Valerie Fachman
(Arthur)
Valerie is pleased to perform again in The Balcony, having first done so in Chicago in 1985 as Chantal, with the now-defunct Gallery Theatre. Valerie spent 15 years performing, adapting literature to the stage, and co-producing independent theatre in Chi-town with Famous Door (3X Jeff-nominated Shrapnel in the Heart), Pegasus Players (Young Playwrights’ Festival), Trap Door (Orpheus Descending), CityLit (Children’s Company & Women’s Project), Blind Parrot Productions (Jeff citation winner Oedipus Requiem), Chicago Shakespeare (Winter’s Tale), American Blues, Prop Thtr., Baileywick, and many other companies living & dead. Façhman has been Managing Director of Performers Under Stress Theatre since its ’06 resurrection in SF (member since 1993). Look for news on FB or their website (www.performersunderstress.com) of their upcoming Fall ’15 world premiere. In bocca al lupo!

Amy Munz
(Thief/Georgette)
Creative Director for The New Stage, Inc., Amy is a 24-year-old San Francisco performance and video artist with 16 years of theatrical experience. Her recent professional debut was Patterns, a piece about finding love, written and performed by Munz with a three-channel video-scape.  The SF Bay Guardian praised Patterns as “one of the more intelligent and sophisticated debuts […] in recent memory.” Munz holds a BA from Northwestern University.  For more about her work and training, please visit www.thenewstage.com

Jack Halton
(General)
Jack adds Genet to his list of Absurdists he has performed including Ionesco (The Chairs), Arrabal (Picnic On The Battlefield) and Beckett (Godot).  Site-specific theater includes plays with Antenna Theater, We Players, Gulf of the Farallones and Trinity Shakespeare. In late spring he will appear at The Sutro Baths in Ondine with We Players as “Old Rivers.”

Audrey Dundee Hannah
(Elyane)
Audrey is an actor and writer whose credits include guest-starring on “Bones” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” recurring on comedy news web series “This Day Today,” and starring in an international Swiffer campaign. Audrey holds a degree in Drama from Stanford University, where she won the Eleanor Prosser Prize for Performance and Scholarship. She has also studied and performed at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, Second City, La MaMa Experimental Theater, and the Marsh. Audrey can be found at www.audreydundeehannah.com.

Jeff Schwartz
(Bishop)
Jeff is a longtime Bay Area actor with credits in theater, film, television and corporate video. He has performed with TheatreWorks, Stanford Summer Theatre, the National Theatre in Jerusalem and on Israeli television. Jeff trained with the late Paul Richards of the Actor’s Studio, who was co-director of the Stanford Repertory Theater. Jeff is a graduate of Stanford University where he studied Acting, Directing and Dramaturgy under Carl Weber, Rush Rehm and Anna Deavere Smith.

M.G. Renu Cappelli
(Luke/Sperm, co-founding member)
Renu originally hails from Italy and from Maui, Hawaii. Her work intervenes into normative models of community and identity: exploring temporal place, heart space, and the travails of difference and density. She completed her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley in 2007, and has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1998. She is a scholar, a teacher, a puppeteer, and a dancer, currently completing her Masters in Integral Counseling Psychology–the “cure by love.”

Will Trichon
(Louis/Tears)
Will Trichon is an actor, writer, and director who is proud to be based in his hometown of San Francisco, and thrilled to once again join the Collected Works, this time for Genet’s The Balcony. Raised in the Castro by a jazz pianist and a cabaret chanteuse, Will attended the California State Summer School for the Arts, where then-Governor Gray Davis named him a California Arts Scholar. At 18, he moved to New York City, where he completed the Conservatory program at Michael Howard Studios and earned a BFA in Acting – with honors – at Marymount Manhattan College. Favorite roles include The Emcee in Boxcar Theatre’s The Speakeasy, Shakespeare’s Richard II at the Off-Broadway Theresa Lang Theatre, the titular lead in The Devil and Ben Jones at the Carbon County Cultural Project in Pennsylvania, and the world premiere of Rachel Strayer’s Drowning Ophelia with Repurposed Theatre.

Tonyanna Borkovi
(Margot)
Tonyanna first joined The Collected Works as Princess Ivona in Princess Ivona. She studied literature and performance at Stanford University, where she met Michael, Jamie and Val, who remain to this day some of her most formative educators. Val (Madame Irma) was her freshman dorm RA. As for Genet. she first encountered his tender, restless work whilst writing her undergraduate thesis on compulsive roleplay as both therapeutic and pathological. She went on to study medicine at St. George’s, University of London, and continues to seek intersections between theatres anatomic and dramatic, for both their tonic and toxic tendencies. In that spirit, she and her mother formed 2112 Inc., a foundation and event series which aims to explore experiments at the junction of the arts and sciences (www.2112inc.org). Tonyanna dedicates her performances to her teacher and greatest mentor, Professor Carl Djerassi, provocateur of realms alchemical, theatrical, revolutionary.

Val Sinckler
(Madame Irma)
Val is a native of New York and Stanford alum, currently living in San Francisco. She has worked as a classically-trained artist/educator in the Bay Area for over a dozen years, notably with StanShakes, Stanford Summer Theater, Sony Pictures, the Lorraine Hansberry Theater, as well as the site-specific troupe We Players, Stanford Lively Arts, and The Joseph Papp Public Theater of New York.

Ryan Tacata
(Carmen)
Ryan is a performance maker and PhD Candidate in the department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. He holds a BFA (2007) in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His dissertation, La Mamelle: Bay Area Conceptual Performance and the Production of Alternative Art Space focuses on the relationship between early Bay Area performance art and the alternative art space movement. He is currently a visiting faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute in the department of History and Theory of Contemporary Art.

Lauren Dunagan
(Judge)
Lauren is pleased to be making her San Francisco debut with The Collected Works! She recently relocated from Los Angeles, where she was a co-founder and co-artistic director of Savage Players Theatre Company. With Savage Players, she appeared as Anne in The Psychic Life of Savages and Sarah in The Tinker’s Wedding. Other favorite credits include Love’s Old Sweet Song (Elsa)- Syzygy Theatre Group; Private Lives (Sybil)- Long Beach Playhouse; Mythical Playground: Greece and India- The Ipanema Theater Co. at the Broad Stage; Hamlet (Ophelia), The Clean House (Virginia), Forgotten World, Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Jean), Fuddy Meers (Claire), The Country Wife (Alithea)- UCLA; The Merchant of Venice (Portia)- New Jewish Theater, St. Louis; Henry V (Katherine)- St. Louis Shakespeare Co.; Medea (Aegeus)- Orange Girls Co., St. Louis. Lauren holds an MFA in Acting from UCLA and a BA in Drama from Stanford.

Todd Pivetti
(Rosine/Armand/Blood)
Todd is delighted to be working with Collected Works for the first time. He can be seen next at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in Tartuffe. He appeared in the west coast premier of Cock at The New Conservatory Theater Center, The Speakeasy with Boxcar Theater Company,
Threepenny Opera with San Jose Stage Company, Julius Caesar, with The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Imaginary Invalid with The Pacific Repertory Theater, Twelfth Night and The Mandrake at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, and played Peer Gynt in Peer Gynt at UC Santa Cruz as his master’s thesis. Todd has also done numerous readings and workshops with The Playwright’s Foundation, Crowded Fire Theater, and the Playwright’s Center of San Francisco.

Florentina Mocanu-Schendel
(Beggar/Envoy, co-founding member)
At age 12, Florentina wrote, directed and performed comedy. At 18 she was awarded best actress, entered the People’s School of Art in Bucharest and later the University of Theater Arts in Targu Mures where she earned her Diploma in Acting for theatre and film. In Romania she worked for the National Theatre, Comedy Theatre of Bucharest and Romania Film. Since she moved to the United States she has worked in theatre and film while completing her education with an MA in Drama from San Francisco State University and a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Stanford University. Presently she teaches Classical Dramatic Literature at University of San Francisco.

Nathalie Brilliant
(Beggar’s Girl/Chantal/Slave)
Nathalie is a practicing performance artist in the Bay Area and finishing up her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute. This will be Nathalie’s first experience working with The Collected Works, and collaborating in this form of theater production. Her buzzing 2 1/2 year old son, Aiden, helps inform her art and psychology.

Scott Baker
(Police Chief)
Scott is Artistic Director and co-founder of PUS (Performers Under Stress) who’ve been producing the lesser-known works of Samuel Beckett and others for over 20 years, both in Chicago and San Francisco. He’s been in two Joseph Jefferson Award nominated productions, winning once for Brian Friel’s “The Freedom of the City” at Mary-Archie in Chicago. He is thankful for the opportunity to work with these wonderful people on this tough nut of a play.

Kellen Hoxworth
(Roger)
Kellen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theater & Performance Studies with a minor in African Studies at Stanford University. He has appeared as Tinker in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, Edgar in Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Judas in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. He is also a freelance director whose recent productions include Lola Arias’s A Kingdom, a Country or a Wasteland, in the Snow, María Irene Fornés’s Mud, Charles Mee’s Bedtime Stories, and Caryl Churchill’s This Is a Chair. He recently served as the