Members

Evan T Cummings

Evan T Cummings (he/him) is a director and playwright based in NYC. Recent directing: Trust by Steven Dietz at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, An Evening of Short Plays for Lincoln Center‘s Restart Stages, and his own play Emergency Planning for Roundabout Theatre’s Reverb Festival. Evan is a member of the Roundabout Directors Group for the 2022-2023 season. He has directed workshops and readings with many companies including New York Theatre Workshop, Lincoln Center, The Private Theatre (company member), Fault Line Theatre, Queens Theatre, The Culture Project, Luna Stage, The Lark, and Geva Theatre Center. He has assistant directed with The Public Theater, LAByrinth Theater, Geva Theatre, Pittsburgh CLO and Dallas Theatre Center.  Evan is a co-founder of the World Wide Lab, an international company that has created community-based director-driven theatre in New York, Athens, Taipei, Rome, and Berlin. He directs frequently with Queens Theatre and their “Theatre for All” initiative which showcases disabled artists’ voices through their New American Voices Series, and he is a teaching artist for the TFA Professional Actor Training Program. Evan was recently brought on as the director and coordinator of a new division within The Stella Adler Studio of Acting: the Division of Artistic Access and Inclusion. He is a graduate of The School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University. 

Carlos Joy

Carlos Joy (they/them) is a proud latinx, trans non-binary, actor, writer, theatre artist based in NYC. They are passionate and committed to telling stories that explore the humanity and complexities of queer identities. Carlos Joy holds a BA from the University of West Georgia, and a certificate from the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. They are a proud alumni of the Labyrinth Theatre Intensive Ensemble, where they found a community and a family.  Carlos has worked and collaborated with many theatres in NYC such as: Labyrinth Theater, The Secret Theatre, Chain Theatre, TÉA Artistry, and The Private Theatre

Talya mar

Talya Mar (she/her) is a writer and actress who grew up bilingual and bicultural in Bloomington, Indiana. She first collaborated with The Private Theatre on Playing With Fire in 2013 and in 2019 performed in Rocco, Chelsea, Adriana, Sean, Claudia, Gianna, and Alex.  She works both on stage and screen; most recently she was seen on screen on At Home With Amy Sedaris.  Her first narrative film, The Stone and The Stars, was screened at festivals around the country and she is currently developing an episodic piece that was part of the Orchard Project Episodic Lab.  She is a member of the Insight Artist Collective with TÉA Creative, and a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and Sarah Lawrence College.

Jessica Greer morris

Jessica Greer Morris (any pronoun) is a creator of theatre, social justice instigator/storyteller, ocean lover, and nonbinary mother of identical twins. She has been known to crawl on pianos and moonlight as a cabaret singer and calls Brooklyn home. In 2019, Jessica stepped down as the Founding Executive Director of the theatre collective Girl Be Heard after ten years of service.  Her artistic endeavors reflect a commitment to human rights. Jessica was an early harbinger of criminal justice reform. In 1990, she worked to get defendants social services, such as drug treatment, instead of jail. Jessica received a Master of Public Health at Columbia University to deepen her work advocating for economic, gender and racial equality.  At the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, she helped launch the Man Up Campaign with 100 young activists from 25 countries working to stop violence against women in their communities. Jessica is best known for devising award-winning shows about sex trafficking, forced child marriage, and other human rights abuses at Girl Be Heard. As lead producer, her work has toured 10 counties, off-Broadway houses, The White House, and United Nations.  Jessica was listed in Newsweek as one of 150 Fearless Women who “shake up the world,” alongside Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga, and Nobel Laureates. She is also an Aspen Institute Scholar, Ashoka Changemaker, Hearts on Fire Visionary, and the recipient of SELF Magazine’s Women Doing Good Award.  For more information, go to her TED talk, I’m Sexy and I Know It or Women You Should Know.  

chuk obasi

Chuk Obasi (he/him) is an actor, writer, director and choreographer.  In addition to his membership with The Private Theatre, Obasi currently serves as Co-Director of TÈA Artistry and a Company Member with the People’s Theatre Project.  He is also an educator, currently a faculty member with the Michael Chekhov Association and Black Arts Institute, and having served as a Movement Project Director at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, a Musical Theatre Adjunct Professor at Drew University, and a frequent guest teacher for LAByrinth Theatre among other engagements. He has recently worked with Intersections International (Artist in Residence), the National Dance Institute (Teaching Artist), and STAR Theatre at the Director’s Company (Choreographer).  Chuk has performed, written, or directed across disciplines, including theatre, film, television, dance, and live poetry performance. Obasi is also a social justice activist. He has taught workshops on using art for social justice at colleges, high schools, and professional organizations - most recently including The University of Montana, Emerson College, Fordham University, Fieldston Ethical Culture, Humanities Preparatory Academy, and Girl Be Heard. Obasi is also a social justice activist. He has taught workshops on using art for social justice at colleges, high schools, and professional organizations - most recently including The University of Montana, Emerson College, Fordham University, Fieldston Ethical Culture, Humanities Preparatory Academy, and Girl Be Heard. Upcoming projects include Working, the Musical at Drew University (Director), The Grace of God and the Man Machine at Theatre Row (Director), and a 2022-23 residency with the New Ohio/IRT Theatres to develop new TÈA production The Weaver, parts II and III.  He is also a 2022 Resident Artist with Mind the Art Entertainment, as an opera librettist. Obasi is a proud New York City Native and son of Nigerian immigrants.

Meagan Olkers

Vieve radha Price

Vieve Radha Price (she/her) is currently the founder and Director of TÉA Creative, Inc. For three years Price served as the Director of Insight Initiatives at Intersections International and the founder and Artistic Director of TÉA. In 2008, she founded TÉA with the mission of engaging interactive theatre and the performing arts in the service of peace building and conflict transformation. After working for five years with NiteStar, an HIV prevention program using theatre and the performing arts, Price joined the Peace Corps. She served in Vanuatu as a youth development volunteer using theatre and the arts to educate young people about HIV/AIDS prevention. Upon returning to the US, Price was selected for the Sargent Shriver Peace Worker Program, a graduate fellowship program focusing on the integration of theory, practice and ethics for the purpose of social change. As a part of the program, Price earned her MS in Public Policy from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and continued her studies at George Mason University, where she earned a second MS degree in the field of Conflict Analysis and Resolution. During this time, Price worked with Search for Common Ground in Washington DC as the Program Assistant for the US/Iran and the US/Syria programs. Over the last ten years Price has been working on the challenge of creating Insight theatre, an artistic language and aesthetic framework that is critically grounded by the Insight approach to conflict transformation. To date, Price and the TE’A Company have researched and devised four distinct theatrical performance pieces with issues ranging from being Muslim and non-Muslim post 9-11, veterans coming home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, retaliatory violence and police legitimacy, and most recently, the political and cultural polarization of America. Presently, Price and a company of Insight artists are working on a new piece focusing on the dynamics of race in America.

Adriana Rossetto

Adriana Rossetto (she/her) is an international actress with a predilection for raw, socially involved work with  avant-garde esthetics. Her favorite credit is “nowhere/now-here”,  a devised play about the role of the immigrant artist which she co-created and co-produced (TheaterLab, NowHere Collective). She graduated from the conservatory program at the Stella Adler Studio, class of 2014. Before coming to New York, she attended Bocconi  University, in Milan, where she was a permanent member of the Bocconi Theatre company, and where she co-founded the Bocconi International Theatre Group and produced its first season debuting with Neil Simon’s Rumors. Recent credits include A Doll’s House (Dorset Theatre Festival reading series), There's Something About America (a stage reading at The Actors Studio), Uniform Justice at The Fringe Festival.  Adriana is a  resident actress and Director of Development at John Gould Rubin’s The Private Theatre, resident actress and board member at Vieve Price's TÉA Creative and an organizational collaborator of Valeria Orani’s Umanism. Past training include the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (London) and NIDA (Sydney).

John Gould Rubin: Artistic Director

John Gould Rubin (he/him) is a founding member of The Private Theatre for which he currently serves as Artistic Director and with which he will direct two shows next season: Royston Coppenger’s new translation of A Doll House and Rocco, Chelsea, Adriana, Sean, Claudia, Gianna and Alex, a devised project he’s been developing for seven years on the political polarization of America as seen through the Consciousness of Conflict-Insight theories of Bernard Lonergan. Also, for The Private Theatre he directed a radically explicit deconstruction of Strindberg’s one-act Playing with Fire, staged at The Box (the notoriously sexual night club) and the 2010 site-specific production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler staged in a 19th c townhouse for 25 people per night. He recently remounted Turn Me Loose, at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and earlier at the Wallis Annenberg Theater Center in LA, a dramatization of the comedy, activism and life of Dick Gregory with Joe Morton starring as the legendary black comedian/Activist, which he premiered off-B’way (and for which Mr. Rubin was a finalist for the Joe Calloway Award from the SDC for Best Direction of 2016.) Turn Me Loose, which Mr. Rubin conceived, developed, produced and directed will return to New York for it’s Broadway debut in 2019. Other recent projects include American Buffalo with Treat Williams and Stephen Adly Guirgis and Outside Mullingar with Michael Hayden and Mary Bacon both for the Dorset Theatre Festival, the premiere of Michael Ricigliano’s Queen For A Day with David Proval and Vinnie Pastore off-Broadway and an environmental production of The Cherry Orchard for The Actors Studio with Ellen Burstyn in which he surrounded the audience with the action of the play. Mr. Rubin directed I, Peer, a re-imagining of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which he presented at the International Ibsen Festival at The National Theatre of Norway and developed at The Old Vic in London; John served as Co-Artistic (with John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Executive Director of LAByrinth Theater Company, for which he directed the premieres of Philip Roth in Khartoum and Penalties & Interest (both as part of Public/LAB at The Public Theater); STopless; The Trail of Her Inner Thigh by Erin Cressida Wilson; John Patrick Shanley's A Winter Party; and co-created and directed two devised pieces: Dreaming in Tongues; and Mémoire. Other projects co-created or directed include The Erotica Project at The Public Theatre; Trial By Water by Qui Nguyen for Ma-Yi; Blood in the Sink at Urban Stages; both A Matter Of Choice and NAMI for Partial Comfort; Pericles, Censored on Final Approach, Six Passionate Women by Mario Fratti, The Shape of Things by Neil LaBute, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, Maria Irene Fornés’ Fefu and her Friends, David Gow’s Relative Good, Kindertransport, Arabian Nights, Rinne Groff’s The Ruby Sunrise, Dark of the Moon, Rebecca Gilman’s The Land of Little Horses; Frank McGuiness’ Factory Girls; Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Three Birds Alighting on a Field, Ivanov, The Crucible, Richard Nelson’s Franny’s Way, David Mamet’s Boston Marriage, Picnic, Israel Horvitz’ North Shore Fish, Reza de Wet’s Three Sisters, Two and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead for the Stella Adler Conservatory; a radical Hamlet with 7 Hamlets for Columbia’s MFA Program, and he has directed for both EST’s and Naked Angel’s Marathons. He recently directed an environmental production of Mother Courage for The Harold Clurman Lab which also produced his two-theater production of “The Seagull,” and he directed a multi-media, stage adaptation of Double Indemnity with Michael Hayden for The Old Globe in San Diego; Riding the Midnight Express, Billy Hayes’ personal tale of imprisonment and escape in Turkey (memorialized in the film Midnight Express) at the Edinburgh Festival, off-Broadway and at the Soho Theater in London; the Off-Broadway production of The Fartiste, a musical he also premiered for The Private Theatre in 2006 at the New York International Fringe Festival (winner of Outstanding Musical award); Jack's Back, a new musical about Jack the Ripper; Open Marriage (a site-specific, one-woman show about Elsie Clews Parsons at Ventfort Hall, in Lenox, Mass., in co-production with Shakespeare & Co.); Little Doc at Rattlestick, The Importance of Being Ernest for Twin Tiers Theatre; and In the Daylight at the McGinn-Cazale. He wrote (and played Ivan Boesky in) The Predators' Ball (collaborating with Karole Armitage and David Salle) for the Teatro Comunale in Florence, Italy, and at BAM's Next Wave Festival.  Mr. Rubin also directed the film, Almost Home, for Trigger Street Independent, which was presented at The Berkshire Film Festival.

Sarah Wharton

Cheryl Dennis

Cheryl Dennis (she/her) has worked as a general, company and theatre manager for the past 15 years on over 30 distinguished and award winning productions. As General Manager - A Queen for a Day, Consent, Reading Under The Influence, Treasure Island, In The Daylight, Stain. As Company Manager - Broadway: Barefoot In The Park, Steel Magnolias, Frozen, Golda's Balcony, 'night Mother, Metamorphoses, True West, Russell Simmons Def Poetry. Jam; Off-Broadway: tick, tick, boom!, Altar Boyz, Jesus Hopped the A Train, Our Lady of 121st Street, Passion Play and The Last Five Years. She currently manages Circle In The Square Theatre. Broadway theatre management include include Fun Home, The River, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, Bronx Bombers, Soul Doctor, Godspell, Lombardi, The Miracle Worker, and The Norman Conquests. She is a managing member of The Private Theatre Company and has previously served on the board of the Fordham University Alumni Theatre Department.