Meet the Retreatant: Phil Berman

Phil Berman is thrilled to return to the Freedom Art Retreat after interning with the 10 incredible retreatants from last year.

Phil makes theater in the Boston area: acting with Moonbox Productions and Puppet Showplace Theatre; dramaturging shows and managing the literary department for Company One; and creating puppets, plays, and music for Free Hands, a company founded with retreatants from last year.

His plays include “The Last Confession of the Virgin Maria,” directed by Corianna Moffatt at Boston University, and “The Three Blessed Brothers,” produced by Free Hands last June, designed by Allie Herryman.

Meet the Retreatant: Barbara Whitney

For someone who regularly finds her wallet in the freezer, bakes challah at 3 am, sleep crafts, and occasionally eats a sandwich in the shower, you know, just for fun, Barbara Whitney is a model of sanity. A model of sanity who is really struggling with writing this bio. She’s ‘turged, directed, devised, performed, puppeteered, production managed, and taught at a variety of places around the world – from Carnegie Hall to Chicago’s South Side St. Patrick’s Day Parade to under a tree in Bangkok. She spent years touring internationally and causing a theatrical ruckus domestically and is proud to have made a living as a freelance artist for 13 years. For the past 4 years she’s been a high school theater teacher where she encourages students to think of themselves as vast beings who exercise curiosity in the out-of-the-ordinary. And who embrace looking like an idiot, and say please and thank you. She is much less of a hippy than this bio makes her sound and, for the skeptics, has a legitimate theatrical resume with credentials and stuff that she’s happy to share if they’re happy to turn their clothes inside out to confuse the fairies. Mainstream is often interesting and worthwhile but the edges are where things happen.

 

Meet the Retreatant: Allie Herryman

Allie is a designer, production manager, and general Jill-of-All-Trades; we’re excited to have her on Retreat!

Alexandra came to Boston in the fall of 2009 to start her MFA at Boston University, and has gone on to a freelance career in production management and the occasional prop and puppet design. She has also built sets, hung lights, driven big trucks through cities, sewn on buttons, built risers, moved chairs and made lots of coffee.

Locally she has worked with Boston Opera Collaborative and Metro Stage Company, and she regularly appears at the Puppet Showplace Theatre as the technician for their quarterly Puppet Slam events.

Before Boston, Alexandra lived in Chicago, where she spent years as the full-time production manager for Silk Road Theatre Project.  She also worked around the city as a stage manager and prop designer for storefront companies Quest Ensemble, Tantalus Theatre, and Porchlight Music Theatre. When not busy behind the stage, she likes to drink coffee and be outside.