Gabriel Vega Weissman 1(Director) Previously for Central square Theatre: Guards at the Taj (Boston Globe Top 10 Theatre of 2018). Gabriel has directed and developed work with companies including New York Theatre Workshop, Atlantic Theater Company, Primary Stages, A.R.T., Williamstown Theatre Festival, New Dramatists, Northern Stage, San Diego REP, National Black Theatre, Castillo Theatre, BRIC, and NYMF. He has directed concert events for Emmy Award nominated actor and musician Tituss Burgess at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall and co-directed productions of 2:22-A Ghost Story on the West End in London and in Melbourne, Australia. He has served as associate director on seven Broadway productions. Gabriel is an alum of the Drama League Director’s Project, Lincoln Center Directors Lab, Manhattan Theatre Club Directing Fellowship, Williamstown Theatre Festival Professional Training Program and New York Theatre Workshop 2050 Fellowship. In 2015, he was the finalist for the inaugural Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Directors Fellowship.  His collection of short plays, Loose Canon, and his adaptation, Aristophanes’ The Birds, are licensed and published by Broadway Licensing and have been produced around the world. Knocked 7,000 doors in Pennsylvania and Georgia during 2020 and 2022 elections. Proud father to Caleb.
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1 The Director is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a national theatrical labor union.

Charles Dickens (Author) is much loved for his great contribution to classic English literature. He was the quintessential Victorian author. His epic stories, vivid characters and exhaustive depiction of contemporary life are unforgettable. His own story is one of rags to riches. He was born in Portsmouth on February 7, 1812, to John and Elizabeth Dickens. The good fortune of being sent to school at the age of nine was short-lived because his father, inspiration for the character of Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, was imprisoned for bad debt. The entire family, apart from Charles, were sent to Marshalsea along with their patriarch. Charles was sent to work in Warren’s blacking factory and endured appalling conditions as well as loneliness and despair. After three years he was returned to school, but the experience was never forgotten and became fictionalised in two of his better-known novels David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Like many others, he began his literary career as a journalist. His own father became a reporter and Charles began with the journals The Mirror of Parliament and The True Sun. Then in 1833 he became parliamentary journalist for The Morning Chronicle. With new contacts in the press he was able to publish a series of sketches under the pseudonym ‘Boz’. In April 1836, he married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of George Hogarth who edited Sketches by Boz. Within the same month came the publication of the highly successful Pickwick Papers, and from that point on there was no looking back for Dickens. As well as a huge list of novels he published an autobiography, edited weekly periodicals including Household Words and All Year Round, wrote travel books and administered charitable organizations. He was also a theatre enthusiast, wrote plays and performed before Queen Victoria in 1851. He was inexhaustible and he spent much time abroad – for example lecturing against slavery in the United States and touring Italy with companions Augustus Egg and Wilkie Collins, a contemporary writer who inspired Dickens’ final unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He was estranged from his wife in 1858 after the birth of their ten children, but maintained relations with his mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan. He died of a stroke in 1870. He is buried at Westminster Abbey.

Courtney O’Connor is a theatre director and teacher living in Boston, MA. She is a senior affiliated faculty member with Emerson College, where she teaches acting, directing, and aesthetics.

 Directing credits include Stage Kiss, Buyer & Cellar, Red Hot Patriot, Rich Girl, Stones in His Pockets, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Associate Director, Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Direction, Outstanding Production, IRNE Award for Outstanding Direction, Outstanding Production, Outstanding Ensemble), Red Herring, The Miracle Worker (Lyric Stage Company of Boston); Much Ado About Nothing, Two Gentlemen of Verona, (Commonwealth Shakespeare Intern Company); Macbeth, A Midsummer Nights Dream (Shakespeare Now!); My Heart and My Flesh, The House of Yes, Sin, This is Our Youth (Coyote Theatre); Caucasian Chalk Circle, Dancing at Lughnasa, Big Love, Robin Hood, Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Long Christmas Dinner & Pullman Car Hiawatha, Picnic, The Women, and Holiday (Emerson Stage). Last summer, Courtney directed the world premiere of Blood on the Snow, a site-specific play by Patrick Gabridge at the Old State House in Boston examining the events the day after the Boston Massacre. After a sold out initial run, the play will return this summer for a three month residency. 

 Through her work with the Tremont Street Project/Coyote Theatre Project, Courtney has overseen the creation of more than 200 new 10-minute plays by at-risk youths from Boston. She has previously served as the Program Director of Emerson’s Summer Stage for High School Students, Education Director for Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, and the Artistic Director of Coyote Theatre. 

She received her B.A. from Cabrini College and her M.A. from Emerson College.

 Courtney is also the Managing Director of Abella Publishing Services.

David Auburn is a Tony Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning American playwright, screenwriter, and director best known for his 2000 play Proof, which he also adapted for the screen, and for the screenplay for the film The Lake House. His play The Columnist opened on Broadway in 2012.

David Auburn was born on November 30, 1969, in Chicago, Illinois, to Mark Auburn and Sandy K. Auburn. He grew up in Ohio and moved with his family to Arkansas in 1982, where his mother worked first for the East Arkansas Area Agency on Aging in Jonesboro (Craighead County) and then as the assistant deputy director of the Division of Aging and Adult Services for the Arkansas Department of Human Services in Little Rock (Pulaski County). His father was the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Arkansas State University (ASU) in Jonesboro and then Vice President for Planning and Management Support of the University of Arkansas System.

In high school in Arkansas, he worked for local professional companies in such jobs as stage hand or assistant to the lighting designer. Auburn graduated in 1987 and attended the University of Chicago, where he wrote scripts for the performance group Off-Off Campus and began reviewing theater performances for the Maroon. Auburn received a BA in English literature in 1991. After graduation, Auburn won a fellowship with Amblin Entertainment for one year. He then moved to New York City and spent two years in Juilliard’s playwriting program, beginning in 1992, studying under the noted dramatists Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang. His first full-length play, Skyscraper, ran off-Broadway in 1997. His short play “What Do You Believe about the Future?” appeared in Harper’s magazine and has since been adapted for the screen.

In 2000, Auburn’s best-known play, Proof, was produced. It ran from October 24, 2000, to January 5, 2003. It won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play, as well as the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Auburn has adapted it into a film, which was released in 2005. Following Proof, he wrote the screenplay for the movie The Lake House, released by Warner Bros. in 2006. In 2007, he made his directorial debut with The Girl in the Park, for which he also wrote the screenplay. He returned to Broadway in 2012 with The Columnist, starring John Lithgow and based on the life of Washington DC newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop. His play Lost Lake, starring John Hawkes and Tracie Thomas, opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City in 2014.

Auburn’s work often revolves around death and tragedy but with warmth, humor, and strong characterization. Proof tells the story of a young woman haunted by the ghost of her father, a brilliant mathematician. Skyscraper, Auburn’s first play, focused on a suicide but maintained comic elements as well. In an interview with Zachary Werner for Otium, Auburn said that “in any human situation there is the potential for humor and pathos, both. I like stories that surprise you with sudden shifts of mood or tone, so that as an audience member you never quite settle into complacency.”

Auburn has been awarded the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as a New York Critic’s Circle Award. He married Francis Rosenfeld in 1999 and resides in Manhattan.

Christopher Hampton’s plays include Total Eclipse, The Philanthropist, Savages, Treats, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Tales from Hollywood, The Talking Cure and Embers. His musicals book and lyrics) include Sunset Boulevard and Rebecca, which opens on Broadway in November. He has translated plays by Ibsen, Molière, Ödön von Horváth, Chekhov (his version of Uncle Vanya opens in the West End in November) and Yasmina Reza. Screenplays include Dangerous Liaisons, Mary Reilly, The Quiet American, Atonement, A Dangerous Method, Carrington and Imagining Argentina, the last two of which he also directed. Awards include two Tonys, an Olivier, an Academy Award and the Special Jury Prize at Cannes.