STAFF AND BOARD – Rorschach Theatre

WHO IS RORSCHACH?

Jenny McConnell Frederick is the co-Artistic Director of Rorschach Theatre. She founded the company in the summer of 1999 with Randy Baker. She is a DC-based a director, producer and theatre maker with a strong belief in impossible theatre.

For Rorschach, she has directed the Helen Hayes Nominated Voices Underwater and God of Vengeance as well as Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and it’s remount, Dead City, This Storm is What We Call Progress, Rough Magic, The Arabian Night, The Scarlet Letter, Master and Margarita, A Clearing in the Woods, and The Illusion. In 2015, she conceived of and directed Truth & Beauty Bombs, an original work based on the Canadian web comic “A Softer World.”

She has also directed for Theater J (G-d’s Honest Truth) and Catholic University (Sissy and Fifi & Hunter Forever!). She created the concept for Truth and Beauty Bombs at Rorschach and co-created Chambers of the Heart, an immersive Dance/Theatre project at Word Dance Theatre. She’s served as a mentor director for the Theatre Lab’s Honors Acting Conservatory and for the Kennedy Centers American College Theatre Festival and was a featured speaker at the CityWrights Conference in Miami. During her tenure as Director of Artistic Programs at CulturalDC, she served as Artistic Director of Source Festival overseeing the selection, development and production of more than 200 works for the stage over nearly a decade. Work developed and produced by Jenny at the Source Festival boasts multiple National New Play Network Rolling World Premieres, several American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg Award Nominations and an Osborn Award Winner. Through CulturalDC’s Mead Theatre Lab Program and Space4:Performing Arts (which she conceived of and launched in 2017), she directed artist selection and recruitment processes and oversaw advisory panels. She has worked closely with many artists to create, develop and produce their own work. Prior to that she spent ten years working in development and special events for Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company as they moved from a tiny garage space on Church Street to their permanent home on D Street NW. There she collaborated to develop and launch two of the company’s biggest on-going fundraising events, the annual benefit bash and Dinner on Stage.

In 2018 she’ll launch the It/That Happened project at the University of Maryland. This new initiative solicits student’s real life experiences and shapes them into performances pieces that serve as a catalyst for substantive, actionable dialogues on diversity and inclusion. She graduated cum laude from Virginia Commonwealth University with a BFA in Theatre and joined Mensa for the free pencils. She lives in Columbia Heights, DC with her husband and their long-term collaboration, a son named Thane.

Randy Baker is an award-winning playwright and director, and the co-Artistic Director of Rorschach Theatre in Washington DC, which he founded with Jenny McConnell Frederick in the summer of 1999. He is also adjunct faculty at George Washington University and a frequent guest artist and educator at a number of institutions including Theatre Lab, National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, and Imagination Stage. He is an alumni of the inaugural cohort of The Playwright’s Arena, a part of Arena Stage’s American Voices New Play Institute and recently ended his tenure as the Washington DC regional rep for the Dramatists Guild of America.

Current projects include directing the upcoming world-premiere of Human Museum by Miyoko Conley at Rorschach Theatre as well as the continued development of The Legend of Hang Tuah (A Malay epic with martial arts and shadow puppetry, developed in collaboration with Malay and Singaporean artists). Rorschach Theatre‘s 25th anniversary season is currently underway.

As a director with Rorschach Theatre he has directed Very Still and Hard to See (nominated for five Helen Hayes awards including Best Director), The Electric Baby, She Kills Monsters (and the 2019 site-specific remount), Chemical Exile: Synthesis, The Minotaur, After the Quake, 1001, Rhinoceros, JB, Behold!, Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards and Monster. Some recent projects outside of Rorschach include the seven-room living installation piece, Hello, My Name Is… at The Welders (nominated for three Helen Hayes awards including Best Director), a shadow puppet gamelan-inspired A Midsummer Night’s Dream at WSC Avant Bard, Big Love at Catholic University, Anon/ymous at Georgetown University and Marat/Sade and his own adaptation of Rashōmon at American University. Some of the other companies where he has directed include The Source Festival, WSC Avant Bard, Pointless Theatre, The Welders, Inkwell Theatre, Breakout Theatre, KL Shakespeare Players (Malaysia), First Draft, NCDA’s Actors Repertory Theatre, Wayward Theatre, Cherry Red Productions, Catholic University, American University, Georgetown University and Young Playwrights Theater as well as a number of shows with teen actors at Imagination Stage and Theatre Lab.

Plays he has written and had produced at Rorschach Theatre include the recent world premiere of Forgotten Kingdoms (2017), a play about a missionary in Indonesia whose life is changed forever in one supernatural night while he tries to convert a man who will not be converted; Truth & Beauty Bombs: A Softer World a project co-written with four other playwrights and inspired by the web comic A Softer World; the full-length plays Dream Sailors and After the Flood; as well as a number of short plays. Also at Rorschach Theatre he collaborated with multiple artists at Rorschach Theatre to create the groundbreaking city-wide immersive “Psychogeographies” projects, Distance Frequencies and Chemical Exile as well as the two found space projects Thesmophoria and Six Impossible Things.

Other produced plays include the full length plays Circus of Fallen Angels at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, wild42hold at George Washington University, an adaptation of Rashōmon at American University as well as a number of short plays at numerous other theatres. Two plays written for teen actors were developed and produced for Theatre Lab including Between Days – a play about American expat teens growing up in Singapore – and Medea: A Teenage Revenge Tragedy.

Readings and workshops of plays include the ongoing development of The Legend of Hang Tuah which was originally commissioned and developed by Pointless Theatre, and had subsequent workshops in Singapore with Nusantara Theatrics and in Malaysia with the KL Shakespeare Players in collaboration with Masakini Theatre; The Burning Road which was developed at Arena stage and had a reading in the Kogod Cradle; Forgotten Kingdoms which has received readings at National New Play Network, Kennedy Center Page to Stage festival, Inkwell Theatre, The Arts Club of Washington, Jakarta Players (Indonesia), Wordsmyth Theater (Houston) and the National Newborn Festival at MTWorks (New York) where it won the Audience Choice Award; Monastery which was developed through Theater J’s Locally Grown program and received a public reading; Circus of Fallen Angels which was commissioned by and performed at the National Conservatory for Dramatic Arts and received a workshop production at American University; Gilgamesh which received a staged reading at Rorschach Theatre and Vox which was developed at Theater Alliance.

The son of educators and the grandson of Pentecostal missionaries, Randy grew up overseas, mostly in Singapore and Malaysia where his family still lives. He attended the University of Richmond before moving to Washington DC in 1997 and currently lives in Takoma Park. He received his MFA in creative writing from Goddard College.

More information can be found at randybakerdc.com.