"Webster is a playwright for our time. Writing about a society on its slide towards civil war, he described the corrosion of institutions by greed and hypocrisy and the lack of any future for young people with an urgency that makes the complex, accelerating plot of The White Devil seem as if snatched from current headlines. Its deeper concerns - corruption, rampant voyeurism, and systemic misogyny - speak directly to our present experience, though in the poetic, visceral, juicy language of 1612 rather than the truncated twitter lingo of 2019. And in spite of his dark subject matter, Webster's gallows humor and satirical gift keeps his audience engaged and laughing. Our production will interpret his White Devil as a poignantly contemporary dystopia, a deep dive into the dizzying maze of political power. Using live video to mirror Webster's world of seductive images, perversion, surveillance and violence, it traces an explosive love affair and the story of an extraordinary woman in a world of deceit, objectification, and fake news."
Find out more about our production of The White Devil. Performances begin March 19, 2019.
LOUISA PROSKE (Director) brings her talent for creating vivid theatrical worlds, her raw passion and attention to detail to productions in opera, classical theatre and contemporary drama. She is the recipient of a 2018 Princess Grace Award and was chosen as the Musical America New Artist of the Month for May 2018. Opera productions include Agrippina (Lincoln Center Debut - Carnegie Hall/ Juilliard Vocal Arts), La Bohème Warhola (Pittsburgh Festival Opera), Così fan tutte (LoftOpera), Don Giovanni, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor, Daphnis & Chloé, Miss Handel (all Heartbeat Opera), Falstaff (Dell’Arte Opera), GianniSchicchi, Riders to the Sea, La Voix Humaine (Yale Opera); the world premiere of Invisible Cities at the Italian Academy New York; Nostalgia Kills You and ReAnimator Requiem (Experiments in Opera); Anthony Braxton’s Trillium J (as Associate Director). She is the proud Co-Artistic Director of Heartbeat Opera (“a radical endeavor” - The New Yorker, “pioneers” - The Wall Street Journal).
Theatre productions include peerless (nominated for a Berkshire Theatre Award for Outstanding Direction), Gaslight, This, Engagements (all Barrington Stage Company), One Day When We Were Young (Assembly, Edinburgh), Pinkalicious the Musical (Hangar Theatre, Ithaca), The Winstons (Juilliard School of Drama); Rum 'n Coca Cola in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (The Tank), Cymbeline and As You Like It at Yale School of Drama, and a European tour of Macbeth.
Louisa has assisted such prominent opera and theatre directors as Willy Decker, Harry Kupfer and Robert Woodruff. Louisa’s translation of Fassbinder's film script In a Year with 13 Moons was presented at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Robert Woodruff and featuring Bill Camp. Louisa is an alumna of the Drama League Director’s Project and the Soho Rep. Writer-Director Lab. She holds an MFA in Theatre Directing from Yale School of Drama, and a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University, UK. She is on faculty at Maggie Flanigan Studio teaching Shakespeare Acting and Script Analysis.
