November 6, 2026 – December 13, 2026 | Peet's Theatre
In This Program
- A Welcome from the Artistic and Managing Directors
- Living with the Hauntings: York Walker on faith, fear, the blues, and becoming
- The Real Robert Johnson
- Show Program
- Artist Bios
- Print Edition
- More about Berkeley Rep
Welcome to Berkeley Rep
To ensure the best experience for everyone:
While always encouraged, masks are required inside the theatres during Sunday and Tuesday performances for the first three weeks of a show’s run.
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From the Artistic Director
Sometimes I wonder if you can tell which playwrights originally began their theatrical life as actors: Horton Foote. Zoe Kazan. Harold Pinter. Bess Wohl. Moliere. William Shakespeare, of course. And York Walker, who received his MFA in acting here in the Bay Area at ACT. While their specific voices as writers could not be more different, they each have created such incredible opportunities for actors. Roles which demand a kind of virtuosity, and leave space for an actor’s own interpretive craft. As I watched this cast approach Covenant on the first day of rehearsal, I sensed that they had a reverence for the text itself, alongside a palpable appetite to dig in and make these characters their own. And they have the gift of doing so under Taylor Reynolds’s thoughtful direction (many of you will remember Taylor’s production of Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s three years ago).
A covenant is defined as a sacred binding promise, often between God and humanity. It seems these days like promises may not be worth much. But perhaps that simply means it’s even more important that we continue to pledge ourselves to things and people and beliefs, and work even harder to stand by those commitments. My religious upbringing was pretty slight (everything I know about Judaism I learned at Camp Kee Tov…) and so my version of a sacred binding promise is one that is made between people. Or the commitment to a community—that’s a notion I can wholeheartedly embrace.
York’s beautiful play reminds us of the sanctity of covenants made, and the seismic rift that can reveal (between people, countries, the physical world and the spirit world) when they are broken. Of course, these promises that keep us safe within defined relationships and worlds can also limit us. Perhaps, at their best (most holy?), covenants give us the courage and the bedrock to reach farther, to explore the unknown territories of our imaginations, ambitions, communities, or psyches.
I’m grateful to artists like York and Taylor, and this cast and design team, whose gifts allow us to look beyond the versions of ourselves we know, and imagine who we might be, if we too made such pacts… Let’s make them wisely!
Warmly,
Johanna Pfaelzer
Artistic Director
From the Managing Director
Welcome to York Walker’s Covenant. What begins as a familiar tale of crossroads myths and whispered bargains soon becomes something far more surprising: a haunting Southern Gothic story about love, faith, family, freedom, and the choices we make when our deepest desires collide with the expectations of those around us. This gripping West Coast premiere invites us to consider what we choose to believe, how myth becomes truth, and whether we can escape the stories that shape us. I have been looking forward to this production with great anticipation since we announced the season last April. Like the best theatre, Covenant asks complex questions in a thrilling and highly theatrical way.
Your presence today helps make Berkeley Rep a home for the most vital voices in the American theatre. As a member of this community, you enable us to create ambitious, thought-provoking work that sparks dialogue, builds empathy, and inspires people to see the world in new and surprising ways.
I hope you will join us for the productions still to come this season, including the world premiere musical The Interestings, featuring music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles. Subscription packages remain the best way to experience the season, with the best seats and prices, flexible exchanges, and a host of other benefits. Theatre also makes a wonderful holiday gift—an opportunity to spread joy to the people you care most about.
If Berkeley Rep’s work has inspired, challenged, or delighted you, I invite you to consider a tax-deductible donation as the year draws to a close. Your support helps create world class theatre while sustaining youth education, lifelong learning, new play development, and meaningful community engagement.
Thank you for being here. From all of us at Berkeley Rep, may you and yours have a happy, healthy, and joyous holiday season. See you again in the New Year!
Enjoy the show!
Tom Parrish
Managing Director
Living with the Hauntings
York Walker on faith, fear, the blues, and becoming
An Interview with AeJay Antonis Marquis
The imaginative flame for Covenant was ignited by a vision, or perhaps a visitation.
A Black woman in period clothing appeared in York Walker’s imagination. He still cannot entirely explain where she came from. Usually, Walker told me, a play begins for him with “a genre,” “a question,” or simply “a sandbox” in which he wants to explore.
This time, however, it was different.
“It might be the only time,” he recalls, “that an image has come to me and been the beginning of a play.”
She came at an opportune time. Walker was pursuing acting and writing in Los Angeles after earning his MFA at the American Conservatory Theater in 2014, and had reached what he describes as a brick wall. By 2019, he described himself as broke, driving for Lyft, and unsure whether the path he had followed was still his path at all.
Before Covenant, Walker had written in a tradition he deeply admired: the August Wilson-inspired “well-made play.” It was skillful work, an homage to a theatrical language he knew and loved. But… it did not yet ask him to leap beyond that form. However, her appearance seemed to call him away from the familiar into the spectacular, the supernatural, the thrilling.
“She appeared to me in that moment as sort of a… lifeline,” he said. “This play changed my life.” Covenant became the work that made others truly see Walker as a playwright. Perhaps more importantly, the play led Walker to see himself as a writer and discover, he said, “what I was capable of doing.”
There is something almost divine about a play haunted by the mythology of the crossroads beginning at a crossroads in its writer’s life. Covenant, set in Georgia in 1936, takes inspiration from the mythology surrounding bluesman Robert Johnson and the story of impossible talent acquired through a covenant with the Devil. Walker had been looking for a way to write, what he described as “a horror play… through a Black lens” without making racial violence or white terror the primary source of fear.
The Robert Johnson myth offered Walker a way into precisely that territory. “The one thing universally Black people don’t mess with is the Devil, and spirits,” he said, connecting that uneasiness in part to the deep imprint of Christianity on Black cultural life. “We just… we don’t do it.” Reckoning with this uneasiness opened the theatrical space where Covenant could ask what happens when spiritual beliefs, fears, and inherited warnings become indistinguishable from reality. The thrill resides in that uncertainty: “questions about what’s real and what’s not real.” Did someone actually make a deal with the Devil, or has the community decided that is the only explanation it can accept?
As such, Walker did not need to import a monster from outside the Black community. The terror could emerge from things already hovering at the edges of belief: the Devil, spirits, the consequences of calling on what should not be called, of loving what one should not love, and perhaps, most frighteningly, the impossibility of ever knowing whether what you fear, its physical and spiritual manifestations, is actually there.
“The thing I love about horror is that it allows you to really face your greatest fears, and I think that writing this play has allowed me to do that.” When asked to clarify, he continued, “I don’t want to spoil anything, but… you know, my greatest fear was that I was never gonna be able to have love.”
We both shared a moment to pause and breathe in this revelation. I knew this feeling too well.
Raised in a strict Christian household as a gay teenager in hiding, he remembers a worldview structured by hard moral categories: good and evil, righteousness and sin, heaven and hell. Adulthood, for him, complicated those binaries. “We live in a gray zone,” he told me. More beautifully, he put it this way: “Humanity… is the gray.”
For Walker, those binaries build a box around what a person is permitted to feel, question, desire, and become. It is easier, he said, to staunchly decide “this is the box that we live in, and there is nothing outside of that box,” because questioning those boundaries becomes a contagion. In Covenant, the character of Mama, Walker shares, “allowed herself to step out of those lines once, and has not been able to forgive herself, and is trying desperately to make sure that her children stay within that box... it’s life and death for her.” But, her daughters are choosing to live inside that dangerous question of beyond: what becomes possible when somebody steps outside the boundaries they have been told will keep them safe? And what are the consequences when, as he puts it, “beliefs create our reality”?
The blues, for Walker, urges one out of that box, and from the entanglements of binary belief.
Gospel music reaffirms those binaries while reaching towards a utopian future: heaven, salvation, the promise that suffering will end. The blues; alternatively, wrestles stubbornly with the mundane. My baby done left me. I drank too much. I desire somebody I am not supposed to desire. I hurt. I want. I survived. It carries contradictions.
However, Walker complicates any simple division between the two. Gospel and blues, he reminded me, “are coming from the same well.” You cannot separate gospel from the lineage of the Black expression that produces the blues. And the people occupying what he called the “gospel box” are living through the same messy experiences sung about in blues music.
Walker’s Covenant stages these sonic arguments through dialogue.
Avery kneels in church and asks, “Please let heaven be real for me.” Later, when Johnny plays the blues inside that same church, she recoils: “That’s the Devil’s music.” Johnny’s response is wonderfully plain: “It’s just music.”
What makes one sound holy and another sound dangerous? “The spirit world,” Mama offers, “is like water. Blessings and curses, it’s all the same.”
I think again of the woman who first appeared to Walker. Was she just an imagination? Or a divine vision? A Black Madonna? The daemonic? A blessing or a curse?
Does the source even matter if the encounter called him towards a life he was supposed to inhabit? Perhaps the holy and the frightening have always lived closer together than our categories allow.
Southern Gothic traditions have often explored this proximal relationship. York and I spoke about theatrical lineages reaching through Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers and toward contemporary Black writers including Aleshea Harris (Is God Is), Tarell Alvin McCraney (Moonlight), Terry Guest (Magnolia Ballet), Dave Harris (Tambo and Bones), and James Ijames (Fat Ham)—playwrights using Southern landscapes, spirituality, violence, desire, folklore, and the uncanny in nuanced ways. Although Walker resists claiming a coordinated movement, what fascinates him is that these writers can arrive independently and still discover that their plays “can be talking to each other.”
My own grandma might have called that coordination “the spirit moving,” and it seems that spirit is shaping the formation of a Black Southern Gothic.
Walker hilariously admits that he does not particularly enjoy being frightened. He prefers watching horror movies at home, where he can turn down the volume, pause, and reach for a blanket. Writing Covenant, though, offered another possibility: a way to process his own hauntings.
“The real hauntings in my life,” he says later in our conversation, “are the ideas about myself that I’ve let go of, that I was taught as a child… what it means to be a good person… what love is supposed to look like. Those things still hover in the background, because they’ve been ingrained. And you may choose to ignore them, you may choose to make a different choice, but they’re always there.”
Sometimes Walker catches an old judgement moving through his mind and asks himself: “Is that my thought or is that me sitting on the pew at eleven listening to the preacher? Those ghosts are still present.”
Walker’s play, his theatrical return to the Bay Area as a playwright after graduating twelve years ago as an actor, and his own journey towards reaching this moment in his life are crowded with things that remain: childhood teachings that survive long after beliefs shift, fears inherited before we can question their legitimacy, emotive memories that disrupt ordinary days, songs whose sacred and profane histories are intertwined. Haunting is sometimes spectacular, like an unexpected visit from an apparition adorned in period clothing; or mundane, like an uninvited visit from a past self adorned with moral judgment. This is perhaps the most compelling offering of Covenant: that living is not the work of escaping our hauntings. “You don’t just get rid of it,” he forewarns.
Perhaps, the work of living is learning to recognize which hauntings will conjure a curse, and which will bless us with divine dominant seventh chords—foundational in both blues and gospel compositions. Or perhaps, living in those uncertainties, provides the thrill that feeds our wonderment.
Let the hauntings play.
The Real Robert Johnson
by Mariah-Lynn Andrews
In Covenant, the character of Johnny “Honeycomb” James is inspired, in part, by Robert Johnson, a blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist of legendary skill. Johnson died in 1938, aged 27. But decades after his death, a myth about the origin of his extraordinary talent persists: he sold his soul to the Devil at a rural Mississippi crossroads.
Several factors might explain why this tall tale took hold: for a long time details of Johnson’s life were vague or unknown; because the blues, in Johnson’s time, was considered by many to be the Devil’s music, sinful and profane, with damnation certain for the musicians who played it; because some of Johnson’s own lyrics directly reference hell and the Devil; and because this sort of story—someone making a deal with the Devil in exchange for astonishing gifts—has captivated the human imagination for centuries, across a vast variety of cultures.
In the lore of vodun (or voodoo), which originates from the West African nations of Benin, Ghana, and Togo, it was said that Papa Legba—a powerful spirit who was crowned chief of all gods through his musical skill—would bless musicians if they came to a deserted crossroads at midnight, imbuing their instruments with great power.
In Europe, a Renaissance alchemist named Johann Georg Faust became an iconic figure of literature and lore, thanks largely to two plays: Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe (first performed in 1592), and Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (published in 1808). In both plays, Faust, frustrated by his fruitless quest for scientific secrets, is visited by Mephistopheles, a demon servant of Lucifer, who offers infinite knowledge for Faust’s soul. Variations on this “Faustian bargain” endure to this day.
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above, “Have mercy, now,
Save poor Bob, if you please”
— Robert Johnson, “Cross Road Blues”
Only a handful of Robert Johnson’s songs deal with religious themes. Nonetheless, his evocative musical pictures of hellhounds, devils, and crossroads have bolstered the legend of his demonic deal. But Johnson’s supernaturally-tinged lyrics can hold many meanings—some of which are speculated upon by Johnson’s sister, Annye C. Anderson, in her 2020 memoir, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson. For instance, Johnson sings about going to a crossroads in his song, “Cross Road Blues”—but the protagonist of that song is only trying to hitch a ride, growing increasingly panicked as the sun goes down. This is possibly a reference to “sundown towns”—communities in the segregated South that enforced violently racist curfews prohibiting Black people to be outside past sunset.
In writing his songs, Johnson drew inspiration from the culture around him. Perhaps the mystery of Robert Johnson continues to fascinate because the songs he left behind are so enigmatic—simple on the surface, but with a deep underbelly of allusions, symbols, and double meanings. His music does have an effect that might be called supernatural: in his songs, the America he experienced comes to life again.
Reprinted with permission from Roundabout Theatre Company. The full article can be found at this link.
References:
Annye C. Anderson, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, 2020.
John Burnett, “Voodoo and West Africa’s Spiritual Life,” NPR, 2004.
Bruce M. Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, Chicago Review Press, 2019.
Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers, Columbia Records, 1961.
Thomas F. Marvin, “Children of Legba: Musicians at the Crossroads in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” American Literature vol. 68, no. 3, 1996, 587-608.
Ed Simon, “Speak of the Devil,” Lapham’s Quarterly, 2022.
Show Program
Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Johanna Pfaelzer, Artistic Director | Tom Parrish, Managing Director
in a co-production with Geffen Playhouse, Studio Theatre, and American Repertory Theater
presents
Covenant
by
York Walker
Directed by
Taylor Reynolds
Scenic Design
Teresa L. Williams
Costume Design
Hahnji
Lighting Design
Alan Edwards
Sound Design & Additional composition
Bailey Trierweiler
SFX Design
Steve Cuiffo
Hair, Wigs & Makeup Design
Earon Chew Nealey
Casting
Destiny Lilly, CSA
Voice and Dialect Coach
Andrea Caban
Vocal/Guitar Coach
David Möschler
Fight & Intimacy Consultant
Dani O'Dea
Stage Manager
Dana Petersen*
Assistant Stage Manager
Anthony Lopez
Director of Marketing and Audience Services
Voleine Amilcar
Associate Producer — New Work
victor cervantes jr.
General Manager
Sara Danielsen
Director of Production
Audrey Hoo
Director of the School of Theatre
Anthony Jackson
Director of Finance
Sam Linden
Associate Artistic Director/Director of In Dialogue
David Mendizábal
Director of Human Resources and Diversity
Modesta Tamayo
Director of Operations
Amanda Williams O’Steen
Director of Development
Autumn Woish
West Coast Premiere
World Premiere produced in New York City by Roundabout Theatre Company as part of Roundabout Underground at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre on October 26, 2023.
Originally workshopped and developed in the 2021 Pacific Playwrights Festival as part of the lab at South Coast Repertory.
Original music by Justin Ellington.
Covenant is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc. concordtheatricals.com
SEASON PRESENTING SPONSORS
Stephen & Susan Chamberlin
Yogen & Peggy Dalal
Bruce Golden & Michelle Mercer
Marcia Grand
Frances Hellman & Warren Breslau
Jonathan Logan & John Piane
Arjay R. and Frances F. Miller Foundation
The Strauch Kulhanjian Family
Gail & Arne Wagner
Peet's Coffee
The Shubert Foundation
SEASON SPONSORS
Crankstart
Wayne Jordan & Quinn Delaney
Jerome & Thao Dodson
Helen & John Meyer
Sudha Pennathur & Edward Messerly
John & Valerie Rowe
Jack & Betty Schafer
William + Flora Hewlett Foundation
SPONSOR
Christina Crowley
ASSOCIATE SPONSOR
Lynne Carmichael
CAST
(in alphabetical order)
Latoya Edwards* … Avery
Israel Erron Ford* … Johnny "Honeycomb" James
Alicia Pilgrim* … Violet
Jeunée Simon* … Mama
Shian Tomlinson* … Ruthie
UNDERSTUDIES
Anna Marie Sharpe* … Mama, Avery
Titus VanHook* … Johnny "Honeycomb" James
Courtney Williams* … Violet, Ruthie
Understudies never substitute for listed performers unless a specific announcement or notice is made at the time of appearance.
*Member of Actors' Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States.
This theatre operates under agreements with the League of Resident Theatres, Actors’ Equity Association (the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States), the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, and United Scenic Artists.
The videotaping or making of electronic or other audio and/or visual recordings of this production and distributing recordings or streams in any medium, including the internet, is strictly prohibited, a violation of the author(s)’s rights, and actionable under United States copyright law.
Opening Night: November 11, 2026
Peet's Theatre
For This Production
Assistant Director ... Nylarose Moore (Peter F. Sloss Artistic Fellow)
Assistant Lighting Designer ... Ollie Harbin (Electrics Fellow)
Assistant Sound Designer ... Caro Yeung (Harry Weininger Sound Fellow)
Production Assistant ... Jessica Garcia (Stage Management Fellow)
Deck Crew ... Michael Boomer, Isaac Jacobs, James McGregor, Chris Russell
Wardrobe Crew ... Caz Hiro, Mika Rubinfeld (Sub), Linda Wu (Sub)
Wigs and Hair Crew ... Raegina Joyner, Karen Arriola (Sub), Mika Rubinfeld (Sub)
Production Electrician/Board Op ... Desiree Alcocer
Sound Crew ... Conor Fortner (A1), Camille Rassweiler (A2)
Scenic Fabrication by Berkeley Repertory Theatre Scenic & Paint Shops
Additional Scenery Fabricators ... Austin Andrade, Cassidy Carlson, Isaac Jacobs, Carl Martin, Troy McClendon, Jen McFarlane, Drea Ronquillo
Additional Scenic Artists ... Kenzie Bradley, Katie Holmes, Courtney Sutherland, E Wayman Murdock
Props Fabrication by Berkeley Repertory Theatre Properties Shop
Additional Prop Artisans ... Hanbyul Joo, Sofie Miller
Costumes Built by Berkeley Repertory Theatre Costume Shop
Additional Costume Technicians ... Breanna Bayba (Draper), Chris Weiland (First Hand)
Lighting Services provided by Berkeley Repertory Theatre Lighting Department
Additional Lighting Technicians ... Desiree Alcocer, Grace Marie Yum Alexander, Ash Brown, Claire Chesne, Brittany Cobb, Angelina Costa, Kaylee Geffken, Katie Genzer, Jack Grable, A. Chris Hartzell, Jacob Hill, Courtney Jean, Brittany Johnson, Hannah Linaweaver, Margaret Linn, Todd Loyd, Charlie Mejia, Zoya Nanale, Kathleen Parsons, Nori-Hayden Quist, Sarina Renteria, Amelia Reyes-Gomez, Riley Richardson, C. Swan-Streepy, Matthew Sykes, Trinity Wicklund
Sound Services provided by Berkeley Repertory Theatre Sound and Video Department
Additional Sound Technicians ... Courtney Jean, Elliott Orr, Ellie Stalcup
Production Manager ... Kali Grau
Assistant Production Manager ... Olivia Lehnert (Production Management Fellow)
Company Manager ... Ryan Duncan-Ayala
Assistant Company Manager ... Lexa Ornes (Company Management Fellow)
Additional Casting ... Karina Fox
Medical Consultation for Berkeley Rep Provided by:
Mari Bell MPT (UCSF), Ed Blumenstock MD, Charissa Chaban DPT, Cindy J. Chang MD (UCSF), Christina Corey MD, Neil Claveria PT, Patricia I. Commer DPT, Kathy Fang MD PhD, Steven Fugaro MD, Anjali Gupta MD (Kaiser), Olivia Lang MD (Berkeley Pediatrics), Allen Ling PT, Colin Ng PT, Liz Nguyen DPT, Desiree A. Unsworth DPT, Christina S. Wilmer OD, Eric Yabu DDS, Lee Yek DPT, and Katherine C. Yung MD
Artist Bios
Latoya Edwards*
Avery
Latoya is a New York-based actor who always carries the warmth of Jamaica with her. She is thrilled to be making her Berkeley Rep debut with Covenant! Select theatre credits include Merry Wives (Shakespeare Theatre Co.), White Girl in Danger (2ST, Vineyard Theatre), The Rolling Stone (Lincoln Center), School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play (MCC, Center Theatre Group), Miss You Like Hell (Public Theater). Select film & TV credits include Law & Order: SVU, The Get Down, Many Saints of Newark, They Saw the Sun First, and Enjoy Your Visit. Many thanks to Nicolosi + Co and Rob Kolker! @latoyaedwards.nyc
Israel Erron Ford*
Johnny "Honeycomb" James
Israel Erron is an Atlanta-born actor, singer, songwriter, and multidisciplinary artist. Select theatre credits include The Brothers Size (The Shed), Choir Boy (Yale Repertory Theatre), The Inheritance (Geffen Playhouse), Twelfth Night (Classical Theatre of Harlem, Chicago Shakespeare Theater), The Hot Wing King (Baltimore Center Stage, Hartford Stage), and Jesus Christ Superstar (Fulton Theatre). On screen, he has appeared in HBO’s Rap Sh!t and the series Phoenix, streaming on Prime Video and Roku. He is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and Yale School of Drama and is grateful to make his Berkeley Repertory Theatre debut with Covenant. @israelerron
Alicia Pilgrim*
Violet
Alicia is grateful to make her West Coast theatrical debut! Alicia is constantly evolving & wondering what ways she can cultivate authenticity, love, community, and truth in whatever art form that speaks to her. Her Off-Broadway credits include Cullud Wattah (The Public), I’m Revolting (Atlantic Theater), and The Wash (New Federal Theatre, WP). Her regional credits include Eden (Yale Rep), and her theatrical workshop credits include Love I Awethu Further (O'Neill Playwrights Conference), Feasts of Rabbits (Playwrights Horizon), WJLB (NYTW), Furlough’s Paradise (MTC), What We Deserve (BAC), and ‘tia pray a sound (Breaking the Binary Theatre). Her film & TV credits include A Thousand and One (Focus), Random Acts of Flyness (HBO), On E (FWMP), and Rob Peace (Participant). She received her training at DESA and holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase. @atribecalledalicia
Anna Marie Sharpe*
U/S Mama, Avery
Anna is a Black and Filipino actor, screenwriter, and teaching artist in the Bay Area. Theatre highlights include Nollywood Dreams (San Francisco Playhouse), Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Aurora Theatre Company), and A Christmas Carol (American Conservatory Theater). Film highlights include Sorry We’re Dead and The Best Time. She makes her directorial debut in the short film For the Culture which is currently on the film festival circuit. She holds two degrees from UC Berkeley. @_amarie3 pronouns: she/her
Jeunée Simon*
Mama
Jeunée is excited to return to Berkeley Rep where she previously understudied It Can’t Happen Here and the world premiere of the ripple, the wave that carried me home. Select regional credits include Les Blancs (Oakland Theater Project), Richard II (Magic Theatre, Play On Shakespeare), Men on Boats (American Conservatory Theater), and Intimate Apparel (Lorraine Hansberry Theatre). She has performed in the one-person shows Tasha (3Girls Theatre) and Stoop Stories (Aurora Theatre Company), and is the creator of oya: un/drowned. Jeunée holds a degree from Stanford University and is a proud recipient of the RHE Artistic Fellowship. jeuneesimon.com | @leadingfromwithn
Shian Tomlinson*
Ruthie
Shian is from Greenburgh, NY. She made her Broadway debut in a nine-month run as understudy for Nell and Ivy in the Tony-nominated play John Proctor is the Villain at the Booth Theatre. Shian was also cast as Ngozi, the fiercely competitive rodeo rider in Shaun Cassidy’s NBC pilot, Unbroken. She has made TV guest lead appearances on Found, New Amsterdam, and The Good Doctor, as well as leads in several award winning short films. She is represented by Innovative Artists, Harvest Talent Management, and Jackoway, Tyerman, Wertheimer, Austen, Mandel-
baum & Morris. @shiantomlinson
Titus VanHook*
U/S Johnny "Honeycomb" James
Titus is thrilled to be joining Berkeley Rep for this extraordinary production. He is a multihyphenate artist born and raised in Oakland, CA. His most recent stage productions include African Stew (Lorraine Hansberry Theatre), Buttercup (Marin Shakespeare Company), and Sally and Tom (Marin Theatre). Titus received his MFA in theatre acting from Columbia University and is currently a professor of drama at the Academy of Art University. He would like to send his deepest gratitude to his loved ones for their support. You can keep up with him on social media @_vanhook_.
Courtney Williams*
U/S Violet, Ruthie
Courtney is delighted to make her Berkeley Rep debut. Select theatre credits include Flex (SF Playhouse), Sunset Baby (Lorraine Hansberry), Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Aurora), Fat Ham (SF Playhouse), A Walrus in the Body of a Crocodile (Clubbed Thumb), Agamemnon (Fordham), and Ruined (Fordham). Select film & TV credits include Empire (Fox), Blindspotting (Starz), Soundtrack (Netflix), Chicago Med (NBC), Chidera (short; featured on American Airlines), and Civic (short; available on the Criterion Channel). She is a graduate of Fordham University with a BA in theatre, and is an alumna of both the Steppenwolf Conservatory Program and the London Dramatic Academy.
York Walker
Playwright
York is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter from Chicago, Illinois. His Off-Broadway play Covenant premiered at Roundabout Theatre Company to critical acclaim earning a New York Times Critic’s Pick. His plays include Covenant (Roundabout Underground, South Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival), Soul Records (Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Manhattan Theatre Club, Vineyard Theatre, Roundabout), Holcomb & Hart (Victory Gardens Theater), and White Shoes (Fire This Time Festival). He is currently developing new work with Roundabout, South Coast Repertory, Geffen Playhouse, and Goodman Theatre. For television, York served as a staff writer and story editor for two seasons of Dick Wolf’s FBI on CBS. He is the inaugural recipient of both the Vineyard Theatre’s Colman Domingo Award and the John Singleton Screenwriting Award. He holds an MFA in acting from American
Conservatory Theater. @issayorkchop
Taylor Reynolds
Director
Taylor is ecstatic to return to Berkeley Rep! She is an Obie Award-winning director based in New York, originally from Chicago. Her work centers around joyful collaboration and new play development. Select credits include Jonah (Studio Theatre), The Waterfall (WP, Thrown Stone), Merry Wives (STC; Helen Hayes nom. for Best Director), The Sensational Sea Mink-ettes (Woolly Mammoth), Fat Ham (Studio Theatre; Helen Hayes nom. for Best Director), This Land Was Made (Vineyard Theatre), Clyde's (Berkeley Rep, Huntington Theatre), Tambo & Bones (Playwrights Horizons, CTG), Man Cave (Page 73), The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington (HVSF; NYT Critic's Pick), and Plano (Clubbed Thumb; Drama Desk nom. for Best Director). Taylor is a New Georges Affiliated Artist, 2021 LPTW Lucille Lortel Award recipient, 2017-2018 Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellow, and Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab alum. She holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and is a
member of SDC. @treynold
Teresa L. Williams
Scenic Design
Teresa is a designer originally from New Orleans, LA. Recent design credits include School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play (Broadway), Proof (Broadway), John Proctor is the Villain with AMP Scenography (Broadway, Royal Court Theatre), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (New World Stages), Wonderful Town (NYCC Encores!), The Waterfall (WP Theater), Pray (Baltimore Center Stage), and The Preacher’s Wife (Alliance Theatre). She received her MFA in design from NYU Tisch. tlwilliamsdesign.com
Hahnji
Costume Design
Hahnji uses their passion for the fiber arts to upcycle garments and offer affordable styling outside the limiting gender and size binaries of capitalism. They are on a continual journey to rematriate the closets of the individuals and institutions around them. Their current focus is the Transcendent Punk Costume Closet, a sustainability experiment started at Soho Rep reallocating theatre costumes to the queer BIPOC community in an effort to make performance costuming and gender-affirming dressing more accessible to trans and gender non-conforming artists. Learn more on @transpunkcloset or at Hahnji.com
Pronouns: They/them
Alan Edwards
Lighting Design
Alan is a lighting designer for live performance. His work off-Broadway includes My Joy Is Heavy (NYTW), Sally & Tom (The Public), Sunset Baby, Fires in The Mirror (Lortel nom.), Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (Signature NYC), Harry Clarke (Vineyard; Lortel Award), Kill Move Paradise (National Black Theatre; Drama Desk nom.), Memnon, Twelfth Night (Classical Theatre of Harlem), and Dakar 2000 (Manhattan Theatre Club). Regional work includes Harry Clarke, How Shakespeare Saved My Life (Berkeley Rep), Gatsby: An American Myth (ART; Norton Award), Appropriate (Old Globe), Fences (The Alley), and Beautiful (Asolo Rep). His work in dance includes In the Same Tongue (Dianne McIntyre), Chasing Magic and NYCC Artists at The Center '23 (Ayodele Casel), and Lifted by Christopher Rudd for American Ballet Theatre. alancedwards.com
Bailey Trierweiler
Sound Design &
Additional Composition
Bailey's select theatrical credits include The Verge (Fiasco Theater, The Public), The Cannibals of McGower County (TheaterWorks Hartford), Estate Sale (Barrington Stage Company), On the Evolutionary Function of Shame (Second Stage), and Chiaroscuro (National Black Theatre). His select co-design credits include Creation Stories and All the Important Importants (LCT3), The Monsters (Berkeley Rep, La Jolla Playhouse), Bartleby (The Old Globe), Wipeout (Studio Theatre), Becoming Eve (NYTW), Riverside (IndyShakes), Blood of the Lamb (Primary Stages), already there (The REACH at the Kennedy Center), and Dangerous Days (Miami New Drama). He received his MFA at the Yale School of Drama.
Steve Cuiffo
SFX Design
Steve is a theatre-maker and illusion designer. As a creator, his original pieces include A Simulacrum (Atlantic Theater Company) and Elephant Room (Center Theatre Group). He is currently the tour director for Geoff Sobelle’s Clown Show, having also designed illusions for Sobelle’s Home, Food, and The Object Lesson. Additional credits include illusion design for Thaddeus Phillips's Around the World in 80 Toys, engineering the analog lip sync and visual deceptions for Dana H. on Broadway, and serving as magic director for David Blaine: Live in Las Vegas. Steve co-founded the creative studio Secret Arts.
Earon Chew Nealey
Hair, Wigs & Makeup Design
Earon's Broadway credits include Fat Ham. Her Off-Broadway credits include Shifters, You Got Older (Cherry Lane); Midsummer Night Dream, Malvolio, Twelfth Night (Classical Theatre of Harlem); Table 17 (Makeup Design; MCC); On Sugarland (NYTW); Public Charge, Hamlet, The Harder They Come, Fat Ham, Cullad Wattah, Mojada (Public Theater); Bad Kreyól, Three Houses (The Signature); On Killing (Soho Rep); and Waterfall (WP Theater). Her regional credits include Almost Famous, Jersey Boys (ACT of Connecticut); Daughters Of The Regiment, Carousel (Boston Lyric Opera); Huzzah (The Old Globe), Camelot, Blues for an Alabama Sky (Barrington); Two Strangers, Diary of a Tap Dancer (ACT); The Grove, Sojourners, Toni Stone, Fat Ham, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (The Huntington); Dames at Sea, Kinky Boots (Bucks County Playhouse); Last Super (SOPAC); Little Girl Blue (Goodspeed, New World Stages); Meet Vera Stark, Matilda (Colorado University); Nina Simone: Four Women (Berkshire Theatre Group); and Little Women (Dallas Theater Center).
Destiny Lilly, CSA
Casting
Destiny is a four-time Emmy nominee for casting Only Murders in the Building. Film credits include the Oscar-nominated musical feature film The Color Purple. Her Broadway credits include A Strange Loop, Purlie Victorious, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Clyde’s. National tour credits include To Kill a Mockingbird. Off-Broadway credits include MCC Theater, Atlantic Theater Company, The Shed, New York Theater Workshop, Colt Coeur, WP Theater, Classic Stage Company, Ars Nova, The New Group, PAC NYC, 2ST, The Vineyard, National Black Theatre, and City Center: Encores!. Destiny received the 2026 Trailblazer Award from Black Women on Broadway, and she currently serves as the President of Casting Society (CSA).
Andrea Caban
Voice and Dialect Coach
Andrea is a dialect coach for film and theatre. She collaborated with Francis Ford Coppola on his career opus film Megalopolis. Her theatre coaching credits include The Thing About Jellyfish, All My Sons (Berkeley Rep); Three Summers of Lincoln, The Recipe (La Jolla Playhouse); Appropriate, Deceived (Old Globe); Absurd Person Singular, Chinglish, Death of a Salesman, Madwomen in a Volvo, and Peter and the Starcatcher (South Coast Rep); Her books include Experiencing Speech: A Skills-based, Panlingual Approach to Actor Training and Experiencing Accents: A Knight-Thompson Speechwork Guide for Acting in Accent. Andrea is faculty in UCSD’s theatre & dance department, leading speech & accents training. She received her MFA from UC Irvine.
Dana Petersen*
Stage Manager
Dana is so excited to be at Berkeley Repertory Theatre! Dana spent the last six seasons on stage management teams at Portland Center Stage, where some of her favorite shows included Lizard Boy; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; NASSIM; What the Constitution Means to Me; Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy; Really, Young Americans (world premiere); tick, tick…BOOM; and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. She has also worked with The Playwrights Realm, Third Rail Repertory Theatre, and The Old Globe. She graduated from the Ohio State University (Go Bucks!) and is a member of Actors Equity Association.
Anthony Lopez
Assistant Stage Manager
Anthony is thrilled to be returning to Berkeley Rep. Anthony's Berkeley Repertory Theatre credits include All My Sons, The Reservoir, The Thing About Jellyfish, Galileo, Cult of Love, Bulrusher, and POTUS. Anthony started at Berkeley Rep as the stage management fellow in the 2023/24 season.
Johanna Pfaelzer
Artistic Director
Johanna joined Berkeley Rep in 2019 as its fourth artistic director following 12 years as the artistic director of New York Stage and Film (NYSAF), a New York City-based organization dedicated to the development of new works for theatre, film, and television. Notable works developed under Johanna’s leadership at NYSAF include Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda, The Humans by Stephen Karam, Hadestown by Anaïs Mitchell, The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe, The Invisible Hand by Ayad Akhtar, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music by Taylor Mac, The Homecoming Queen by Ngozi Anyanwu, The Great Leap by Lauren Yee, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, The Fortress of Solitude by Michael Friedman and Itamar Moses, The Jacksonian by Beth Henley, and Green Day’s American Idiot. In addition, Johanna has developed the work of many notable artists including Jocelyn Bioh, Zach Helm, Halley Feiffer, Billy Porter, Lucy Thurber, Duncan Sheik, V (formerly Eve Ensler), Steven Sater, Jaclyn Backhaus, Patricia Wettig, and Marcus Gardley. Since arriving at Berkeley Rep, Johanna has produced multiple world premieres as well as projects that have gone on to notable future productions including Swept Away, Galileo, Mexodus, and Cult of Love. She was formerly a producing director of Zena Group and served for five years as the associate artistic director of American Conservatory Theater. Johanna is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the Actors Theatre of Louisville apprentice program and has taught in the MFA theatre program at Columbia University School of the Arts. She lives in Berkeley with her husband Russell Champa and their son Jasper.
Tom Parrish
Managing Director
Tom has served as a theatre leader and arts administrator for over 20 years, with experience in organizations ranging from multivenue performing arts centers to major Tony Award-winning theatre companies. Prior to Berkeley Rep, he served as executive director of Trinity Repertory Company, Geva Theatre Center, and Merrimack Repertory Theatre and as associate managing director/general manager of San Diego Repertory Theatre. His work has been recognized with a NAACP Theatre Award for Best Producer and “Forty Under 40” recognition in Providence, Rochester, the Merrimack Valley, and San Diego. He received his MBA/MA in arts administration from Southern Methodist University; BA in theatre arts and economics from Case Western Reserve University; attended the Commercial Theater Institute, National Theater Institute, and Harvard Business School’s Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management; and is certified in leading diversity, equity, and inclusion by Northwestern University. He and his husband live in Berkeley.
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