Lucky to have this pair making theater live in the UK premiere of RETROSPECTIVE
Here’s what our Jasmine Dorothy Haefner(Z) & Benjamin Parsons(Clint Belinsky) said
How lucky are we to have in the cast for our upcoming UK production of RETROSPECTIVE, friends and colleagues, old and new, who want to make theatre live. Jasmine Dorothy Haefner who plays Z, an acerbic critic, in this magical mystery tour of a comedy first worked with KWT in 2020. Here’s why Jasmine makes theatre:
Why make theatre? Because it’s fun!
We only met Benjamin Parsons at casting for this production, and yet already feel we have gained a stalwart companion and kindred spirit as he becomes Clint Belinsky, the rogue painter and laid-back lover in RETROSPECTIVE’s ‘menage a quatre‘. Here’s his thoughtful take on why making theatre matters to him:
Benji like many of us in theatre is there for the storytelling
In our previous post featuring the other half of this quirky quartet, Noah Huntley and Sarah Pearcy, we shared how the pandemic’s shuttering of theaters stirred our commitment at Knowledge Workings Theater company to #maketheatrelive. We needed that rush of creation and power of performance even if the work went into pixels before it got to people. Felicitously, many theatre artists joined that cause first in our Zoom productions Grudges in that crazy Spring of 2020 followed that autumn by Within The Context Of No Context by George W S Trow, and the Swedish screwball comedy, Keeping Right.
Happily and gratefully, thanks to a co-production with the pioneering and innovative Broom Street Theater in Madison WI in November 2021, we got back to making theater on an actual stage with our third play, Genealogy before a live, laughing, sighing, and physically present right before us audience . This ‘making’ then continued through our Off-Broadway productions of The Oracle (2022) at THEATRE FOR THE NEW CITY, The Jester’s Wife (2023) at The Chain Theatre, HONOR (2024) at Gene Frankel Theatre, and now Retrospective, which debuted at the Broadway Bound Theatre festival at the AMT Theatre on West 45th St. in Manhattan August 2025.
Now UK theater lovers can enjoy Jasmine and Benji along with Sarah and Noah in the shadowy bantering world of RETROSPECTIVE at Barons Court Theatre May 14-23 by clicking on the button below
Want to know more about the comedy that New York critics called “ more complicated and more multidirectional than one first assumes“? Click here for deets and treats
Here’s what our Noah Huntley(RORY McGRORY) & Sarah Louise Pearcy (PIPPA) said:
March 12th, 2020.
Do you remember where you were on that date? On March the 12th, 2020, my co-playwright, Joe Queenan, and I were set to audition actors for the staging of our second co-written play, Grudges. That’s the day the pandemic hit the fan in the USA with the NBA canceling its season, ERs overflowing, and travel of pretty much any kind cancelled, cancelled, cancelled. Theater also just stopped. Around the country, whether in Broadway palaces or school gyms, regional playhouses or East Village cabarets, theater just stopped. Every plan for a stage performance died.
Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Tom Stoppard
But along with a few others, our then still relatively new company, Knowledge Workings Theater, refused to give up the creation and unfolding of those moments that encompass actor and audience, that give life to the text of a playwright, the scheme of a director, the arts of scenic, lighting, and sound designers. What distinguishes theater is that process and product are about making something live in a way that can simultaneously resemble our lives and show us another world. That four-letter word — live — can be an action verb or a descriptive adjective; both signifying In theater the vivifying reality of stage performance. So hatched our tagline #maketheaterlive. And that’s why we asked our four fabulous actors in the UK premiere of our latest play Retrospective at Barons Court Theatre May 14th – May 23rd to share why they are passionate about making theater live. Noah Huntley and Sarah Louise Pearcy offered the first installment of those answers above.
Our making theater live in those dark days started in a compromise: the actors and performance were live, but the audience was spread somewhat to our surprise not only across North America but in Europe and Asia as well via Zoom. That’s the way in which we produced Grudges (which was our first time working with Jasmine Dorothy Haefner who plays Z in our upcoming UK production of RETROSPECTIVE—her third performance with KWT) followed by Within The Context Of No Context by George W S Trow, and the Swedish screwball comedy, Keeping Right. And through the generosity of these audiences to a GoFundMe, our actors got paid, which we think made them perhaps the best paid stage performers at that moment. Of course, that status derived from being were just about the ONLY stage performers due to the COVID restrictions, but a credit is a credit, right?
Here’s a thirty second promo for those Zoom showings featuring my friends and fine actors John Blaylock and Lynne Otis.
And then in 2021, we got to actually make theater live again through the gracious coproduction of our third play, Genealogy, at Broom Street Theater in Madison WI. Because that’s what’s important about theater: it’s live. You have to remember the lines right then. The lights have to go up at the right time and the sound effects have to go off at the right time. And the audience is right there. Happily for us at KWT, this ‘making’ continued through our productions of The Oracle (2022), The Jester’s Wife (2023), HONOR (2024), and now Retrospective, which debuted at the Broadway bound theater festival at the AMT Theatre on West 45th St. in Manhattan August 2025
Other arts amaze, but theater is the one where you are least likely to know what’s going to happen. Oh, yes, there is a script, a text that the playwrights created and the director has formed a production on that foundation. But every night the connection between the actors and the audience can differ. They have to make theater live every time. No phoning it in, no running it back. Every night is new.
The Irish critic Fintan O’Toole put it very well during COVID:
“Live performers …make their own decisions, here and now, in this moment. In a filmed performance, the performer loses that power. It belongs to others – the director, the editor. But this also applies to us as members of the audience. At a live event, we choose where we look and how we listen. In a virtual event, other people are – sometimes heavy-handedly, sometimes subtly – making those choices for us. This is what we miss about live performance: the autonomy and integrity of the performer, our freedom to shape our own responses, the sense of our shared presence in space and time.”
Shared presence and shared passion: that’s what Sarah and Noah note in their statements above about the importance of making theater live in their own lives. We hope to share that experience with as many theater goers as possible during Retrospective’s run May 14-23 in London. Please join us. Tix at this link.
Some somebodies are about to #maketheaterlive at Barons Court Theatre
Here’s something that I learned over the years that used to be called ‘the elevator pitch’, the spiel for a product or in this case new 90 minute comedy, RETROSPECTIVE, delivered in under 1 minute. Did this one work? I’ll find out by how many tickets we sell. Oh BTW, the link for tix is below; message me for the discount code, or if you need a complimentary ticket. These 3 performances — August 13th (8PM), August 15th (5PM) and August 16th (2PM) are prelude to what we hope will be a longer run and we’re looking for backers or co-producing theaters. Feel free to apply https://broadwayboundtheatrefestival.ludus.com/index.php?show_id=200484720
Jeremiah Alexander smiling because he knows how much audiences will love his portrayal of Clint Photo Bill Wadman
For playwright, T.J. Elliott, and actor, Jeremiah Alexander, this collaboration stems from September of 1978. Alan Brody as the male leads in a regional production of George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. First, they were fellow actors, then for a time roommates, and later, and always, friends as both moved to NYC to pursue careers in theater. They both studied with acting teacher legend Terry Schreiber and appeared on stages that happened to be in cellars, barrooms, lofts, and even occasionally a real theatre.
A pledge was made by T.J. once he turned to playwrighting in the early 1980s that one day he would work with Jeremiah and benefit from his chum’s comedic talent, irrepressible energy, and unique intuition. Necessarily working straight jobs and happily raising a family with wife and now Executive Producer, Marjorie Phillips, however, kept that rendezvous from happening until now, but the result is worth the wait. Jere enchants and entertains with the antics of Clint Belinsky, described in the script of RETROSPECTIVE as “late 60s, looks even younger, artist & enjoyer of life.” The last part is an understatement; Clint is a painter who admits, “Art was cool but some days I just heaved the paint up there and hoped for the best.” This so-called ‘seminal figure in the Soho crowd‘ concedes his “talent lay in a different direction” than his fellow painter and our protagonist, Rory McGrory (Mark Thomas McKenna), and apparently that direction took him into the arms of both Rory’s wife, Pippa LeFebvre (Adara Totino) and her best friend/his worst enemy, the ferocious critic, Z (Jasmine Dorothy Haefner). Rehearsals run long because we can’t stop laughing at Jere’s sparkling, loopy creation of this one of a kind character.
Jeremiah’s return to the stage comes after a long career in film, television, & commercials. Television credits include Mozart in the Jungle, Howl, All My Children, One Life to Live, & The Guiding Light. On film, Jere can be seen in Unfaithful, Inside Man, Goosed, &Half Baked. But where you really must see him to enjoy up close the laughter and charm he brings to his work is in RETROSPECTIVE. Get your tix today at this link or on TDF
What forces form a fine actor? Experience. Intelligence. Discipline. Feeling. All of these but also the skill and courage to make their own path through not just each work but through ‘the business’, and a capacity for reflecting on each moment in the career (which sometimes careens) and constantly learning. John Gielgud in his 1963 book Stage Directions captures the way this needs to play out:
“I think an actor has to find his own especial way of working, selecting his effects from what he has found out for himself in all kinds of different experiments at rehearsals and—experiments of movement, experiments of give and take with the other players—in order to gain the necessary flexibility to contribute to and fit in with the director’s intentions as far as possible.”
Jasmine Dorothy Haefner possesses all of these qualities, a judgment I can make with authority having cast her in three plays and directed her twice.
She was Candy, the MAGA Cuban-American in Grudges,
and Micky in The Oracle
She was a unique Hollywood force in Joe Queenan’s TOP HATE
And many different people in 2-Faces at Edinburgh Fringe
How did her ‘especial way of working’ emerge? As one observer put it, “After ten years in the entertainment industry, she’s done almost every job except light fire to the hoop the lion jumps through.” And I can add that neither the lion nor the fire would give her pause with the commitment she applies to everything she does. All that she’s learned, all the experimenting and discovery that she undertakes excitedly and assiduously combines with an innate sensitivity and creativity to make her so valuable especially in the creation of a new work particularly a comedy that dares to imagine an afterlife where a menage a trois — with a ‘plus one’ — tries to sort out who is still attached to whom so they can all get to next, whatever next is
In writing RETROSPECTIVE and imagining the character of Z, critic of…everything, having the voice of Jasmine in my head was a joyous inspiration. And now that our director, Gifford Elliott, is getting this play up on its feet her embodiment of this wickedly funny character has blossomed into even more than even I envisioned. That’s why you’ll regret it if you miss her performance as part of the Broadway Bound Theater Festival this August 13th (8PM), 15th (5PM with talkback) and 16th (2PM)
Talking to one of our actors during a rehearsal for RETROSPECTIVE (opening August 13th for just three performances at AMT Theatre 354 W. 45th St. in NYC, get Tix here), the topic of persuasion arose. My characters are ALWAYS persuading someone to ‘see something the way you see it’, to feel or act in a different way. This tendency in my characters may stem from my growing up around a table filled with meat, potatoes, and debate. As the youngest of five boys with a clever younger sister, contention and dissension over ‘what was what’ proved a daily part of the agenda. You protested your preferences about art (such as we experienced it), sports, books, school, politics, TV shows…everything. Entering the outside world, arguments not only failed to daunt me; they enlivened my spirit, a cause for both my marvelous wife’s forbearance and chagrin.
But theater is also a natural place for persuasion. Declan Donellan in his book The Actor and The Target makes the point that, “For the actor, all ‘doing’ has to be done to something. The actor can do nothing without the target.” Therefore, the playwright also has to understand what target he has given to the actor and how these various targets interact. Donellan makes the important point that, “the actor cannot act a verb without an object.… All an actor can play are verbs, but even more significantly, each of these verbs has to depend on a target. This target is a kind of object, either direct or indirect, a specific thing seen or sensed, and, to some degree, needed. What the target actually is will change from moment to moment. There is plenty of choice. But without the target the actor can do absolutely nothing at all, for the target is the source of all the actor’s life.” Didion’s verbs above include make, wrench, and trick, a nifty trio.
Target — ‘something aimed at’ — can show up many ways in a play, As Didion suggests, the target hostilely might be the site of a planned attack, that mind to be wrenched in a different direction, but it might also be lovingly the locus of an attempt at salvation or seduction, an entirely different sort of wrenching. Statements like Joan Didion’s have the shock of recognition for me: my characters frequently are trying to ‘wrench around someone’s mind’, but because of my Bronx/Jersey Irish Catholic influences they do so talking fast, smart-ass, but only sometimes hostile. The other times, they come off canny or cunning, articulate to the point of exasperation, which, of course, can make people laugh when they see themselves or their intimates/enemies in what transpires on stage. The fun flows from other characters also ‘targeting’ but in the opposite direction. Then we get what Peter Brook called “a duo creating a world together“, a world like our own with winds blowing every which way and no knowing whose cause (if any) will win.
Who is persuading whom? Pippa (Adara Totino) and Rory (Mark Thomas McKenna) gently wrenching each other’s mind
“The play does not exist in the theater as a written text until it has been absorbed in the process of production. Drama is ‘translated’ or transformed into the person of the actor — “the body of the art of the theater”, as Stark Young put it.“ Harold Clurman, On Directing
‘The body of the art of the theater‘: Watching Mark Thomas McKenna* in rehearsal for RETROSPECTIVE, this quote came to mind. These words suggest one of the most important truths for any playwright or director: it’s mostly about the actor in theater that matters, theatre that moves us. Actors may not be everything in theatre but they form the essence of what we want to see on stage. Alan Ayckbourn, one of our greatest living playwrights and the clearest explainer of playwrighting, agrees; “Theatre is not about the writing, it’s not about the directing. It is about that, but in the end it’s really about the actors and the audience and most audiences – aside from the cognoscenti who sit there being experts – come to watch a bit of acting.”
Mark brings to this work (with our three other stellar actors featured on this page) more than 35 years of experience acting, devising, teaching, producing, and presenting ensemble created work for the stage. He blends the mimodynamics of two years at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris with improv training from Second City. He incorporates insights gained at HB Studios with the great Herbert Berghof right alongside the clowning technique gained from studying with the great vaudevillean Avner Eisenberg better known as Avner the Eccentric. The latter skill showed up big time in his portrayal of Don Quixote.
But fundamentally Mark brings himself to the play, a grand artist who never stops learning while sharing his talent. Clarity of utterance, agility of movement, depth of feeling, generosity of spirit, and quickness of thought characterize his work. Make sure you see him as RORY in one of our three performances in RETROSPECTIVE
Clockwise from Bottom Left: Jasmine Dorothy Haefner, Jeremiah Alexander, Mark Thomas McKenna, Adara Totino [Cast photos by Bill Wadman]
Adara Totino is PIPPA in RETROSPECTIVE Photo Credits — Bill Wadman
“Fine acting always hits an audience with the force and oneness of the well made bomb — one is only aware of the blast or series of blasts at the time–afterwards you can study the devastation or think about how a bomb is made.“ Alan Rickman
Adara Totino detonates delightfully as PIPPA in the new play RETROSPECTIVE in the leading comedy performance of the summer. (Don’t miss the glorious burst of energy that is her performance; buy your tix nowfor 08/13-08/16 for BBTF at AMT Theatre 354 West 54th St. )
Adara (PIPPA) and Jasmine Dorothy Haefner (Z) take in the action in the afterlife
Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Adara attended the Actor’s Studio MFA Program, studying under luminaries such as Elizabeth Kemp, Susan Aston and Louis Colaianni. You may have been fortunate enough to see Adara in Edward Allan Baker’s DOLORES (ASDS Repertory) or Cyn Cooper’s I WAS A STRANGER TOO produced by Remember the Women Institute. To see Adara on stage is to cherish and never forget her ability to create a character so real and engaging that her story draws you willingly, bewitchingly into another world.
Air hugs for everyone: Jeremiah Alexander (CLINT), Adara (PIPPA) and Jasmine (Z) are into it
“The theatre is the place where extraordinary things happen, where you see people behaving, not as they do on the street, but as they might do in your dreams. Or your nightmares.” Simon Callow
Who is Pippa the character that Adara embodies in RETROSPECTIVE?
Dead poet, deep-rooted rapturous rhymer
Tour guide to the afterlife
Feltering (look it up) ex-wife of Rory McGrory, acclaimed painter
Putative, but disputed, muse of Rory, now warily encountering her
Unclogger of earthly attachments and schmutz
Rory thinks (and hopes) he’s dreaming; Pippa says he’s dead. To find out who’s right and see Adara Totino in her captivating turn on the Off-Broadway stage come see RETROSPECTIVE
Clockwise from bottom left” Jasmine Dorothy Haefner, Jeremiah Alexander, Mark Thomas McKenna, Adara Totino, our fab cast for RETROSPECTIVE at Broadway Bound Theatre Festival
Clockwise From Top Left: Adara Totino, Jeremiah Alexander, Jasmine Dorothy Haefner, Mark Thomas McKenna
In mid-July, our cast gathered for their “etudes,” a time for the actors to dig into their characters. Edward Albee, one of the greatest English language playwrights once said that “Every good actor does two things: He does exactly what the author intended and he does it his own way.” Etudes are a way of actors figuring out what that way is. The actors with our director, Gifford Elliott, are shaping now during our last week of rehearsals what the world of this play will be with the text as a foundation. Here’s a look at their adventures:
The words of the play describe how famous painter, Rory McGrory, finding himself in a gallery with empty canvases puzzles over whether he is asleep or… in the afterlife? There, Rory encounters his first wife and two other frenemies from his past. This mischievous menage a trois claims they just want to help him get to next while he just wants to wake up. These fine actors create a world out of these words with work that start this week, which we will be documenting here.
Come enter that world August 13th (8PM), August 13th (5PM), August 13th (2PM). Tickets for our performances at AMT theater 354 West 45th Street in Manhattan as part of the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival are available at this link.
RETROSPECTIVE is our tenth production since slip-sliding back into theatre again in 2018, and with Gifford Elliott directing this marvelous cast we think it’s going to be our best yet. So, get your tickets today by clicking this link
