice and Men and All’s Well That Ends Well at American Players Theater (WI), Much Ado About Nothing at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby at PlayMakers Repertory Company (NC), and The Winter’s Tale at Asolo Repertory Theatre (FL). Sarah holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama and a BFA from Syracuse University.

Mark Tynan (Stage Manager)

Imagine being in a room full of artists, watching the birth of an idea, a movement given purpose, a sentence, phrase, scene, act given life. Then imagine that room translating to the stage with lighting, sound, costumes, scenery and props, then you can imagine what Mark’s job is like. Special thanks to the phenomenal PCS production assistants, Lydia Comer, Kelsey Daye, and Kailyn McCord who help keep the vision attainable. Prior to PCS, Mark toured nationally and internationally with musicals including Dreamgirls, The King and I with Rudolf Nureyev, How to Succeed…, Grand Hotel, The Phantom of the Opera and Rent. Other Portland credits include several summers with The Broadway Rose Theatre Company in Tigard. Regional credits include The Alley Theatre (Houston, TX), La Jolla Playhouse (La Jolla, CA) and Casa Manana Theatre(Fort Worth, TX).

Lydia Comer (Production Assistant)

Lydia is grateful to be in the midst of her third season as a production assistant for PCS. Previously, Lydia was a production assistant for Sweeney Todd, Black Pearl Sings! (as well as playing the prison guard), Red, The Santaland Diaries (2011), The Real Americans, Opus, The Imaginary Invalid and An Illiad. Lydia started at PCS as the audience recruiter for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. A recent graduate, Lydia received her B.F.A. in Theatre, specializing in production and management, from the University of Victoria. University credits include stage managing La Ronde and Romeo & Juliet. For the last two years of university, she also served as the assistant technical director and master electrician for her program. Lydia would especially like to thank Mark Tynan and Emily Wells as well as Jeremy Eisen, Kailyn McCord and Kelsey Daye Lutz.