Check Out Noah Todd’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Noah Todd.

Hi Noah, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story? 
I am a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on the theatre arts. I am primarily a theatre director and associate member of the Stage Directors & Choreographers union, a performed playwright, and a songwriter and composer, with folk and acoustic rock music published under the name Dear Samson. I was previously the Assistant Artistic Director of Flock Theatre in New London, CT, where I also taught theatrical script analysis at Mitchell College, performed at the 2019 National Puppetry Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and was awarded Emerging Artist recognition from the Connecticut Office of the Arts in 2020. I moved to Los Angeles in June of 2023 and worked quickly to establish theatre work here, culminating in my LA directing debut as founder and creative director of The Brookside Project, my experiential, essentialist theatre company with a small studio in West LA. Our debut production was Chekhov’s Gull, an out-of-time-period, stripped-down adaptation of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov, which I wrote. 

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
In my artistic career as a whole, the COVID-19 pandemic made certain artistic work screech to a halt while other areas of my artistic life flourished. My longtime girlfriend and actress Jamie Leo and I took the break from our arts work to travel the country in a van we converted, an adventurous endeavor that ultimately taught us crucial lessons about our relationship, about harnessing our curiosity, and about being compassionate people. That period of long-term travel, and specifically Jamie’s companionship and support, are a significant part of who I am as an artist. Our time post-lockdown and post-travel has been spent trusting our impulses and intuition and committing fully to major projects, namely our cross-country move from Connecticut and establishing an indie theatre company fully in line with our artistic visions. 

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Having mentioned a chunk of my artistic career up to this point, I’ll expand more on the scope The Brookside Project. 

The Brookside Project is an experiential, essentialist theatre company based in West Los Angeles founded on the tenets of human-centric creation and uncompromised access to the arts. 

“Experiential” and “essentialist” – in short, we, as artists, are learning by doing, and our drive is to create theatre in its “essential” form, highlighting the direct connection between actor and observer as strongly as possible. 

The Brookside Project as a theatre company, is committed to: 

– Producing new, original theatre, including innovative adaptations of classic texts alongside new works written and curated by our artists. 

– Pay-what-you-can admission to Brookside productions, always. 

– Celebrating human intelligence, curiosity, and ingenuity with large language models and any artificial intelligence tools to come in the future, never being incorporated into our writing process, text analysis, or media generation. 

I am a huge proponent of arts access, not just in terms of ADA compliance and financial accessibility but also in our approach to classic work. Shakespeare, to me, holds no value as an academic pillar – why do a Shakespeare production at all if its only merits are to be the show’s “authenticity”? Brookside, rather, is a company interested in taking the lessons of the classics and removing any social, emotional, and educational barriers typically required to engage with those texts as written. Our production of Chekhov’s Gull was a prototype of this approach, updating the language and focusing heavily on the original play’s core question of why we, as human beings, are driven to create art at all. 

The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you, and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
The only additional lesson not referenced earlier, which is in the vein of our approach to arts access, is that video archival is crucial. Before the lockdown, I was a staunch defender of theatre only occurring live and in the space – in retrospect, this was obviously naive. Not only is proper archival important for our artist portfolios in many ways, it is much more important as an access point for folks who may be unable to attend a live performance for any number of reasons. They deserve to engage with the work just as fully. We at Brookside are attempting to capture the energy of our live performances in video, and Chekhov’s Gull is a bit of an experiment in that regard. We filmed three different performances in different ways – close-up work, a wide shot recording with audience members responding to the piece live, and with actors treating the camera as an audience member itself – and I’m eager to create a new, unique form of that project using the footage we captured which will be accessible to all. 

Contact Info:

• Website: brooksideproject.com
• Instagram: @brooksideproject

Image Credits
Ben Bernard