I grew up watching opera swallow people whole. Not always gracefully. I remember my parents, newly dragged to the Met when I was thirteen, white-knuckling it through Pelléas et Mélisande, hoping I'd walk onstage soon so they'd have a reason to stay awake. That image never left me. And when I moved from the stage to the director's chair, it became the thing I couldn't stop thinking about: how do you make someone who didn't grow up with this art form lean forward instead of back? How do you make opera feel like something that's happening to them, not at them?That question is at the center of everything I do. Not as a philosophy. As an obsession.

I came to directing through singing (New York City Opera, the Met, companies across the country) and that experience gave me something I couldn't have gotten any other way. I know what it costs to stand on a stage and produce sound. I know the physical logic of a singer's body, the relationship between breath and emotion, the way a musical phrase can either support a dramatic moment or completely undermine it. When I sit in a rehearsal room, I'm not watching from the outside. I'm inside the music, inside the bodies of the people onstage, mining every bar for something we haven't found yet.

The rehearsal room is where I live. It's where I'm most myself. I walk in with strong ideas, sometimes bold, occasionally half-baked, sometimes just a question I've been turning over for weeks, and I'm looking for the person across the table who's going to surprise me. I want artists who aren't afraid to look foolish. Who will throw themselves into the deep end before they know how to swim. That willingness to try something and fail spectacularly and try again is where the real work happens. I create environments where that kind of play isn't just tolerated, it's demanded. People need to feel brave enough to go where I'm asking them to go, and that only happens when the room itself makes bravery feel possible. The room shouldn't feel like a meeting. It should feel like the most exciting, slightly terrifying place anyone has ever been.
I love to provoke. Not for shock's sake, but because a well-placed challenge to an assumption, to a convention, to what everyone in the room has decided is "just how this scene goes," blows open possibilities that no amount of careful preparation can manufacture. I ask questions I don't know the answers to. I stage things and throw them away. I push my collaborators to make bold choices and then bolder ones. The best productions I've made are the ones I couldn't have made alone. That's not modesty. That's the point.

In comedy, I'm not interested in jokes. I'm interested in behavior, the kind of behavior that's so truthful it becomes funny without trying. The goal is never to land a gag. It's to find the moment where a character's logic is so completely and hilariously their own that the audience can't help but recognize something true in it. That's when comedy stops being performance and starts being experience.

For dramatic works, I'm after visceral emotional truth, the kind that bypasses the brain entirely and hits somewhere lower. I'm always looking for the turn, the moment when the world of the opera shifts and the audience feels it in their bodies before they can name what happened. The best dramatic staging doesn't announce itself. It just makes the loss, or the joy, or the devastation land so precisely that people leave the theater slightly changed.

I love a hard staging problem. The bigger the theatrical challenge, the more alive I feel. Whether it's finding a physical language for an ensemble that never stops moving, or reimagining an entire dramatic structure from the inside out, I'm drawn to the work that resists easy solutions. I refuse to accept that something can't be done differently. That refusal is where the interesting choices live.

At Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music, I direct two productions a year and teach acting to singers who are often encountering this work for the first time. That teaching is not separate from the directing. It's the same thing. I'm trying to help someone discover that opera isn't a museum piece to be handled carefully. It's a living, dangerous, thrilling form that demands everything you have. When I see a young singer stop protecting themselves and actually commit, something shifts in the room. That's the moment I'm always chasing.

I've spent the last several years developing Swimming in the Dark, a new chamber opera based on Tomasz Jedrowski's novel about two gay men navigating love and political repression, as director and dramaturg. It will be the first time Indiana University Opera Theater has centered an LGBTQ+ story, and it is deliberately, unapologetically a story that does not end in tragedy. I grew up during the AIDS crisis. I know what it means when every story about people like the ones in this opera ends the same way. Swimming in the Dark is a love story. A complicated, beautiful, politically urgent love story. That's the kind of new work I want to be fighting for.

I've directed at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Des Moines Metro Opera, Atlanta Opera, Arizona Opera, Wexford Festival Opera in Ireland, Opera Philadelphia, Virginia Opera, and many others. I've racked up more than eighty-five productions across two decades. None of that is what gets me out of bed. What gets me out of bed is the problem I haven't solved yet. The singer who's on the edge of something extraordinary and doesn't know it. The moment in a score that no one has ever staged quite right. The audience member who came in skeptical and leaves wrecked in the best possible way. That's what this is. That's all it's ever been.