When New Leaf learned that we would be out of our home for the 2010-2011 season, I knew I wanted us to challenge ourselves to explore different kinds of venues and expand our comfort zones as individual artists and as a collaborative team. With Redeemers, not only did I get to play with the most site-specific of our company's stagings to date, the challenges for my actors were also different.

This text is almost exclusively direct-address storytelling. The conceit of the piece was that these characters - these people - are unfolding their story to you right now, in real time. To find the authenticity in the performance of that voice, we had to strip away the training and craft that keeps actors "in the moment" no matter what the audience brings. The actors needed to by hyper-aware of the audience so that the responses to whatever they found in that room night after night were authentic and honest and of that instant.