laura dupper

I have worked at Dallas Theater Center, Signature Theatre, Second Stage Theater, Columbia University, and LCT3; I have also worked with Playwrights Realm, Barrington Stage, P73. I have assisted and worked on several Off-Broadway productions, and have had the privilege of working closely with artistic heroes like Lila Neugebauer, Evan Cabnet, Will Eno, and Tracy Letts. BFA Southern Methodist University.

You should also know that much to the dismay and disillusionment of the double p’s in my last name, it is pronounced DOOPER. As in super. as in super dupper. no pressure.

But why?

I have loved theatre for a long time, but I have been asking why again—why do we need it, at this moment in time, why do I still love it and think it unlocks something unique and magical that is essential to our human condition?

Everything feels loud, and chaos seems to be the only consistent thing in our world, right now. I wonder if you might feel a similar temptation as me—to either embrace the tumult with my own fury-filled voice, or to shut it all out completely and pretend it’s not happening. Both seem to leave me feeling isolated. When we see our world as a conglomeration of ideologies that are either with us or against us, we lose the people—the humanity. The truth is that it’s hard to love big ideas, concepts, or abstract ideals. We love particulars—this person, this animal, this place. When we take the time to distill down what is in front of us, I think we see an entirely different world, filled with recognizable humanity. This has always been the gift of theatre to me—to sit in a room, shoulder to shoulder with a stranger and witness a story that for a moment transcends time and space that leaves us feeling a bit more human and a bit less alone. 

I want to do the kind of theatre that engages the part of our brains that light up when we try to understand someone we don’t. When we try to read someone’s eyes and the way their mouth is turned, and is that sadness, regret, elation, or fear? I love plays that are daring enough to sound like people sound when they are experiencing those emotions. I love plays that have a dialogical muscularity to hold both what people who feel those things actually say and are too afraid to say. I love plays that explore heartbreak and the devestestation of broken relationships and the endless dance of expressing and storing trauma. I love plays that use time as a constraint and that disregard the Truth of its linearity for the truth of the way it actually feels. 

I’m also a therapist. And while I’m not here to sell you on my practice (ethics lol), I think it’s key in understanding how I approach people and the practice of embodying text. I studied psychology and theatre in undergrad, and when I went back to grad school for social work, I had this theory that being a director and being a therapist might feel spiritually connected, and it turns out they really do. I’ve spent so much of my work trying to get under the surface of suffering, connecting the dots to desire, to pain, to fear. The reason I believe in theatre and I believe in therapy are the same. I’m endlessly curious about human impulses and the mechanisms with which we stifle them to protect ourselves from a greater fear. I believe we are bodies, and we have learned to operate as minds, and the practice of theatre invites us into a space of desperately needed integration. I believe our bodies will tell us what we need, who we want to be close to, how we need to hide if we will listen. I believe characters know this and actors know this, and there’s scientific evidence for patience. The best thing I know to do is create a room where there is safety to explore what we know and what we don’t. I believe in the ritual of theatre and the gathering of the kinetic energy of artists all breathing together to tell a story that is somehow both made from scratch and was living in our collective bones forever.

I am also a sucker for magic onstage and plays that do not abide by linearity. I want it soft, soft intimate and big, big theatrical.