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 the Artistic Director of The Schoolhouse Theater, the oldest professional theatrical venue in Westchester County, New York. Schoolhouse recently completed its first post-Covid season: a triumphant slate of plays opening with John Logan’s Red which Owen directed and which has recently won nine 2023 Regional BroadwayWorld Awards including Best Play, Best Director, Best Performer, Best Supporting Performer, Best Designers, and Favorite Local Theater. In 2024, Schoolhouse will present the World Premiere of Barbara Dana’s What Keeps Us Going, directed by Austin Pendleton, followed by two twentieth-century masterpieces: Athol Fugard’s ‘Master Harold’…and the boys and Brian Friel's Faith Healer, both of which Owen is thrilled to be directing.
www.theschoolhousetheater.org
Owen's theatrical productions have been seen all over New York City and in regional theaters across America. He served as the Artistic Director of NYC’s acclaimed Protean Theatre Company, whose productions were lauded by the New York Times, The New York Post's Clive Barnes, TimeOut New York, the Village Voice, BackStage and several other prestigious publications. He also spent many years as Producing Director of The River Rep at the historic Ivoryton Playhouse in Essex, Connecticut. River Rep was a revitalizing force in professional Connecticut theater and presented over one hundred productions at Ivoryton, helping to save that historic theater from the wrecking ball and allowing it to continue to thrive well into the 21st century. Additionally, Owen developed many original works as producer and literary manager of new plays for Off-Broadway's illustrious TACT (The Actors Company Theatre).
Owen is also an educator with two post-graduate degrees in classical dramatic literature and has taught in several institutions of higher learning, including Fordham University, Marymount Manhattan College, and CUNY’s New York City College of Technology as well as in the New York City Public School system.
A long-time veteran of the New York theater scene, Owen has directed numerous Off and Off-Off Broadway shows, including his immersive, multi-media production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest for the Secret Theatre at the Plaxall Art Gallery, which was nominated for a bevy of New York Innovative Theatre Awards including Outstanding Director. Owen grew up in a theatrical family as the child of Broadway actors Joan Shepard and Evan Thompson, and at the age of nineteen he founded The Facemakers, an avant-garde theater company that flourished in the downtown NYC arts scene of the 1980s and produced several celebrated shows including a notorious revival of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest starring the iconic Quentin Crisp as Lady Bracknell.
Owen also founded New York City’s Protean Theatre Company, for whom he produced and directed numerous productions including the critically acclaimed American Premiere of the previously lost Restoration Comedy The London Cuckolds, the Jacobean thriller The Revenger’s Tragedy, an evening of Shavian one-acts called George Bernard Shaw’s Fictitious History, Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet and Molière’s outrageous farce The Doctor in Spite of Himself, for which he also wrote a much-praised modern adaptation
As Producing Director of the River Rep Theatre Company, Owen produced or co-produced more than one hundred productions over the course of two decades, several of which he directed, including a smash hit revival of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado, for which he received the Connecticut Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Director of a Musical.
Owen lives in Manhattan with his beautiful and brilliant wife Leda Zukowski, their rescue cat Harry, and a family of squirrels whom they seem to have inadvertently adopted.