Lisa Ann Goldsmith is an actor, director, and educator with many New York and regional credits, including Kate in the World Premiere of Windfall directed by Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander (Arkansas Rep); Audrey in As You Like It and The Courtesan in The Comedy of Errors (Pittsburgh Public Theater); Kate in Brighton Beach Memoirs, Laurel in Torch Song Trilogy, and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth (Human Race Theatre Company); Macbeth in Macbeth 3 (Unseam’d Shakespeare); ten years as Mrs. Cratchit in A Musical Christmas Carol (Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera); Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Tulsa Shakespeare in the Park); Veronica in God of Carnage (Theatre by the Sea); Cassius in Julius Caesar (Pittsburgh Shakespeare in the Parks); Gretchen in Boeing, Boeing (CLO Cabaret); Queen Victoria in Victoria’s Secret: A Life in Music, the Mendelssohn Choir’s 200th Anniversary Celebration of her birth; Mrs. Staunton in The Speckled Band and The Woman in The Father (Kinetic Theatre) and many others.
Her upcoming projects include playing Mary Travers of Peter Paul & Mary for the feature film 116 MacDougal (including singing four tracks on the cast album). Other film credits include roles in The Next Three Days with Russell Crowe, Love and Other Drugs with Hank Azaria and Jake Gyllenhall, One for the Money with Katherine Heigl, and Matt’s Mom in the Sundance nominated The Lifeguard with Kristen Bell.
Lisa Ann is a Dialect Coach with many credits, including the Emmy-winning Amazon series After Forever. Her directing credits include professional productions of the world premieres of The Devil’s Arithmetic and Walk Two Moons (Prime Stage), Findings (Pittsburgh Playwrights), and Amy Hartman’s Disinfecting Edwin (Open Stage); As You Like It (Pittsburgh Shakespeare in the Parks); Jake Heggie’s Three Decembers and To Hell and Back (Microscopic at Pittsburgh Opera), as well as The Monkey’s Paw, Happy Garden of Life, and The Proposal (Microscopic Opera Company); an immersive production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show that was set in an actual S & M dungeon (Brisbane Management), and many others.
As an educator, she has taught Acting, Shakespeare First Folio Technique, Musical Theatre Performance, Dialects, and Voice and Speech classes at Carnegie Mellon University, Point Park Conservatory, the University of Pittsburgh, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Seton Hill University, Youngstown State University, and Fordham University, as well as Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, Shadyside Academy, and Winchester-Thurston.
She has directed university productions of Ghosts, Vanya, Sonia, Masha, and Spike, The House of
Bernarda Alba, The Tempest, Doonesbury, White Christmas, Blood Relations, and Into the Woods. She is a private acting coach in Pittsburgh and New York City, where she has coached her students literally to jobs on Broadway, on TV, and in major films.
Lisa Ann also teaches a Shakespeare First Folio Technique Intensive for professional actors all over the country. She has been the Resident Teaching Artist at the Pittsburgh Public Theater teaching Shakespeare First Folio Technique, Scene Study, Monologue Audition Technique, and Dialects. She has taught the Young Persons Acting Intensive and/or the Young Persons Shakespeare Intensive every summer since 2007, and has been the instructor for all adult acting classes since then.
Lisa Ann is a native New Yorker (born in Brooklyn, grew up in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan - a Triborough Baby!) that has transplanted to Pittsburgh, where she received her MFA from Point Park Conservatory and fell in love with the city. She lives with her eight cats (Thurl, Stevie Wonder, Lady Plymdale, Ripley, Magenta, Charlotte, Olivia, Mary Noel) and one puppins (Karma), her partner Don and a zillion books in her adorable little 1930's Sears house affectionately known as Kilbourne Manor.
Owen Thompson is an award-winning director whose productions have been seen in New York City and in regional theatres around the country. His immersive, multi-media production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest for The Secret Theatre was recently nominated for a bevy of New York Innovative Theatre Awards, including Outstanding Director and Outstanding Revival of a Play, and his production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado at the Ivoryton Playhouse received the Connecticut Critics Circle award for Outstanding Director of a Musical.
Owen is a long-time veteran of the New York City theatre scene and has served as the Artistic Director of NYC’s Protean Theatre Company as well as the producer of newTACTics, the annual festival of original plays presented by TACT (The Actors Company Theatre). For TACT, Owen staged Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid and developed and directed a number of plays receiving their first New York City productions. For the Protean Theatre Company, Owen directed and produced the critically acclaimed American Premiere of the previously lost Restoration Comedy The London Cuckolds and his own original adaptation of Molière’s The Doctor in Spite of Himself among many other productions.
Other Off-Broadway directing credits include Tennessee Williams' mid-century masterpiece Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the Gallery Players, Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama How I Learned to Drive at Queens Theatre in the Park, the World Premiere of Mark Edward Lang's Lunt & Fontanne: the Celestials of Broadway at the New York International Fringe Festival, Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure for the Hip to Hip Theatre Company, Grass Island for the Abingdon Theatre Company, and the New York Premiere of James McLure’s Thanksgiving at the John Cullum Theatre at the American Theatre of Actors.
Regionally, Owen served as Producing Director of The River Rep Theatre Company, for whom he directed several plays including Neil Simon's The Good Doctor and John Van Druten’s Bell, Book, and Candle. Other regional directing credits include Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep at Connecticut’s Seven Angels Theatre, Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage starring Katharine Houghton, Larry Shue’s The Nerd
for the Sheboygan Theatre Company, Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet at the North Carolina Civic Center, and George Feydeau’s classic farce A Flea in Her Ear at the Ivoryton Playhouse.
For many years Owen acted professionally, appearing in over a hundred productions in New York City and all across America. He toured with Yul Brynner in The King & I, played Jack Worthing opposite Quentin Crisp’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, and has performed numerous major Shakespearean roles, including Mercutio in Romeo & Juliet, Malvolio in Twelfth Night (alongside his current co-host and dear friend Lisa Ann Goldsmith as Viola), Iago in Othello, and most recently Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV, parts 1 and 2.
Owen is also an educator who has taught at several institutions of higher learning, including Fordham University, CUNY’s New York City College of Technology, and Marymount Manhattan College (where he currently teaches Script Analysis) and holds post-graduate degrees in classic dramatic literature from Fordham and Hunter College of the City University of New York.
Owen lives in Manhattan's East Village with his wife Leda Zukowski, a Vice President at Morgan Stanley, and their cat Eliot.