Home PRESS ROOM SEASON ARCHIVES BLACK COMEDY ARTISTIC BIOS
JEFF STEITZER (Director) For the past 35 years, Jeff Steitzer has directed extensively in theaters across the country, including Actors Theatre of Louisville, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Cleveland Playhouse, Goodman Theatre, Arizona Theatre Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre, The Pearl, Alliance Theatre and many others. He has also maintained a busy career as an actor, appearing on Broadway (Inherit the Wind, Mary Poppins), in film (Georgia, Delivered and Jody Foster’s new film The Beaver) and TV (The Fugitive, 30 Rock, Law & Order), and has been heard in hundreds of commercials. He will most likely be remembered as the Voice of God Multiplayer Announcer in all four of the HALO games for Microsoft XBox.
WILLIAM BARCLAY (Set Designer) is active in theatre, film and television. On Broadway, he designed Solitary Confinement with Stacy Keach and Sally Marr & Her Escorts with Joan Rivers. Off-Broadway designs include A Shayna Maidel, Goblin Market, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, and the revivals of Kurt Wiell, Berlin to Broadway and Alan Sherman’s Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, among others. Mr. Barclay has designed more than 150 productions in New York and at regional theatres across the country, including Doubt in PTC’s 07-08 season, and Dial M for Murder in the 08-09 season, and has been nominated for the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Helen Hayes, and Drama-Logue Awards. He has also designed award winning TV commercials, consulted on PBS documentaries and designed Corporate Events internationally. In film, he has served as Production Designer on She’s the One, I Love You, I Love You Not, Men of Respect, Seven Girlfriends, Simply Irresistible and others. He has been Art Director on over a dozen feature films, including Glengarry Glen Ross, Beaches, The Cowboy Way, and The Crow.
CAROL WELLS-DAY (Costume Designer) is one of PTC’s resident costume designers and the costume shop supervisor. Her recent designs for PTC include Dracula, Twelve Angry Men, Is He Dead?, Dial ‘M’ for Murder, The Light in the Piazza, The Heiress, Doubt, Lost in Yonkers, Pride and Prejudice, James Joyce’s The Dead, The Importance of Being Earnest, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Cyrano de Bergerac, Peter Pan, The Three Musketeers, Joyful Noise, Big River, As You Like It, The Count of Monte Cristo, A Streetcar Named Desire, An Ideal Husband, Misalliance, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Hay Fever. She was assistant designer for Inherit the Wind at the Ford Theatre in Washington D.C. She worked for the Utah Shakespearean Festival for 13 years as a costume shop supervisor and designer. This is Carol’s second tenure at PTC. During her earlier stint she designed over 15 productions, including My Fair Lady, Oliver, and Romeo and Juliet. Carol has film and TV credits.
JESSE PORTILLO (Lighting Designer) is happy to work with Pioneer Theatre, where he previously worked as an Assistant Lighting Designer on Peter Pan, Smokey Joe’s Cafe and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Recent designs include She Was My Brother for Plan-B Theatre, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and Too Much Memory for the Salt Lake Acting Company, Oliver for the Grand Theatre and Kiss Me, Kate for Light Opera Oklahoma. Other credits include the Egyptian Theatre, Pygmalion Theatre and Salt Lake Shakespeare. Jesse is an Assistant Professor (Clinical) in the University of Utah Department of Theatre where he teaches courses in Lighting Design.
MATTHEW TIBBS (Sound Designer) is Pioneer Theatre Company’s Resident Sound Designer and recently designed sound for White Christmas and Dracula. He has previously worked as a sound designer or engineer at Portland Center Stage, Artists Repertory Theatre, Salem Repertory Theatre and Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati. Some of his favorite past sound designs include Fat Pig, Proof, and The Full Monty. He received his M.F.A. in Sound Design from University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) and his B.A. from George Fox University. Matthew has also been the sound designer on several award-winning films and video projects. Matthew is visiting faculty at University of Utah teaching Sound Design and lives with his wife Beth and son Lucas in Salt Lake City.
AMANDA FRENCH (Hair and Makeup Designer) has been a Makeup and Hair Designer for over 20 years. She has worked for The Utah Shakespeare Festival, The Utah Opera, Egyptian Theatre Company and the University of Texas at Austin. She is a contributing writer in the tenth edition of Stage Makeup by Corson, Glavan and Norcross, and her work can also be seen in The Costume Technician’s Handbook by Ingham and Covey, and Wig Making and Styling: A Complete Guide for Theatre and Film by Ruskai and Lowery. She attended the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati where she studied with Hair and Makeup Designer Lenna Kaleva. She is a member of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) and a current University of Utah adjunct professor of wigs and makeup.
DALE ANTHONY GIRARD (Stunt Choreographer) is an award-winning Fight Director and Choreographer, and author of the stage combat manual Actors on Guard. He is a second degree Black Belt in Taekwondo/Hopkido and Haidong Gumdo, a founding member of the North Carolina Stuntmen’s Association and one of only fifteen Fight Masters in the United States recognized by the Society of American Fight Directors. Recent credits include the Metropolitan Opera, The Folger Theatre, Signature Theatre, Opera Carolina, Piedmont Opera, San Diego Opera, Two River Theatre and the Chautauqua Opera. Recent films include Eyeborgs, The Trial, Fall Down Dead and the critically acclaimed Junebug. As a master teacher, Mr. Girard has instructed classes and seminars in stage combat, acting, and dramatic movement at colleges and universities throughout North America. Based in North Carolina, he serves as Director of Stage Combat Studies for UNC School of the Arts and as an Assistant Instructor for Tiger Kim’s Taekwondo.
SANDRA SHOTWELL (Dialect Coach) is a professor with the University of Utah Department of Theatre, teaching acting, voice, speech, and text. A professional actress, she received an M.F.A. in Acting from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, an Advanced Diploma in Voice and Speech from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and is a Certified Laban-Bartenieff Movement Analyst. Her PTC dialect coaching includes Twelve Angry Men, Charles Morey’s The Yellow Leaf, The Vertical Hour, James Joyce’s The Dead, The Real Thing, Dancing at Lughnasa, Rough Crossing, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, The Cripple of Inishmaan, Playboy of the Western World, Last Night at Ballyhoo, South Pacific, West Side Story, O Pioneer! and St. Joan. She is also coaching The Persian Quarter for Salt Lake Acting Company this month. Her dramaturgy for PTC includes Twelve Angry Men, Dial ‘M’ for Murder, Les Misérables, Humble Boy, The Dead and White Christmas. Sandra has performed with PTC in The Guardsman, Macbeth, Peer Gynt and Comedy of Errors; in film/television her appearances include Touched by an Angel, Night Sins, The Long Road Home, Detention High, Luck of the Irish and Anya’s Bell; she is the voice of TRAX north-south line. Happily, Sandra volunteers foster care for dogs with the Humane Society of Utah.
WADE HOLLINGSHAUS (Dramaturg) is the head of Dramaturgy Studies in the Department of Theatre and Media Arts at Brigham Young University, where he teaches courses in dramaturgy, literary and cultural theory, theatre historiography, performance studies, and Finnish literature. Primarily, his research uses contemporary Continental philosophy to explore and re-think various performative sites: rock and roll, media technologies, human rights, dramaturgy and education, to name a few. He is currently working on a book project entitled The Currency of Rock Performance, discussing the work of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie. While most of his dramaturgical experience has been with new play development for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and also the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, he has done production dramaturgy for the University of Minnesota’s production of Peer Gynt (2003) and Brigham Young University’s productions of Esperanza Rising (2008) and Tartuffe (2010). Black Comedy marks his first opportunity to collaborate as a dramaturg with Pioneer Theatre Company.
"You need three things in the theater - the play, the actors, and the audience, - and each must give something."
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