Martha Boesing THEATER ARTIST

PLAYWRIGHT     DIRECTOR     TEACHER

Teaching/Consulting "Ms. Boesing is one of the few women writing for the theater today, whose work is informed by consciousness rather than rhetoric, and whose goal is to move audience members rather than chastise them, and whose unederstanding of theater is as thorough as her understanding of human liberation." —Phyllis Wagner, Chairperson, Directing Program, University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale As a playwright and theater director for most of my life, I have been teaching playwriting and acting classes, leading workshops and retreats, and serving as a dramaturgist and consultant to playwrights, librettists, and ritual-makers over the years. Please contact me for more information about any of these services. TEACHING: I have taught playwrighting at the PLAYWRIGHT’S CENTER in Minneapolis (www.pwcenter.org) and acting workshops over the years At the Foot of the Mountain and on tour around the country. Most recently, I have been teaching an ongoing playwriting class at the Faithful Fools Street Ministry in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. Talk to me about organizing a retreat or a workshop in your part of the country. I am willing to travel and am flexible in my arrangements. CONSULTING: I also offer private coaching for your playwriting project. Whether it be a musical or an opera, a drama or a comedy, we can work together to shape it, find the journeys and develop the voices of your characters, and create the right format for your play. Perhaps you have a play you’ve been working on for a while and feel stuck. Or maybe you would like to have your play produced and need advice on rewriting and production opportunities. Or maybe you just have a longing to write a play and feel unsure about where to begin.  I can help you find a way to begin, and guide you to create the play you want to write. Consultations can take the form of a single visit (in person or by phone), or several meetings over weeks or months – whatever you need to help you with your play. As an acting coach I will work with you individually on a scene you are preparing, an audition piece, or a public speech, helping you to find the voice, movement, and gesture which spring most organically from your own instinctive choices. LECTURES AND READINGS: I offer lectures or classes, to colleges, universities, community centers, theaters, in what it was like to be a part of such historical movements as the Civil Rights, Anti-War, Women’s and Environmental Movements of the last century. I have also given talks about the experimental theater of the sixties and the women’s theater of the seventies and eighties, when I was the founder and artistic director At the Foot of the Mountain theater in Minneapolis. I am available to give readings from any of my plays. Most particularly, in the Bay Area and in Minneapolis, I have been recently touring a dramatic reading of SONG OF THE MAGPIE, an hour-long monologue focusing on the plight of the aged who live on the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. CEREMONIES: As a Universal Life Minister, I will help you create the weddings, funerals, baptisms and ritual events to mark passages in your own and your children’s lives that best express your own beliefs and imaginations and needs. BUDDHISM: In my three decades of Buddhist practice, I have received lay ordination at Clouds in Water Zen Center in St. Paul, MN, and taken refuge with Pema Chodron at Gampo Abbey. I consult with indivicual studnets in monthly interviews, and teach as a substiute teacher from time to tme at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, CA. My partner, Sandy Boucher, and I, lead an annual New Year's Retreat for Women at the Great Vow Zen Monastary in Clatskanie, Oregon—a meditative and festive way to welcome in the New Year. To find out more, go to www.greatvow.org.