Director: 
Tara Brooke Watkins (www.tarabrookewatkins.com) is a theatre director, instructor, playwright and activist. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University and an MA in Theatre Education from Emerson College. Much of her research focuses on the effect of theatre in communities experiencing cultural trauma. In 2019-2020, she worked with students at Eastern Nazarene College and guests and administration at Father Bill's Place, a homeless shelter in Quincy, Massachusetts to hear stories and use applied theatre, story circles, and drama therapy techniques to respond to needs. From 2016-2018, she worked with the Black community of North Tulsa to run story circles and used theatre to create a play showing how the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre still lives in Tulsans' lives today.

​Tara is a member of Bethel AME Church where she co-facilitates the Shatter the Silence ministry which uses story circles and drama therapy to address sexual victimization. She is the creator of several plays which originated in this type of community engagement work using story circles. Such plays include The Bible Women’s Project, Tulsa ’21: Black Wall Street, and The Father Bill’s Play.  She is an award-winning director for Sleeping Weazel Theatre company in Boston where she directed The Audacity: Women Speak and is currently working on Charlotte Meehan's new play, Everyday Life and Other Odds and Ends, an original play about Parkinson's. She founded the Theatre for Social Justice Program at Eastern Nazarene College and is the founder and executive director of South Shore School of Theatre in Quincy, MA, a children's theatre school.

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​Playwright: 
​Sarah Ruhl’s plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play, The Clean House, Passion Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Melancholy Play, For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday, The Oldest Boy, Stage Kiss, Dear Elizabeth, Eurydice, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, Orlando, Late: a cowboy song, and a translation of Three Sisters. She has been a two-time Pulitzer prize finalist and a Tony award nominee. Her plays have been produced on and off Broadway, around the country, and internationally, where they have been translated into over fifteen languages.
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Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University, where she studied with Paula Vogel. She has received the Steinberg Award, the Samuel French Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Whiting Award, the Lily Award, a PEN Award for mid-career playwrights, and the MacArthur Award. You can read more about her work on www.SarahRuhlplaywright.com. Her new book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write was a New York Times notable book of the year, and she most recently published Letters from Max with Max Ritvo. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and she lives in Brooklyn with her family.
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Critical Reviews of STAGE KISS:

• “Part parody, part inside-baseball valentine to theater, part falling-down silly physical comedy about love.” – Newsday
• “CRITIC'S PICK. Suffused with warmth and humor. Sarah Ruhl frothily whips together romantic comedy and backstage farce in this lively comedy about a pair of actors... who find life and art mixing together when they rekindle an old romance during rehearsals for a play.” – The New York Times
• “FOUR STARS. Sarah Ruhl delivers a brilliant comedy that aims for big laughs and hits its target. Funny: There’s nothing like it.” – New York Post
• “At once a knowing sendup of the hazy half-truths of stage naturalism and a goofy meditation on the nature of desire and sexual fantasy, [Stage Kiss] manages to be both wholly original and instantly recognizable to the audience. As a satire of theatre and theatricals, it’s right up there with Neil Simon’s 'The Sunshine Boys.” – The New Yorker
• “There's not one but two plays-within-a-play in Sarah Ruhl's Stage Kiss, a highly meta-theatrical, fundamentally enjoyable, slightly slight, not-so-romantic comedy pondering the complexity of onstage osculation.” – Variety
• “The gorgeously articulate author of The Clean House and Eurydice is in top form with this delightful piece.” – Theatremania

By arrangement with ORIGIN Theatrical
​On behalf of Samuel French, A Concord Theatricals Company