Fear and Misery in the Third Reich

Brooke Adams was last seen at CSC in the staged reading of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, and the production of Happy Days directed by Andrei Belgrader (also in New York and Los Angeles). Her stage credits include The Heidi Chronicles on Broadway, Key Exchange at the Orpheum, Split at The Second Stage, The Old Neighborhood at A.R.T., If Memory Serves at the Pasadena Playhouse, The Philanderer at Yale Rep, The Cherry Orchard at The Atlantic Theatre Co., and Lend Me a Tenor on Broadway directed by Stanley Tucci. Film credits include “Days of Heaven”; “Gas”, “Food Lodging”; “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”; “The Dead Zone”; “Cuba”; “Tell Me a Riddle”; “Babysitters Club”; “Key Exchange”; and “Made-Up” (co-produced and starred). On television “Thirtysomething”, “Moonlighting”, “Family”, “The Lion of Africa”, “Special People”, the miniseries “Lace” and “Lace II”, “Monk” (4 episodes), and most recently the CBS series “BrainDead”. She co-created, produced, directed, and starred with her sister Lynne Adams in two seasons of the original web-series “All Downhill From Here”.

Joel Colodner returns to CSC after A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2007) on the Boston Common.  He has appeared as the Stage Manager in the Huntington Theatre’s Our Town, in That Hopey Changey Thing at Stoneham Theatre, as Solomon Galkin in Imagining Madoff, Freud in Freud’s Last Session and Emil in Three Viewings at New Repertory Theatre, in Glengarry Glen Ross, It’s a Wonderful Life and Going to See the Kid at Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Signor Naccarelli in The Light in the Piazza at SpeakEasy Stage Company, and as V. Ira Taub in The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife at Lyric Stage Company of Boston. He played King Henry in Henry IV Parts One and Two, the Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi, the King of France in King John, Marcus in Titus Andronicus and Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale.

Johnny Lee Davenport returns to CSC after A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Boston Landmarks Orchestra. Other area credits include Thurgood, The Whipping Man, and A House with No Walls (New Repertory Theatre), The Unbleached American (Stoneham Theatre); It’s A Wonderful Life, A Radio Play (Wheelock Family Theatre); Water by the Spoonful and Broke-ology/Elliot Norton Award, Best Actor (The Lyric Stage Company); Driving Miss Daisy and Master Harold…and the Boys (Gloucester Stage Company); and Invisible Man/Helen Hayes Award, Best Ensemble (Studio Theatre Washington, D.C. and The Huntington Theatre Company). Mr. Davenport has played more than 50 roles in 24 of Shakespeare’s plays including Richard III (Commonwealth Shakespeare Company); Pericles (Actors’ Shakespeare Project); and Richard II (Shakespeare & Company). Film credits include “Ted” “The Fugitive”, “U.S. Marshals”, and “Ascendants”. He was named Best Actor in Boston Magazine (2011). johnnyleedavenport.com

Seamus Doyle (he/him) is delighted to return to Commonwealth Shakespeare Company after appearing in Richard III, and Fear and Misery in the Third Reich. He currently attends Syracuse University as a BFA Acting Major, most recently appearing in their production of Barbecue, as White James T.

Nash Hightower returns to CSC after appearing as Domain in Love’s Labor’s Lost. Other theater credits include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (CSC2), Ether Dome (Huntington Theater Company), Falsettoland (Test Theater Company), and more. Film credits include: “The American Dream”, “Paralarva”, and “The Internet”. He also is a set carpenter and a proud member of the National Registry of EMTs. Nash is a graduate of Emerson College.

Obehi Janice returns to CSC after performing as Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Recent credits include Oleanna and The Gift Horse at New Repertory Theatre; Out of the Mouths of Babes at Gloucester Stage Company; We’re Gonna Die (IRNE Award, Best Solo Performance) at American Repertory Theater with Company One Theatre; An Octoroon at ArtsEmerson with Company One Theatre; Mr g at Underground Railway Theater; FUFU & OREOS at Bridge Repertory Theater. Obehi was named “Boston’s Best Actress” by The Improper Bostonian in 2014. American Theatre magazine named her one of “6 Theatre Workers You Should Know” in February 2017. Obehijanice.

Karen MacDonald previously appeared as Mrs. Plant/Mrs.Vane in Universe Rushing Apart, Maria in Twelfth Night, Volumnia in Coriolanus, The Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well and Gertrude in Hamlet and directed Old Money for CSC. On Broadway, she understudied and performed the role of Amanda Wingfield in John Tiffany’s production of The Glass Menagerie. New England area credits include The Huntington Theatre, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Portland Stage, Hartford Stage,  Trinity Rep, Speakeasy Stage Company, Lyric Stage, Greater Boston Stage Company, Gloucester Stage, GAMM Theatre, Israeli Stage, Sleeping Weasel, ARTS Emerson, Boston Playwrights Theatre, Bridge Rep, Boston Theatre Company, New Repertory Theatre,. The Vineyard Playhouse, Dorset Theatre Festival, Shakespeare and Company, Berkshire Theatre Festival.  She has appeared with the Boston Pops and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, both at Symphony Hall and Tanglewood. She was a Founding Company Member of the American Repertory Theatre, performing in 73 productions.. She has worked nationally from The Wilma Theatre to Berkeley Rep. Karen has been awarded several IRNE and Eliot Norton Awards for her work. She received the Robert Brustein Prize for Sustained Achievement in the Theatre and the Eliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence. She is a graduate of Boston University and teaches at Harvard University.

Deb Martin returns to CSC after appearing as Goneril in King Lear. Recent credits include Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Croom in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia at The Gamm Theatre, Barbara in Barbecue at The Lyric Stage Co. of Boston, Sam in Mud Blue Sky at Bridge Repertory Theater (IRNE Award, Best Supporting Actress), Eleanor in Casa Valentina at SpeakEasy Stage, and Corrine in Gidion’s Knot at Bridge Rep.  Other roles include Victoria Grant in the 2^nd National Tour of Victor/Victoria, Holly in Next Fall at SpeakEasy Stage, Anna in Ivanov, Irma in The Balcony, Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Kristín in Miss Julie. Development workshops with Huntington Theatre Company, ArtsEmerson, New Repertory Theatre and German Stage. Film: “Spartan”with Val Kilmer and William H. Macy, written and directed by David Mamet.  Training: B.F.A., Emerson College, and trained with off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company, founded by William H. Macy and David Mamet.

Sarah Mass is delighted to return to Commonwealth Shakespeare Company after appearing in last year’s productions of Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, Julius Caesar (Stage2), and Romeo and Juliet (Free Shakespeare on the Common).on the Boston Common. Sarah is an alumnus of both the CSC2 company and the CSC Apprentice Program. Other local credits include Mame (Greater Boston Stage), Sense and Sensibility and The Winter’s Tale (Maiden Phoenix Theatre Co), A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V (Arts After-hours), Blinders (Flat Earth Theatre), Footfalls (Exiled Theatre), A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare Now!). Sarah received her B.A. in Theatre from Boston College and also studied at the British American Drama Academy in London.

Lily Ramras is thrilled to be making her CSC debut. NY Credits: Diary of a Wimpy Kid the Musical (AEA Staged Reading), School of Rock (Broadway Promotional Tour), Kris Kringle (Broadway Staged Reading), Jambo’s Journey (pilot, Green Team Productions). Regional Credits: Debbie in Billy Elliot (Wheelock Family Theatre), Jane Banks in Mary Poppins (WFT), Susan Waverly in White Christmas (Ogunquit Playhouse), Little Girl in The Witches of Eastwick (OP), Amaryllis in The Music Man (MSMT), Belinda Cratchit in A Christmas Carol (Hanover Theatre), Samantha in Jimmy and the Star Angel (Family Time Audio Theatre), Shrek the Musical (WFT), A Year with Frog and Toad (WFT), Charlotte’s Web (WFT), & Annie (title role).

Tony Shalhoub last appeared as Willie at CSC in Happy Days with Brooke Adams. He is a film, television, and stage actor; has received Emmy, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild awards for his lead role in the TV series “Monk”; has appeared in a range of TV series and films from “Barton Fink”, “Big Night”, “Men in Black” and “A Civil Action” to “Nurse Jackie,” “BrainDead,” and the upcoming series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” more. His multiple theatre credits include several years as a company member at the A.R.T. where he appeared in As You Like It, The Marriage of Figaro, School for Scandal, Rameau’s Nephew, and David Mamet’s The Old Neighborhood. His numerous New York credits include The Mystery of Love and Sex with Diane Lane at Lincoln Center; Golden Boy, Act One, Lend Me a Tenor, The Heidi Chronicles, Conversations with My Father, and The Price on Broadway, where he is currently appearing in the acclaimed musical The Band’s Visit.

Michael Underhill previously appeared at CSC in Cymbeline, Othello, Two Gentleman of Verona (u/s), Macbeth (CSC2), Richard III, and Romeo & Juliet (CSC2). He is a graduate from Northeastern University and a Boston born and bred actor. Additional roles include the title role in King John (Praxis Stage), Actor #1 in Hotel Nepenthe (Brown Box Theatre) and Joseph Surface in School for Scandal (Actors’ Shakespeare Project). Other regional credits include the Huntington Theatre, SpeakEasy Stage, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Central Square Theatre and imaginary beasts. Find out more at www.michaeljunderhill.com 

Brandon Whitehead CSC credits include Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, Boyet in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the Hatch Shell, and Fool in King Lear. Other recent credits include Amiens in As You Like It and Oscar Wilde et al in The Importance of Being Earnest at the GAMM Theater. Also Matthew Harrison Brady in Inherit the Wind and Mike Francisco in Breaking Legs at Ocean State Theater Company as well as Mr. Mushnik in Little Shop of Horrors with Tantrum Theatre (Ohio). Before moving to Massachusetts, Whitehead spent nearly twenty years working professionally in Seattle performing with ACT (A Christmas Carol, Joe Egg, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Seattle Repertory Theater (Twelfth Night, The Imaginary Invalid), Intiman (Paradise Lost), Seattle Shakespeare Company, Book-It Repertory Theater, Village Theater, and many others. Some of his film and television credits include “Castle Rock” (Hulu), “A Bit of Bad Luck”, “21 and Over”, and “Leverage”.

Steven Maler is the Founding Artistic Director of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC). At CSC he has been directing Free Shakespeare on the Boston Common productions since 1996, including Richard III, Love’s Labour’s Lost, King Lear, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Coriolanus, All’s Well That Ends Well, Othello, The Comedy Of Errors, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, Henry V, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, and Romeo & Juliet. Other CSC works include his critically acclaimed production of Naomi Wallace’s adaptation of William Wharton’s novel Birdy, Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, the world premiere of Jake Broder’s Our American Hamlet, and the world premiere of Robert Brustein’s The Last Will.  In collaboration with Boston Landmarks Orchestra, he directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring the Overture and Incidental Music of Felix Mendelssohn, as well as concert stagings of The Boys from Syracuse and Kiss Me Kate at Boston’s iconic Hatch Shell.  For CSC he has also directed one-night-only readings of iconic plays featuring Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Paul Rudd, Anthony Mackie, Blair Brown, Tony Shalhoub, Brooke Adams, Leslie Uggams, David Morse, and Jeffrey Donovan among others.  He conceived and directed Shakespeare at Fenway, an evening of Shakespeare scenes performed at Boston’s iconic Fenway Park, featuring Mike O’Malley, Neal McDonough, Maryann Plunkett, Jay O. Sanders, Kerry O’Malley, Seth Gilliam, Zuzanna Szadkowski, Max Von Essen, Christian Coulson, Jason Butler Harner, and many others.

In collaboration with Google, he adapted and directed a first of its kind sixty minute virtual reality film of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, entitled Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, starring Jack Cutmore-Scott, Jay O. Sanders, Brooke Adams, and Faran Tahir.  It is currently available for viewing on Boston public media producer GBH’s YouTube channel; for more information, visit www.wgbh.org/hamlet360.

Outside of CSC, he directed Maria, Regina D’Inghilterra for Odyssey Opera, Péter Eötvös’ operatic treatment of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (U.S. Premiere) and Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face for Opera Boston, The Turn of the Screw at New Repertory Theatre, Santaland Diaries and Chay Yew’s Porcelain at SpeakEasy Stage Company, Top Girls and Weldon Rising at Coyote Theatre, and The L.A. Plays by Han Ong at A.R.T. His New York City credits include the New York Musical Theatre Festival production of Without You, written by and starring Anthony Rapp. The production has been seen in Boston, Edinburgh, Toronto, London, and Seoul.

He received the prestigious Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence, as well as for Best Production for Twelfth Night and All’s Well That Ends Well; Outstanding Director, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Best Production, SubUrbia; Best Solo Performance, John Kuntz’s Starf***ers (which also won Best Solo Performance Award at New York International Fringe Festival). His feature film “The Autumn Heart,” starring Tyne Daly and Ally Sheedy was in the Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival.

Bertolt Brecht was one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century. His works include The Threepenny Opera (1928) with composer Kurt Weill,Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The Good Person of Szechwan (1943), and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1958). Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, in 1898, and the two world wars directly affected his life and works. He wrote poetry when he was a student but studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After military service during World War I, he abandoned his medical studies to pursue writing and the theater.

A member of the Independent Social Democratic Party, Brecht wrote theater criticism for a Socialist newspaper from 1919 to 1921. His plays were banned in Germany in the 1930s, and in 1933, he went into exile, first in Denmark and then Finland. He moved to Santa Monica, California, in 1941, hoping to write for Hollywood, but he drew the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although he managed to deflect accusations of being a Communist, he moved to Switzerland after the hearings. He relocated to East Berlin in 1949 and ran the Berliner Ensemble, a theater company. As a director, he advocated the “alienation effect” in acting—an approach intended to keep the audience emotionally uninvolved in the plights of the characters.

Brecht’s poetry is collected in Poems 1913-1956 (1997) and Poetry and Prose: Bertolt Brecht (2003). He wrote a wide variety of poetry, including occasional poems, poems he set to music and performed, songs and poems for his plays, personal poems recording anecdotes and thoughts, and political poems. Poet Michael Hofmann, in “Singing About the Dark Times: The Poetry of Bertolt Brecht” for the Liberal, commented, “In the course of a mobile, active and engaged life, the poems were the intelligent, compressed, adaptable and self-contained form for both his private and his public address.”

Bertolt Brecht died in 1956. He is buried in Berlin.

Victoria Townsend is a Boston-based director, teaching-artist and occasional performer who has been working with CSC since 2011. Directing Credits: For CSC: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2023), As You Like It (2022) and several Boston Theater Marathon pieces; Emerging Playwright’s Festival (Wheelock Family Theater), Cosi Fan Tutte (New England Conservatory’s UGOS Program), The Memorandum (Flat Earth Theater). Assistant Directing Credits: Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, Kiss me Kate, Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare and Leadership (CSC) and L’Egisto (NEC/UGOS). She has also served as a teaching-artist for Watertown Children’s Theater and Live Arts Education. A Massachusetts native, Victoria currently resides in Woburn and is a graduate of Saint Michael’s College in Vermont with degrees in Theatre and English Literature and holds a certificate in Social Impact Management and Leadership from the Institute for Nonprofit Practice & Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University.

Recent acting credits include A Midsummer Night’s Dream (New Repertory Theater’s Classic Repertory Company), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Longwood Players) and Measure for Measure (Hovey Players). Other credits include assistant directing Othello at Actors’ Shakespeare Project, Freud’s Last Session and On the Verge at New Repertory Theatre, and assistant teaching New Rep’s high school Shakespeare program summerSTAGE2. Tyler is also a co-producer of ShotzBoston, part of the Resident Lab at the Charlestown Working Theater, where he has directed, written, or acted in fifteen new short plays since 2014.