About the Artistic Team
ACTOR
Elaine Vaan Hogue is an actor, director, teacher, and producer. Originally from Los Angeles she has performed, directed, and taught in diverse settings across the country.
Elaine is a fervent member of The Magdalena Project, a dynamic international cross-cultural and cross-generational network of women in contemporary theatre, amplifying women’s voices. She performed in the Magdalena International Festival, a gathering of worldwide women, non-binary, and trans artists, hosted by Double Edge Theatre and has participated in several Magdalena Project festivals in Europe.
Elaine has directed and performed at many theatres including Great Barrington Public Theater, The Hanover Theatre Repertory, New Repertory Theatre, Central Square Theatre, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Boston Center for American Performance, Arts After Hours, Bridge Repertory Theatre, Wheelock Family Theatre, Double Edge Theatre, Olney Theatre Center, New Theatre, American Theatre Arts.
Favorite directorial projects include the queer romcom, Mother Mary (BPT); How I Learned to Drive (Actors’ Shakespeare Project); The Kite Runner, Imagining Madoff (New Repertory Theatre); A Disappearing Number (Central Square Theatre); Baltimore (BCAP/New Rep).
She is a Professor Emerita at Boston University where she taught acting and directing for 25 years.
Elaine has toured Representation and How to Get It to historic venues throughout New England and performed as part of the United Solo Festival in NYC.
DIRECTOR
Judy Braha has been a director, actor, teacher and artist for social justice for over four decades. Long-time head of the M.F.A. Directing Program at Boston University’s School of Theater, her credits include theaters and universities throughout New England. With a commitment to the arts as activism, Judy collaborates with Andre de Quadros in the BU College of Fine Arts Prison Arts Initiative, teaching incarcerated students in Massachusetts’ prisons and jails. Judy was honored by the Association for Theater in Higher Education with the 2022 Oscar Brocket Award for Excellence in Theater Teaching.
As a director, Judy’s work often has concern for human rights at its center: To Kill A Mockingbird (Gloucester Stage Company), Emilie, La Marquise du Chatelet, Defends Her Life Tonight (Central Square Theater), Othello, I Am Lear, a devised piece on aging (Actor’s Shakespeare Project), The Oil Thief + Deported, a dream play (Boston Playwrights Theater), Golda’s Balcony (NEW REP), Our Class, Our Country’s Good and The Exonerated at BU/School Of Theater, the new work Mr. Fullerton, Between the Sheets (Great Barrington Public Theater and Gloucester Stage Company) and the East Coast premiere of Things I Know To Be True (GBPT).
Currently, Judy is directing a series of solo shows: Representation and How to Get It, focused on the legacy of the feminist, suffragist, abolitionist Julia Ward Howe coming to a historic venue near you, Mozart’s Wife by Anne Undeland for GBPT and You Can Live If They Let You by Moshe Waldoks premiering in Spring 2024.
A longtime member of the Society of Directors and Choreographers, AEA and SAG-AFTRA, Judy is also proud to have been a founding board member of Stage Source, New England Theater’s service organization committed to connecting theaters, artists and their communities.
PLAYWRIGHT
Joyce Van Dyke’s REPRESENTATION AND HOW TO GET IT, a one-woman show inspired by Julia Ward Howe, features Elaine Vaan Hogue and is directed by Judy Braha. The play was developed collaboratively by Joyce, Elaine and Judy, and since 2021 has been produced over 15 times in historic venues and theatres in New England.
Joyce is currently developing theatre work that responds to the climate crisis. She is a founding member Climate Crisis Cabaret, a Boston collective of theatre artists and scientists aiming to kindle collective action. Their first cabaret, The Warm Up, was staged in 2025 (trailer, CCC website). Her earlier play, THE OIL THIEF, was included in the climate collection, 100 Plays to Save the World (2023). Produced by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and directed by Judy Braha, THE OIL THIEF was originally commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theatre / Sloan Project and won Boston’s Eliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script.
Her other plays include THE WOMEN WHO MAPPED THE STARS about a group of five astronomers centering on Cecilia Payne who discovered what the stars are made of (originally commissioned and first produced in 2018 by Central Square Theater).
Her play dealing with survivors of the Armenian genocide, DAYBREAK, is based on the stories of her grandparents (Off-Broadway world premiere produced by Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, 2018.) An earlier version was developed in collaboration with Judy Braha and produced by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre under the title DEPORTED / A DREAM PLAY. A GIRL’S WAR (Golden Thread Productions, New Repertory Theatre, and Boston Playwrights’ Theatre) won the Gassner Award and the Boston Globe’s “Top Ten” plays of 2001, and was anthologized in Contemporary Armenian American Drama.
A MacDowell Fellow and a Huntington Playwriting Fellow, Joyce teaches Shakespeare and creative writing at Harvard Extension School.
Production Team
Sound design: Jacob Fisch
Costume design: Zoë Sundra, Marissa Wolf
Scenic Consultant: Marina Sartori
Voiceover: Mark Cohen
“The one woman play, Representation and How to Get It, is outstanding! To say it’s thought-provoking and inspiring is an understatement… Julia Ward Howe is a force to be reckoned with.”