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"His Eye is on the Sparrow" Cast and Creative Team

His Eye is on the Sparrow
Written by Larry Parr
Directed by Timothy Douglas
With Maiesha McQueen as Ethel Waters

THE CREATIVE TEAM

Darius SmithMusic Director/Piano Player
Scott BradleyScenic Designer
Alison HeryerCostume Designer
Peter MaradudinLighting Designer
Casi PacilioSound Designer
Kelsey Daye LutzStage Manager
Kristen MunProduction Assistant
Harriet BassCasting

BIOGRAPHIES


Maiesha McQueen
Ethel Waters
Maiesha McQueen is honored and thrilled to be returning to The Armory in His Eye is on the Sparrow. She was last seen on The Armory main stage in the 2015 production of Ain’t Misbehavin’. Regional credits include: 'Da Kink in My Hair (Horizon Theatre, Atlanta); Sirens of Song (Milwaukee Repertory Theater); Chasin’ Dem Blues (True Colors Theatre, Atlanta); Black Nativity (Dominion Productions, Atlanta); In the Red and Brown Water (PG Entertainment, GA); Little Shop of Horrors, Show Boat, Man of La Mancha, Guys and Dolls (Forestburgh Playhouse, NY). Film credits include: DayBlack (ArtistDirector Media), Down to Earth (Paramount Pictures). Maiesha has traveled the globe as a leading ensemble member and musical composer for the touring company Progress Theatre, whose work has been presented at spaces such as The Public Theater, 14th Street Playhouse, The Kennedy Center, The Apollo Theatre and World Music Festival in Amsterdam. She holds a B.F.A. in Musical Theatre from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, a master’s in education from Fordham University, and has spent over a decade teaching in both public and private sectors. Maiesha would like to thank her family and "tribe" for their unconditional love and support! maieshamcqueen.net

Larry Parr
Playwright
Larry Parr has had hundreds of regional productions and is a Dramatist Guild member. Awards and honors include: Hi-Hat Hattie – Kansas City’s Drama Desk Award for Best Musical, Florida Individual Artist Recipient, American Cinema Foundation’s First Prize for Screenwriting; My Castle's Rockin' Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre’s ScriptFest, the first play by a white playwright produced in the history of the National Black Theatre Festival; Invasion of Privacy – 1999 Gold Coast Players Best Play Award, The National Arts Club’s Playwrights First Award in Manhattan, Ashland New Play Festival, Theatre Conspiracy’s New Play Competition, Florida Individual Artist Recipient, Dezart Performs Audience Favorite+; Sundew – Southern Appalachian Repertory Theater’s Annual Play Competition; His Eye is on the Sparrow – Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Recipient, The Sarasota County Arts Council’s John Ringling Fellowship Grant, Daytony Award for Best Overall Production; Shunned – Southern Appalachian Repertory Theater’s ScriptFest Winner, Utah Shakespeare Festival, New American Playwrights Project, Julie Harris Playwright Award Finalist; winner of Florida Studio Theatre’s Short Play Competition nine years in a row; winner of Stages 1993; winner of the 1994 Porter Fleming Playwriting Competition; and a recipient of the Barbara Anton Playwriting Award from Florida Studio Theatre, 2000 and 2010. larryparr.info

Timothy Douglas
Director
Timothy Douglas returns after directing the productions of Anna in the Tropics and A Feminine Ending. He is a New York based theater director who currently serves as an associate artist at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, where he has staged seven productions, including the world premiere of Keith Josef Adkins’ Safe House. Recent credits include Seven Guitars for Yale Repertory Theatre; Disgraced and King Hedley II for Arena Stage; Father Comes Home from the Wars, parts 1, 2 and 3, for Round House Theatre; Richard II for Shakespeare & Company; BRONTE: A Portrait of Charlotte presented Off-Broadway; and the development of Ione Lloyd’s Eve’s Song for Sundance Theatre Institute/MENA Lab in Morocco. Timothy has directed nationally and internationally and counts among his many productions the world premieres of August Wilson’s Radio Golf for Yale Repertory Theatre; Rajiv Joseph’s The Lake Effect for Silk Road Rising (2013 Jeff Award for Best New Work); Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea (six Helen Hayes Award nominations) for Theater Alliance; the Off-Broadway premiere of a new translation/adaptation of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm; as well as his critically acclaimed Caribbean-inspired Much Ado About Nothing for Folger Shakespeare Theatre. He was the associate artistic director at Actors Theatre of Louisville, 2001-2004, where he directed 16 productions including three Humana Festival premieres. The list of theaters Timothy has made productions for include American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Cleveland Playhouse, Downstage (New Zealand), Guthrie Theater, Juilliard, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Pioneer Theatre Company, Pittsburgh Public Theater, Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre (associate artist, 2001-2005), PlayMakers Repertory Company, South Coast Repertory, Steppenwolf Theatre, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and many others. Timothy earned his M.F.A. from Yale School of Drama. timothydouglas.org

Darius Smith
Music Director/Piano Player
Off-Broadway: Futurity, Three Little Birds. DC area: Signature Theater: Jelly's Last Jam, La Cage aux Folles, Soon, Dreamgirls (Associate Music Director); Olney Theatre Center: The Producers, Disney's The Little Mermaid, Once on this Island; Studio Theatre: Choir Boy, Carrie: The Musical; MetroStage: Glimpses of the Moon; Adventure Theater-MTC: Petit Rouge, Go, Dog, Go; Charlie and the Purple Crayon, Big; and many others in the DC area. Original works: Marcus Nate is Alive and Great and Living in Detroit (workshop), The Snowy Day (Best TYA Production Helen Hayes nomination); U.G.L.Y. (Signature Theater SigWorks MT Lab, Kennedy Center Page-to-Stage); Songs in the Key of Chocolate (Signature Theatre Summer Cabaret Series). Cabarets: with Helen Hayes Award winners, Nova Y. Payton and Natascia Diaz. Awards: 2016 San Francisco Theatre Critics Award - Outstanding Music Direction (Choir Boy), 2015 Signature Theatre Young Artist Citation, 2015 Bernard/Ebb Songwriting Competition Finalist. Upcoming: Raisin, The Wiz.

Scott Bradley
Scenic Designer
Scott Bradley previously designed Fences at The Armory. Broadway: premieres of August Wilson's Seven Guitars (Tony nomination and Drama Desk Award for Best Set Design) and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Drama Desk Award for Best Set Design). Recent openings: Gloria, NYU Tisch School of the Arts; Love’s Labour’s Lost, Boston Commonwealth Shakespeare Company; A View from the Bridge, Seattle Repertory Theatre; The Crucible, Cleveland Play House; Brownsville Song, Long Wharf Theater; Much Ado About Nothing, Oregon Shakespeare Festival; Chapatti, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. Other notable productions: world premiere of Samuel D. Hunter's A Great Wilderness (Seattle Repertory Theatre); Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl and The Notebooks of Leonardo de Vinci by Mary Zimmerman (Second Stage Theatre, Lucille Lortel nominations for both productions). Television: set designer for Late Night with David Letterman. Film: production designer for Ang Lee's Pushing Hands. Graduate of Yale School of Drama.

Alison Heryer
Costume Designer
Alison Heryer is a costume designer for theater, film and print. She is thrilled to be returning to The Armory, after designing costumes for The Oregon Trail, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Our Town, Three Days of Rain and Threesome. Other design credits include productions with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 59E59 Theaters, La MaMa, The New Victory Theater, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Portland Opera, Artists Repertory Theatre and The Hypocrites. She has exhibited work at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Austin Museum of Modern Art, and Prague Quadrennial of Design and Space. Recent awards include the ArtsKC Inspiration Grant, the Austin Critics Table Award and a 2016 Drammy. Alison is an assistant professor of art practice in the School of Art + Design at Portland State University and a member of United Scenic Artists Local 829. alisonheryerdesign.com

Peter Maradudin
Lighting Designer
Peter Maradudin is pleased to return to The Armory, where previous work includes Great Expectations, Threesome, Othello, Ragtime, Crazy Enough, West Side Story, Anna in the Tropics, Hamlet, King Lear and Terra Nova, among many others. He is also the lighting designer for the lobby spaces of The Armory. On Broadway, he designed the lighting for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Kentucky Cycle. Off-Broadway he designed Threesome, Hurrah at Last and Ballad of Yachiyo. Peter has designed more than 300 productions for such companies as the Guthrie Theater, American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, La Jolla Playhouse, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Old Globe Theatre and South Coast Repertory. He is the studio director of the architectural lighting group StudioK1, and is the author, under his pen name Peter Alexei, of the novels The Masked Avenger and The Queen of Spades.

Casi Pacilio
Sound Designer
Casi’s home base is The Armory, where recent credits include The Oregon Trail, Little Shop of Horrors, A Streetcar Named Desire, Great Expectations, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Three Days of Rain, Cyrano; Other Desert Cities, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, A Small Fire and Chinglish with composer Jana Crenshaw; and ten seasons of JAW. National shows: Holcombe Waller's Surfacing and Wayfinders; Left Hand of Darkness, My Mind is Like an Open Meadow (Drammy Award, 2011), Something’s Got Ahold Of My Heart and PEP TALK for Hand2Mouth Theatre. Other credits include Squonk Opera’s Bigsmorgasbord-WunderWerk (Broadway, PS122, national and international tours); I Am My Own Wife, I Think I Like Girls (La Jolla Playhouse); Playland, 10 Fingers and Lips Together, Teeth Apart (City Theatre, PA). Film credits include Creation of Destiny, Out of Our Time and A Powerful Thang. Imagineer/maker of the Eat Me Machine, a dessert vending machine.

Kelsey Daye Lutz
Stage Manager
The Armory credits include: stage manager for Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin, Hold These Truths, The Pianist of Willesden Lane, Each and Every Thing, Forever, The Santaland Diaries, The Lion, The People’s Republic of Portland (second engagement), Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, The Typographer’s Dream, The Last Five Years and A Small Fire; and production assistant for Clybourne Park, Venus in Fur, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The North Plan and Anna Karenina. Kelsey Daye is a graduate of University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She would like to thank her pups for all their unconditional love, and Shamus for being wonderful.

Kristen Mun
Production Assistant
Kristen Mun is originally from Hawaii and graduated from Southern Oregon University with a B.F.A. in Stage Management. This is her fourth season at The Armory, where previous credits include: production assistant on The Santaland Diaries (2015 and 2016), Hold These Truths, A Streetcar Named Desire, Each and Every Thing, Forever, Three Days of Rain, Threesome, LIZZIE and Fiddler on the Roof. Outside of Portland, she has worked at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Idaho Repertory Theatre and Actors Theater of Louisville. In Portland, she has worked as a production assistant and stage manager with theater companies including Artists Repertory Theatre (And So It Goes … and Red Herring), Oregon Children’s Theatre (A Year with Frog and Toad, Charlotte’s Web, Ivy and Bean and Junie B. Jones) and Broadway Rose Theatre Company (Oklahoma!). Outside of stage managing, Kristen is a fight choreographer and stage combat teacher. She is forever grateful to Adam and her family for their love and support.

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