Holly L. Derr

  • About MeHolly Derr is a director and professor of theater specializing in the Viewpoints u0026amp; Composition, the performance of gender, and applied theater history. Originally from Dallas, TX, she holds an MFA in Directing from Columbia University and a BA in Theater from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the founding Artistic Director of SKT Inc., a small, New York based not-for-profit theater, and has directed new plays for Big Dance Theater and the PlayPenn New Play Development festival. Holly has served on the faculties of Marlboro College and Smith College, and has taught and directed at the American Repertory Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University, The Brown University/Trinity Repertory Theater Consortium, and the California Institute of the Arts. Most recently, Holly presented her original script, American Medea, at Ensemble Studio Theater/LA and directed Twelfth Night at the University of Riverside. Favorite past projects include In the Penal Colony, Speak, The Time of Your Life (as a musical adaptation), The Front Page, and new plays by Gregory Moss, Ann Marie Healy, Timothy Braun, and Colin Denby Swanson.
  • Creating
    • DirectingAs a director, I use a combination of the Viewpoints u0026amp; Composition and the tools and philosophies of Epic Theater to represent multiple points of view within one theatrical event, disrupt the false binary of gender roles, and explode the social constructs of identity. But more than anything, I use these techniques to organize human experience within a community: to tell stories. ♦ A song and dance Twelfth Night, Or What You Will at the University of California at Riverside combined the worlds of rave, Las Vegas, and Lady Gaga to illuminate the Illyrian culture of excess central to this love story. I also created a thirty-five minute version for a tour to underserved communities as part of the Gluck Fellows Arts Education Outreach Program. ♦ In December of 2010 I directed a semi-staged reading of my play American Medea at the Ensemble Studio Theater Los Angeles. American Medea combines the real-life stories of Andrea Yates, Darlie Routier, Deborah Green, and Susan Smith with the structure and characters of Euripides’ play to elucidate the cultural construction that is modern motherhood. ♦ Ruins, a new half musical, half domestic drama, premiered at the California Institute of the Arts in 2010. Unfolding in…
    • New Play DevelopmentNew play development is a crucible in which ideas are lit up by the fire of necessity. Ideas that begin as sounds and images in a playwright’s mind become black words on a white page become sounds and images in the space and time of a public forum. An audience consumes the performance, interprets it, and turns it back into ideas. Artists working to create quickly and collaboratively under the pressure of this compressed time invest in ideas that seem to have been plucked out of the ether, but in reality have been released by the heat of that necessary fire. ♦ In December of 2010 I directed a semi-staged reading of my play American Medea at the Ensemble Studio Theater Los Angeles’s Sunday Best, a monthly “artistic gymnasium” for actors, directors, and writers focusing on plays-in-progress. American Medea creates a post-modern collage of the real-life stories of Andrea Yates, Darlie Routier, Deborah Green, and Susan Smith and the structure and characters of Euripides’ play to elucidate the cultural construction that is modern motherhood. ♦ Ruins premiered at the California Institute of the Arts in 2010. Unfolding in both the past (through Rogers and Hammerstein-style song and dance) and the…
    • Plays/AdaptationsWRITING/ADAPTATIONS Warriors Don’t Cry, an adaptation of Melba Patillo Beals’ memoir of the integration of Little Rock High School (in process) American Medea, using the structure and characters of Euripides’ play with text from the letters, trials, and news coverage of Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, Darlie Routier, and Deborah Green; read at Ensemble Studio Theater LA’s Sunday Best, December 2010 Speak, an adaptation of the novel by Laurie Halse Anderson The Time of Your Life (original musical adaptation), based on the original play by William Saroyan Anatomy of Isabelle: A Reconstructed Production, a documentary production chronicling unfinished work on a production of New Anatomies (Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play about Isabelle Eberhardt, an early 20th-Century European traveler who converted to Islam and lived among the Sufi Mystics of North Africa), which was interrupted by the tragedy of 9/11 In the Penal Colony, an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story Monsieur X: Here Called Pierre Rabier, an adaptation of the Marguerite Duras memoir, War Hundreds of Collisions, an original piece based on the theories of John Cage Doors, an autobiographical piece about the director based on the theories of Thadeusz Kantor
  • Teaching
    • Research Statement
    • Teaching PhilosophyTEACHING PHILOSOPHY My journey has been characterized by confronting the unknown. I was born and raised in Dallas, TX, and have always been deeply interested in the culture of the South, especially as represented by my Louisianan grandmother and her small town worldview. After attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where one of my favorite classes was The Sociology of the South), I moved to New York City and lived consecutively in Hell’s Kitchen and Dominican Harlem. There I became fascinated by the difference between the politics of multiculturalism and actual life in diverse communities. I moved from there to rural Vermont, where I participated in old- American-style Town Meetings and other New England traditions. Seeking the kinds of adventure I read about in my favorite childhood books (Little House on the Prairie, A Wrinkle in Time), I found real-life adventure by living American culture in its many forms. As a teacher, I try to engage students in this ongoing adventure of discovery. I value the unique contributions of diverse students and help them to start from where they are by bringing their experience to the table, but I also encourage them to embrace the unfamiliar. Whether…
  • Production Photos
    • The Wolves
    • Hamlet: Fall of theu0026nbsp;Sparrow
    • Red Bike
    • SuperTrue
    • Macbeth
    • Comedy of Errors
    • American Medea
    • Harry and theu0026nbsp;Thief
    • Romeo and Juliet
    • The Metal Children
    • Rimers of Eldritch
    • As Long as Fear Can Turn tou0026nbsp;Wrath
    • Twelfth Night, or What Youu0026nbsp;Will

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    • Ruins
    • Golden Girlsby Louise Page, photos by Jon Crispin

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  • Blog
  • April 4, 2022

    Performing the Peace

    Performing the Peace

    Police and Former Prisoners Use Playback Theatre to Build Trust in their Community. Originally published by Southern Theatre Magazine Fall 2021. At a time when George Floyd has become a household name and police-community relations are strained across the country, a program in Memphis called Performing the Peace – which uses theatre to bridge the…

  • March 1, 2022

    Forget the Times: Stream This Feminist Playwright’s New Work Now

    Forget the Times: Stream This Feminist Playwright’s New Work Now

    Originally published by Ms. Magazine on March 22, 2021 Editor’s note: Lauren Gunderson’s new play The Catatrophist (now streaming) is a one-person show about her husband, a virologist. A major publication recently ran a scathing review of the play. The review was perceived to be sexist by many in the theater industry. While this piece intentionally does not link…

  • February 28, 2022

    Using Critical Fabulation in History-Based Playwriting

    Using Critical Fabulation in History-Based Playwriting

    Originally published by HowlRound on March 3, 2021 When the pandemic hit last March, the University of Memphis, as with most theatres and universities, went online for the rest of the semester, and our spring musical—one week into rehearsal—was canceled. Our chair, feeling deeply the loss to our students, wanted to provide them with a…

  • May 16, 2020

    The Art and Craft of Intimacy Direction

    Originally published on HowlRound on January 30, 2020. In case you haven’t noticed, we are experiencing a revolution in the way artists and entertainers rehearse and perform intimacy. The seeds were planted at least ten years ago, when a few highly trained movement specialists started noticing that they were often called upon to handle scenes…

  • May 15, 2020

    The Ms. Q&A: Why Holland Taylor Wanted to Act Like Ann Richards

    Originally published by Ms. Magazine on September 16, 2019.  I’ve always looked forward to being old enough to play Ann Richards in a one-woman show—so imagine what happened when I saw that Holland Taylor’s Ann was on Broadway HD and running at Arena Stage, with Jayne Atkinson in the starring role. I was eager to talk to…

  • May 14, 2020

    #MeToo and the Method

    Originally published by HowlRound on June 13, 2019. #MeToo has raised many questions about what kinds of intimacy are created in rehearsal rooms and classrooms, and to what end. As I’ve listened to the stories of survivors, I’ve been struck by the fact that the abusers in these cases, mostly men, weren’t doing anything that…

  • May 13, 2020

    Storytelling for Social Change: Inside the #HealMeToo Festival

    Originally published by Ms. Magazine on April 15, 2019. Hope Singsen had done very little producing before she began putting together The #HealMeToo Festival, which just wrapped in New York City. She started with a plan to find a space to produce Skin, her solo show about the road and obstacles to healing and reclaiming intimacy after…

  • May 12, 2020

    #MeToo Power, Complicity, and Collective Responsibility

    Originally published on HowlRound on April 11, 2018. My #metoo theatre story is from high school. Our theatre department consisted of five women and whatever hapless guys we could convince to come play a part so that we weren’t limited to just doing Steel Magnolias over and over. The women referred to our teacher as the Dirty…

  • May 18, 2018

    Manahatta’s Gender Flip: Equity in Action

    Originally published by HowlRound on April 2, 2018. As an advocate for creating equity in the American theatre through consciously changing whom we choose to represent on stage, I am often told, “but that would interfere with the creative process.” The playwright’s vision, some argue, would be compromised by any effort to pursue casting quotas.…

  • February 5, 2018

    A Feminist Retelling of Sovereignty

    Originally published by Ms. Magazine Blog on January 10, 2018 As a student at Tulane Law School, activist, writer and lawyer Mary Kathryn Nagle once persuaded her Critical Race Theory professor to let her write a play as her final paper that was based on Worcester v. Georgia, an 1832 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that tribal…

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