DEPARTMENT OFFERS READINGS OF ALUM’S WORKS
The University at Albany Department of Theatre is pleased to present Short Plays and Skirmishes in the Studio Theatre at the UAlbany Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus. Performances are scheduled for Friday, February 10, 2012 at 7pm and Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 1pm. The program each day will feature partially staged readings of three short plays by alumnus Joseph Travers.The Proxy, Within These Garden Walls and Sanctuary will be directed by adjunct faculty member David Lane. A talkback will follow each performance.
Playwright and fight director Joseph T. Travers has worked in the theatre for 28 years as an actor, director, musician, songwriter, fight director and playwright. Shortly after his graduation from UAlbany, he began a career as an actor, performing Off-Broadway, regionally and in multiple national tours. In 1984, he began his training in stage combat which ultimately led to a shift to a career as a fight director and stage combat teacher. Having taught thousands of students and staged hundreds of fight scenes for the theatre, he now teaches stage combat to M.F.A Acting students at Columbia Universityand heads the stage combat program at the American Musical andDramatic Academy in New York City. Since 1995, Travers has been the Managing Director of Swordplay, New York’s longest running stage combat school. Throughout his career, he has continued to perform periodically as an actor and as a singer/songwriter, with a catalogue of over 200 original songs. Writing plays has been an interest for many years, and has come to fruition most recently with informal readings of the one act plays, Ave Imperator and Within These Garden Walls, as well as of the full-length work Upon the Ramparts.
According to Travers, “The earliest of these plays came into being several years back, because of a one-act play contest offered by The Lady Cavaliers, a now defunct ‘action theater’ company in New York that was seeking plays that featured women fighting. My (non-winning) submission was Within These Garden Walls. Having enjoyed my time with the character of Bayard, I found myself missing him, and since I had some thoughts about a script based on a rather interesting historical duel, he cleverly discovered a portal through which to visit me again (later in my life, though earlier in his) – and so, The Proxy (a “prequel”) was born.”
