Dael Orlandersmith, Playwright Les Waters, Director Annie Smart, Scenic & Costume Designer James F. Ingalls, Lighting Designer Nicole Galland, Dramaturg Lynne Soffer, Dialect Coach Cynthia Cahill, Stage Manager Amy Potozkin, Casting Director CAST Deidrie N. Henry, Alma Clark Jackson, Eugene DAEL ORLANDERSMITH (Playwright) won an OBIE Award for Beauty’s Daughter, which she wrote and starred in at American Place Theatre. Film and television credits include Hal Hartley’s Amateur, an episode of Spin City and the new film Get Well Soon with Courtney Cox. Dael has toured extensively with the Nuyorican Poets Café (now known as Real Live Poetry) throughout the U.S., Europe and Australia. In November 1996 she premiered Monster at New York Theatre Workshop and appeared in Romeo and Juliet at Williamstown. Dael has attended Sundance Theatre Festival Lab four summers developing new plays. The Gimmick, commissioned by the McCarter Theatre, premiered on their Second Stage on Stage and went on to great acclaim at the Long Wharf Theatre and New York Theatre Workshop. Yellowman was commissioned by and premiered at the McCarter in a co-production with the Wilma and Long Wharf Theatres. Vintage Books published Yellowman and a collection of earlier work. She was a Pulitzer Prize Award finalist and Drama Desk Award Nominee for Yellowman which premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2002. Dael was a Susan Smith Blackburn Award Finalist in 1999 and is the recipient of a NYFA Grant and The Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award. She is currently finishing her first novel, a new play commissioned by the Wilma and the screenplay version of Yellowman at Sundance Screenwriters Lab. LES WATERS (Director) For Berkeley Rep: Suddenly Last Summer and Big Love. Regional theatre credits: Wintertime, Nebraska, Life During Wartime, The Importance of Being Earnest and Nora (La Jolla Playhouse); Big Love (Humana Festival, Long Wharf, Goodman Theatre); Buried Child, Glengarry Glen Ross (A.C.T.); Ghost On Fire, Spinning Into Butter (Goodman); The Designated Mourner, The Memory of Water (Steppenwolf); The House of Bernarda Alba (Guthrie). New York credits: Fen, Ice Cream With Hot Fudge, Rum and Coke, Romeo and Juliet (New York Shakespeare Festival); Life During Wartime (Manhattan Theatre Club); Big Love (Next Wave Festival at BAM); Savannah Bay (Classic Stage Company). His U.K. credits include productions at the National Theatre, Royal Court Theatre, Hampstead Theatre Club, Bristol Old Vic, Traverse Theatre Club and Joint Stock Theatre Group. Awards include: Edinburgh Fringe First, Tokyo Theatre Critics, Dramalogue, KPBS Patte, Connecticut Critics Circle, Dean Goodman, Bay Area Critics Circle and an OBIE for directing Big Love. Les is the Associate Artistic Director of Berkeley Rep. ANNIE SMART (Set and Costume Designer) In the U.K., shows include designing the original productions of Fen and A Mouthful of Birds. At the Royal National Theatre: The Father, Say It with Flowers, Black Snow, The Mountain Giants and The Skriker. Of the classics, her work includes Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The School for Scandal, Miss Julie, The Father, Medea, Woyzeck, The Voysey Inheritance and Verdi’s La Traviata. In the U.S., she has designed for The Public Theater, Arena Stage, The Guthrie, San Diego Rep, Intiman, ACT Seattle, Long Wharf, The Goodman, Classic Stage, Theater for a New Audience and BAM. For La Jolla Playhouse: The Importance of Being Earnest, Nora, Loot (costumes), Sheridan (costumes), Walking to St. Ives (sets) and Wintertime (sets). For A.C.T., she designed set and costumes for The Threepenny Opera and sets for Night and Day, and A Doll’s House in the current season. She created the set and video projections for The History and Mystery of the Universe, recently seen at the Artaud in San Francisco. At Berkeley Rep, Annie designed sets for last season’s Suddenly Last Summer and Big Love the season before. Annie was Chair of the Masters Course in Theatre Design/Scenography at London’s Wimbledon School of Art and now teaches as an adjunct professor at U.C. San Diego. JAMES F. INGALLS (Lighting Designer) returns to Berkeley Rep, where he previously designed How I Learned to Drive, McTeague and The Revenger. His work in the Bay Area includes the John Adams/June Jordan musical I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, directed by Peter Sellars, as well as Platee and The Hard Nut, choreographed by Mark Morris, for Cal Performances; The Three Sisters, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again and The Invention of Love at A.C.T.; The Death of Klinghoffer at San Francisco Opera, and Silver Ladders, Maelstrom, Pacific and El Grito for San Francisco Ballet. LYNNE SOFFER (Dialect Coach) Recent Berkeley Rep collaborations include Suddenly Last Summer, The House of Blue Leaves and Cloud Nine. Other recent credits includes dialect work for Lynn Redgrave’s play The Mandrake Root at San Jose Rep and Amy Freed’s The Beard of Avon at Seattle Rep. She has been the dialect and/or text coach on more than 80 productions for theatres including Berkeley Rep, San Jose Rep, A.C.T., Seattle Rep, Magic Theatre, California Shakespeare Theater, Marin Theatre Company, Aurora Theatre, Word for Word, Theatre-on-the-Square’s production of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and the world premiere of Moisès Kaufman’s The Laramie Project at Denver Center Theatre Company, New York and Berkeley Rep. An instructor of acting and Shakespeare as well as speech and text work, Ms. Soffer has taught for many schools and theatre companies throughout the country. She has worked as an actor in theatres from Maine to Alaska, including Berkeley Rep’s production of Tony Kushner’s Slavs! CAST DEIDRIE N. HENRY (Alma) is ecstatic to make her debut in Yellowman, after having admired the incredible work at Berkeley Rep for years. Prior to her move to Paris in January of last year to pursue a singing career, she was with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for four seasons. She appeared as Rosalind in As You Like It, Artemidorous/Messala in Julius Caesar, Lulu in OO-Bla-Dee, Irina in Three Sisters, Magda in Gibraltar, Susie in Wit, Ophelia in Hamlet, Vera Dotson in Seven Guitars and Margaret in Much Ado About Nothing. Other theatre credits include Closer at Portland Center Stage, Blues for an Alabama Sky at Alliance Theatre (Atlanta, GA), Hartford Stage, Arena Stage, Huntington Theatre (Boston) and work with Jomandi Productions (Atlanta, GA), Art Station and Actor’s Express. She was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Blues for an Alabama Sky and received a Backstage Bistro Award (New York) for Outstanding Vocalist and Cabaret Debut for her cabaret What a Day for a Daydream. CLARK JACKSON (Eugene) won a Drama Desk Award for his performance as Oscar Charleston in Cobb, produced by Kevin Spacey at the Lortel Theatre in NYC. Other NYC theatre credits include Le Menage at La MaMa E.T.C., Jamaica Avenue at Soho Rep, Cuba and the Night at Theatre for the New City, Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Mint Theatre and the title role in Emperor Jones at Columbia University. Regional theatre credits include Lobby Hero at the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC, the title role in Waiting for Tadashi at George St. Playhouse in New Brunswick, NJ, The Tempest at the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival and Travesties at Luna Stage in Montclair, NJ. Clark has appeared on T.V. in Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Wonderland and Guiding Light. His film credits include The Arrangement and the lead role in the award-winning educational video Rapmatics. Clark is a graduate of Stanford University and the Yale School of Drama. He was born and raised in Atlanta, GA. The Actors and Stage Managers employed in this production are members of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States. BACK TO TOP