Alumna Patricia McGregor returns to SMU to direct 'Yerma'

SMU alumna Patricia McGregor returns to the University this spring to direct the Theatre Division's production of Federico Garcia Lorca's once controversial social commentary Yerma.

McGregor will be holding auditions for Yerma in November, and it will be performed April 27-May 1, 2011, in the Greer Garson Theatre.

Yerma is about a childless woman whose desperate desire for motherhood becomes an obsession that drives her to commit a terrible crime. The play was written and first performed in 1934 but banned by the Spanish government until the mid-1950s. The work serves as a condemnation of the social norms of the woman's culture and its strict sexual morality. Lorca was a poet and dramatist who was fatally shot in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War; the circumstances of his death remain a point of controversy.

Born in the Virgin Islands, McGregor was an SMU Presidential Scholar who graduated from Meadows School of the Arts in 2000 with a BFA in theater studies and spent a year at the Beckett Center at Trinity College. She later graduated from the directing program at the Yale School of Drama, where she was artistic director of the Yale Cabaret and the recipient of a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and a McDougal Scholarship.

McGregor is co-founder of Angela's Pulse, a company which creates vital dance and theater works and fosters collaboration among artists, educators, organizers, academics and other diverse communities to illuminate under told stories, infuse meaning into the audience experience and animate progress through the arts.

She has worked at venues including Broadway, BAM, Second Stage, The Kennedy Center, The Public Theater, The Kitchen, the O’Neill National Playwriting Conference, Lincoln Center Institute and Exit Art.

Her directing credits include Jelly's Last Jam, Romeo and Juliet, Four Electric Ghosts, The French Play, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, Eleemosynary, Sidewalk Opera, Dancing in the Dark, The Covering Skyline is Nothing, In the Meantime, In the Cypher, Imaginary Audience, The Twenty-Four Hour Plays, Guernica-The Musical!, 365 Days 365 Plays by Susan-Lori Parks, Clarisse and Larmon, Totems, Three Sisters, Cloud Tectonics, and My Children My Africa.

She was associate director of Roger Guenveur Smith's Juan and John and assistant director of Tarell McCraney's Brother Sister Plays at The Public and Winter's Tale at NYTF Shakespeare in the Park.

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