ABOUT PERFORMANCE WORKSHOP

Biographies

Marianne Angelella
Marc Horwitz
Joan McCready
Sam McCready
Marlyn G. Robinson

Marianne Angelella is a professional actress and theatre teacher in the Baltimore/Washington area. She has appeared at local theatres for over 15 years in performances at: Performance Workshop Theatre, AXIS Theatre, Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, Everyman, Fells Point Corner Theatre, Round House Theatre, Spotlighters, Vagabonds and the Washington Fringe Festival, having trained with Marlyn Robinson, Paul Berman, The Studio Acting Theatre Conservatory and Shakespeare and Company. Marianne is the lower school drama teacher at the Lab School and has taught acting classes for Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, Everyman, Fells Point Corner Theatre and Performance Workshop Theatre.

Marc Horwitz is co-founder of Performance Workshop Theatre and an Artistic Producing Director. His many performances with the Company include the recent Shakespearean One-Man Show, Ages of Man, for which he was awarded "Best Actor" 2009 from City Paper in their Best of Baltimore Edition, and title roles in Oedipus (Best Actor -City Paper 2008), Macbeth, Hamlet, Peer Gynt, Henry V, (Best Actor, New York International Festival of the Arts), Faith Healer, The Playboy of the Western World and The Puppetmaster of Lodz (Best Actor, City Paper 1995 and 2002). He was also recently seen performing two One-Man Shows, St. Nicholas, and [Un]told Stories, as Martin Doul in The Well of the Saints, and as Henry in The Real Thing. He was awarded an Acting Fellowship from the British Theatre Association in London where he worked and trained with the Royal Shakespeare Company, The National Theatre, and The Old Vic Company. In New York, he was appointed Artistic Director of The American Theatre Festival and Director of the Theatre Program at Long Island University. Locally, he has been a Visiting Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of Maryland, College Park, a Guest Artist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an Assistant Professor of Drama at Villa Julie College. He received his M.F.A. in acting from Temple University. A voice, diction, dialect specialist, and Linklater trainer, he has presented workshops and master classes throughout the United States. His readings of stories, poems, and letters of Edgar Allan Poe can be heard on the Maryland Public Television website, Knowing Poe.
Email: marc@performanceworkshoptheatre.org

Joan McCready was a founder member of the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast, Ireland, where she played leading roles, including Mary Stuart in a translation of Schiller’s Maria Stuart, Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Pegeen Mike in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. She directed productions there, and before leaving for the US, was joint-Artistic Director of the company. In the US she has maintained a career as a teacher, actress and director. Most recently she has specialized in performing roles in the plays of W.B. Yeats and the later works of Samuel Beckett, among them Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu, which she performed throughout Ireland. Since 2004, she has toured extensively in the United States and Ireland in the one-woman play Coole Lady, which she performed to much acclaim Off-Broadway. Her innovative production of Yeats’s Purgatory played to a capacity house at the Bowery Poetry Club in May 2008. She will return to Hong Kong in November 2008 to adjudicate the Hong Kong Schools Speech and Drama Festival. She is delighted to be performing again at Performance Workshop Theatre, where she co-directed and acted in last season’s popular production of Three Irish Plays.

Sam McCready is an internationally respected actor, theatre director, teacher, and published author. He was a founding member of the Lyric Players Theatre, Belfast, and later a Trustee and joint-Artistic Director of the company. He emigrated to the United States in 1984, when he was appointed Professor of Theatre at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He has directed off-Broadway and appeared as an actor in a number of venues in the US, most recently in Purgatory at the Bowery Poetry Club, New York City. He has received national recognition for his college theatre productions, and was Artistic Director of the summer touring company, Shakespeare on Wheels, 1984-93. An acknowledged master-director of the plays of W.B. Yeats, his most recent off-Broadway production, Two Plays by W.B. Yeats, won universal praise from the New York critics and this summer, he again directed the Drama Workshop at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, Ireland. His play Coole Lady, starring his wife, toured throughout the US and Ireland, while his New York State of Mind premiered in the Grand Opera House, Belfast, September 2007. In November 2008, he will return to Hong Kong to adjudicate the Hong Kong Schools Speech and Drama Festival. He has recently published a memoir, Baptism by Fire: My Life with Mary O’Malley and the Lyric Players (Lagan Press). He is pleased to be returning to Performance Workshop Theatre where he co-directed and acted in last season’s successful Three Irish Plays.

Marlyn G. Robinson is co-founder of Performance Workshop Theatre and has been an Artistic Producing Director since 1976 when the acting company and theatre school was established in Bethlehem, PA. She has directed many outstanding plays for the Company including critically acclaimed productions of classics such as Oedipus, The Well of the Saints, Macbeth, The Playboy of the Western World and Peer Gynt; contemporary plays and new works of world theatre including our recent productions of The Jewish Wife and The Informer, and Faith Healer, listed in the top ten of the City Paper’s 2006 and 2007 The Year on Stage, St. Nicholas, One for the Road, The Real Thing, [Un]told Stories, Old Times, Paper Flowers, and the 1998-2001 Theatre In Dialogue Tours; and Shakespearean adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, and Henry V. Her direction of our production of The Puppetmaster of Lodz won special notice in the Baltimore Sun and City Paper. She has been an acting instructor at the University of Maryland's Theatre Department, Baltimore County, and Villa Julie College's Department of Drama and Communication Arts. She received her M.A. in Dramatic Arts from Case Western Reserve University.
Email: marlyn@performanceworkshoptheatre.org