Christian DuComb is associate professor of Theater at Colgate University, where he teaches theater history, dramatic literature, and performance studies.  He has previously taught at Haverford College and Brown University, where he received his Ph.D. in Theater and Performance Studies in 2012.  His first book, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Michigan, 2017), traces the deep roots of Philadelphia’s annual Mummers Parade through the city’s history of blackface minstrelsy and other forms of racial impersonation. 

Gregory Poggi grew up in New York City in the 1950s and 60s, where he fell in love with theater. After attending Iona College, he went on to Indiana University in Bloomington, where he got both his MA and Ph.D.. His decades of leadership in American theater is astoundingly long and distinguished. Greg is a founder of the Indiana Repertory Theatre in Indianapolis, served as managing director of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg, and he has led university theater and artistic management programs in Dallas, Texas and Ann Arbor, Michigan.  He is, in fact, the perfect person for us to interview at this point in the overall storyline of our podcast, because - because during the 1980s, he was the head of the Philadelphia Drama Guild. 

Jerrell L. Henderson is a Theatre Director, Puppeteer, and African American Theatre Historian and Archivist. Through the mediums of theatre and/or puppetry and film, Jerrell seeks to disrupt generational curses of self-hate (i.e. racism, homophobia, religious intolerance, etc.).

As a theatre historian and archivist, Jerrell contributed to Fifty Key Musicals (Routledge Press). He authored the chapter on Shuffle Along (1921) and co-authored the chapter on The Wiz (1975). He also serves as the creator and curator of black_theatre_vinyl_archive on Instagram. black_theatre_vinyl_archive is an extensive collection of vinyl albums which highlight the contributions of members of the African Diaspora in Theatre/Musical Theatre History. He is represented by the Gurman Agency (susan@gurmanagency.com).

Dr. Jonathan Shandell is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts. A published theater historian, his scholarship focuses on issues of race and integration on the American stage of the mid-20th century.  He is the author of the forthcoming book Readying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance Culture from post-World War II to the Black Arts Movement (University of Michigan Press), to be published in January 2025 from the University of Michigan Press. He is author of The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (University of Iowa Press, 2019) and co-editor of the anthology Experiments in Democracy (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016).

Mary B. Robinson is a stage director, teacher, and writer whose career has spanned four decades. She’s directed 70 productions at non-profit theaters around the country and in New York City, including Arena Stage, Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage, and Seattle Repertory Theatre. She served as associate artistic director of Hartford Stage and artistic director of the Philadelphia Drama Guild.

She was a 1986 Drama Desk nominee for Lanford Wilson’s Lemon Sky, the first recipient of the Alan Schneider Award in 1987, and winner of Philadelphia’s Barrymore Award for Of Mice and Men in 1995. 

For many years, she ran an undergraduate directing program at New York University (under the auspices of Playwrights Horizons Theatre School) and taught in the MFA directing program at Brooklyn College

Michael Lueger is an adjunct professor at Emerson College and Northeastern University, where he teaches theatre history. His blog “Abstract and Brief” features images and essays on theatre history. His work has appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed publications, such as the recent Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, and on WBUR’s Cognoscenti page. Follow him on Twitter with the handle @theaterhistory.

Penelope Reed, who won a Barrymore Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, more or less grew up at Hedgerow Theatre. She studied acting under its founder, Jasper Deeter, who became a father figure to her after her own father — also named Jared Reed, and also an actor — died in 1967. Later, she worked at the Milwaukee Repertory Company, where she met her husband, Zoran Kovcic.

Reed was a lead member of the McCarter Theatre in New Jersey and ran the drama department at the Lawrenceville School. Then, in the wake of a 1985 fire that reduced Hedgerow to a shell, she moved back to help raise it from the ashes. The theater reopened in 1990.

Tom Bissinger grew up in San Francisco, attended Phillips Academy and Stanford University, and after military service, moved to New York, where in the 1960s, he directed plays Off- and Off-Off-Broadway as well as in theaters throughout the United States and Europe. He began writing plays and short fiction in the 1970s when he moved to the Pennsylvania countryside. His plays include the tragic comedy The Big Kephresh, Descartes’ Blues (a play about the life and loves of Rene Descartes), and his latest (coauthored with Dance Wareham) The Bus, which was performed on a forty-foot bus. He has held a variety of jobs in teaching, publishing, and performing. His book Da Capo: Selected Writings 1967–2004, edited by Philip Beitchman, PhD, was published in 2008. Since 1987, Bissinger has studied with Joseph Rael, an American Indian visionary. Bissinger is married with two children and many grandchildren