For bold, curious, genre-defiant, and most of all, scrappy theater makers and comedians eager to sharpen their directorial skills. Be the prepared, warm, capable, fun, and highly imaginative collaborator everyone wants to work with. Whether you identify as a director, or want to view your own work through a director’s eye, this lab-style course from the Elysian offers practical tools and inspiring ideas for creating indie comedy and performance that doesn’t fit neatly into a box…mostly, because your props are too big.
Work on strengthening your stagecraft and effectively communicating your vision to others. Through hands-on exercises, ensemble experiments, and discussion, you’ll be thinking and communicating like a director for a range of theater forms, including solo performance, sketch comedy, clown, musical theater, and beyond. We’ll approach all through the lens of low-budget and DIY theater-making, helping you be confident to dream big on a small stage, and create work that is often low budget, but always highly entertaining.
Thursdays June 12-August 7th 7-10pm (no class on 7/17)
Skunk Room
About the Instructor:
CASSIE AHIERS is a director, writer and educator originally from Minnesota. She holds a degree in Theater Directing from Columbia College Chicago. Recent Elysian directing credits include, Shipping, Fanny: A Classical Punk Musical and Widdle Women, an original play she wrote for the Elysian’s Spaghetti Festival. For the past decade, Cassie has been developing her dark comedy musical, The Mountain Digby, which has had readings and workshop productions in Chicago and Los Angeles. It was also a finalist for the Stellar Emerging Artist in Theatre Grant and the National Alliance of Musical Theatre Festival. Cassie has over 15 years of experience teaching improv, sketch writing, and theater, to students ages 4 to 80. Cassie is a former director of The Second City’s National Touring Company- leading 100+ productions that toured theaters nationwide. As an acting coach, she worked on over 50 episodes of Nickelodeon productions, including Side Hustle, The Thundermans Return, That Girl Lay Lay, Danger Force, and Aaron & Erin. In 2024, Cassie piloted The Blast Zone, an original podcast with Atlas Obscura and NPR, which is currently in development. Her newest short film, Aloneness, is in post-production, while Boy Band in a Haunted Hotel—a short she created with a group of artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities—is set to premiere at festivals later this year. Learn more about her film and theater work at www.cassieahiers.com
Class cancellation policy: 100% refundable up until 5 days before the class. 75% refundable within 5 days of the class start date. No refunds after the start date of class.