About the Artistic Team
ACTOR
Elaine Vaan Hogue is an actor, director, teacher, and producer. Originally from Los Angeles she has performed, directed, and taught in diverse settings across the country.
Elaine is a fervent member of The Magdalena Project, a dynamic international cross-cultural and cross-generational network of women in contemporary theatre. She performed in the 2022 Magdalena International Festival, a gathering of worldwide women, non-binary, and trans artists, hosted by Double Edge Theatre.
Summer 2023, Elaine was a participant in the inspirational La MaMa ETC International Director’s Symposium in Spoleto, Italy. Original work in which she has collaborated as a director and performer include The Future of Ice, Creation: Mythic Weavings, and When Jennie Goes Marching.
Elaine has performed and directed at many theatres including Great Barrington Public Theater, The Hanover Theatre Repertory, New Repertory Theatre, Central Square Theatre, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Boston Center for American Performance, Arts After Hours, Bridge Repertory Theatre, Wheelock Family Theatre, Double Edge Theatre, Olney Theatre Center, New Theatre, American Theatre Arts.
She is a Professor Emerita at Boston University where she taught acting and directing for 25 years. Elaine is touring Representation and How to Get It to historic venues throughout New England. She is the recipient of two grants for this solo project, from The Puffin Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Fall 2023 she is collaborating with Actor’s Shakespeare Project and directing How I Learned To Drive by Paula Vogel, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
DIRECTOR
Judy Braha has been a director, actor, teacher and artist for social justice for over four decades. Long-time head of the M.F.A. Directing Program at Boston University’s School of Theater, her credits include theaters and universities throughout New England. With a commitment to the arts as activism, Judy collaborates with Andre de Quadros in the BU College of Fine Arts Prison Arts Initiative, teaching incarcerated students in Massachusetts’ prisons and jails. Judy was honored by the Association for Theater in Higher Education with the 2022 Oscar Brocket Award for Excellence in Theater Teaching.
As a director, Judy’s work often has concern for human rights at its center: To Kill A Mockingbird (Gloucester Stage Company), Emilie, La Marquise du Chatelet, Defends Her Life Tonight (Central Square Theater), Othello, I Am Lear, a devised piece on aging (Actor’s Shakespeare Project), The Oil Thief + Deported, a dream play (Boston Playwrights Theater), Golda’s Balcony (NEW REP), Our Class, Our Country’s Good and The Exonerated at BU/School Of Theater, the new work Mr. Fullerton, Between the Sheets (Great Barrington Public Theater and Gloucester Stage Company) and the East Coast premiere of Things I Know To Be True (GBPT).
Currently, Judy is directing a series of solo shows: Representation and How to Get It, focused on the legacy of the feminist, suffragist, abolitionist Julia Ward Howe coming to a historic venue near you, Mozart’s Wife by Anne Undeland for GBPT and You Can Live If They Let You by Moshe Waldoks premiering in Spring 2024.
A longtime member of the Society of Directors and Choreographers, AEA and SAG-AFTRA, Judy is also proud to have been a founding board member of Stage Source, New England Theater’s service organization committed to connecting theaters, artists and their communities.
PLAYWRIGHT
Joyce Van Dyke’s plays put women center stage. She writes about women, non-belongers, scientists, outsiders and refugees in dramas of struggle and discovery. Her current work in progress responds to the climate crisis, as does her earlier play THE OIL THIEF, recently included in the climate collection, 100 Plays to Save the World (2021). Produced by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and directed by Judy Braha, THE OIL THIEF was originally commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theatre / Sloan Project and won Boston’s Eliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script.
REPRESENTATION AND HOW TO GET IT, the solo show inspired by Julia Ward Howe, featuring Elaine Vaan Hogue, directed by Judy Braha, and developed collaboratively by Joyce, Elaine and Judy, is currently touring New England, with performances in historic venues.
Joyce’s other upcoming productions include THE WOMEN WHO MAPPED THE STARS which introduces five extraordinary women who helped shape the field of astrophysics (Theatre Conspiracy, Fort Myers, 2024 – this performance will take place at a planetarium). Originally commissioned by Central Square Theater, THE WOMEN WHO MAPPED THE STARS had its world premiere there in 2018. An adapted version has been touring schools in Maine for the past two years.
Other plays include DAYBREAK (Off-Broadway world premiere production, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, 2018); and A GIRL’S WAR (produced by Golden Thread Productions, New Repertory Theatre, and Boston Playwrights’ Theatre) which won the Gassner Award, the Boston Globe’s “Top Ten” plays of 2001, and was anthologized in Contemporary Armenian American Drama.
A MacDowell Fellow and a Huntington Playwriting Fellow, Joyce teaches Shakespeare and playwriting at Harvard Extension School.
Production Team
Sound design: Jacob Fisch
Costume design: Zoë Sundra, Marissa Wolf
Scenic Consultant: Marina Sartori
Voiceover: Mark Cohen
“The one woman play, Representation and How to Get It, is outstanding! To say it’s thought-provoking and inspiring is an understatement… Julia Ward Howe is a force to be reckoned with.”