Arts and diversity were essential in my life growing up. I was raised in a low-income neighborhood in Southern California, exposed to a melting pot of cultures where our greatest toy was the collective use of our imaginations: Painting, dancing, cooking and performing with children from completely disparate backgrounds laid a foundation for the type of inclusive, global artist I now aspire to be. In that environment I learned to invite hope, celebrate otherness, and explore the boundaries of possibilities- all of which I infuse into my artistic practice today.                

    I believe no role in theatre is more essential than the other: In my rehearsal room, the best idea will always win, and through a collective unification of ideas, talents and disciplines, we detonate the turbid hegemony of white-focused, ableist patriarchy and uplift the stories and voices of outcasts, outsiders, and the forgotten.

     In a world growing more intransigent, rapidly declining in connection, obsessed with media consumption and racked with dopamine addiction- is not the theatre a sibylline evocation of what it means to be human? After decades (centuries?) of the hackneyed “How is theatre still alive?”- perhaps now, in a technocratic world where individualism has swallowed collectivism, theatre has become more vital than ever to remind us how to plug back into our humanity, how to recodify our relationship to the world and those around us, and to remind us that magic is real and play is essential.

Adam Lance Parker

Human Being

    I direct plays that jump between the subtle and the colossal, rejecting traditional naturalism and the dross of the ordinary. My approach for a text has a bend towards Kintsugi (The Japanese art of repair or “Golden Joinery”): On my own and with collaborators, we explode the work to find it’s nucleus- the artistic heart that pumps blood into the words on the page. Together we meticulously re-assemble the pieces, where the mundane can become exceptional and flaws expressed as essential. We explore unconventional forms and detonate the liminal space between the performer & the spectator, so that a piece is never explained to the viewer but rather experienced with, and alongside them: We won’t spell things out for an audience nor answer easy questions- for the great mysteries of life are subjective- but probe deeper into the inquiry’s roots, finding new & louder ways to ask them. An answer is finite, but a mystery? That lingers with us and slowly excavates our being- like a first kiss.