WELCOME
Adrian is a director, actor, producer, and educator. Growing up with one foot in the United States, and the other in Western Europe, he developed a deep passion for the performing arts and its ability to express the richness and the diversity of human experience.
He brings this passion to all of his endeavors.
WHAT's HAPPENING!
Shaker Bridge Theatre is thrilled to announce our 2025/2026 Season, offering five main stage productions at our home in the Briggs Opera House. Our 18th season kicks of in October with the 2025 Broadway hit play EUREKA DAY by Jonathan Spector followed by Ken Ludwig’s DEAR JACK, DEAR LOUISE, a warm love story for all to enjoy during the holiday season. The new year kicks off with Sam Shepard’s classic tale of two former lovers, FOOL FOR LOVE. In March we have a provocative comedy from Pulitzer Prize nominee Theresa Rebeck, SEMINAR, and in May we have Kenneth Lonergan’s wacky and heartrending look at the effect of senility on a family, THE WAVERLY GALLERY. In addition to our main stage, SBT introduces our Bridge Series, readings of new plays by Vermont and New Hampshire playwrights.
Get you tickets and check out upcoming events at
CURRENT PRODUCTIONS
MAYTAG VIRGIN
WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME
SAMANTHA INSIDE OUT
May 8 - 25, 2025
Shaker Bridge Theatre
Maytag Virgin by Audrey Cefaly. Alabama school teacher Lizzy Nash and her new neighbor, Jack Key, have lost their spouses and now find themselves living next door with their back porches and lives staring each other in the face. Two new neighbors put their hearts and laundry on the line and wonder if good clotheslines make good neighbors. As a year passes, kept secrets shake loose and they find themselves wondering if they are ready to live and love again. Laughter, love and laundry.
SAMANTHA INSIDE OUT
WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME
SAMANTHA INSIDE OUT
May 30, 2025
Shaker Bridge Theatre
SAMANTHA INSIDE OUT, a new one-woman show written by Marisa Smith (The Gift of the Magi: A Modern Adaptation, Venus Rising, Mad Love, Sex and Other Disturbances), directed by Pulitzer Prize finalist Theresa Rebeck (most Broadway-produced female playwright of our time, Omnium Gatherum, Seminar, Spike Heels, Bernhardt/Hamlet), and starring TONY Nominated Jayne Atkinson (Broadway: The Rainmaker and Enchanted April TV: Madam Secretary, The Walking Dead, House of Cards) as part of Shaker Bridge’s commitment to developing new work.
Samantha, a woman of a certain age has had it—with her life, her marriage, modern life, everything. She’s a high school English teacher, mother of grown twins and wife of Eliot, a cruel, pompous philanderer. After a humiliating and violent encounter with her husband, Samantha flees a stultifying Christmas party at the President of the College’s house. She ends up in the host’s teenage daughter’s cluttered room on the third floor. Amid the chaos Samantha reviews the wreckage of her life and reveals her truth and her secrets out loud. By doing so Samantha charts a new course for herself. It’s never too late to start again.
WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME
WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME
WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME
June 14
Shaker Bridge Theatre
A benefit reading for SBT's 18th Season.
Playwright Heidi Schreck’s boundary-breaking play breathes new life into our Constitution and imagines how it will shape the next generation of Americans. Fifteen-year-old Heidi earned her college tuition by winning Constitutional debate competitions across the United States. In this hilarious, hopeful and achingly human new play, she resurrects her teenage self in order to trace the profound relationship between four generations of women and the founding document that shaped their lives.
RECENT PRODUCTIONS
THE EFFECT
THE THANKSGIVING PLAY
THE WICKHAMS
January - February 2025
Shaker Bridge Theatre
The Effect by Lucy Prebble. Hearts racing. Minds reeling. Knees buckling. Connie and Tristan have palpable chemistry - or is it a side effect of a new antidepressant? They are volunteers in a clinical trial, but their sudden and illicit romance forces the supervising doctors to face off over the ethical consequences of their work. The Effect takes on our pill-popping culture with humor and scintillating drama.
THE WICKHAMS
THE THANKSGIVING PLAY
THE WICKHAMS
December 2024
Shaker Bridge Theatre
The Wickhams: Christmas at Pemberley
by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon. A yuletide sequel to Pride And Prejudice. In the downstairs servants’ quarters Mrs. Reynolds, a no-nonsense housekeeper; Cassie, an eager new maid; and Brian, a lovesick footman, are bustling with preparations for holiday guests. But their work is interrupted by the midnight arrival of the definitely not invited Mr. Wickham - Lydia’s rogue of a husband and Mr. Darcy’s sworn enemy. A charming holiday tale that explores the confines of class and the generosity of forgiveness.
THE THANKSGIVING PLAY
THE THANKSGIVING PLAY
Between Riverside and Crazy
September - October 2024
Good intentions collide with absurd assumptions in Larissa FastHorse’s wickedly funny satire, as a troupe of terminally woke teaching artists scrambles to create an elementary school pageant that somehow manages to celebrate both Turkey Day and Native American Heritage Month without ruffling any feathers. What could possibly go wrong? Just about everything. Rambunctious, thorny and not altogether politically correct, The Thanksgiving Play serves up the hypocrisies of woke America on a big, family-style, platter. Come get ya some.
Between Riverside and Crazy
Between Riverside and Crazy
Between Riverside and Crazy
Broadway
2022 - 2023
Helen Hayes Theater
Associate Director. City Hall is demanding more than his signature, the landlord wants him out, the liquor store is closed — and the Church won’t leave him alone. For ex-cop and recent widower Walter “Pops” Washington and his recently paroled son Junior, the struggle to hold on to one of the last great rent stabilized apartments on Riverside Drive collides with old wounds, sketchy new houseguests, and a final ultimatum in this Pulitzer Prize-winning dark comedy from Stephen Adly Guirgis. For Pops and Junior, it seems the old days are dead and gone — after a lifetime living Between Riverside and Crazy.
“It’s a dizzying and exciting place to be!” hails The New York Times.
THE DUMB WAITER
Between Riverside and Crazy
LAB 30 GALA CELEBRATION
November 2023
Hudson Theatre Works
Director. Hudson Theatre Works presents Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter as part of Pinter x2. As the New York World-Telegram & Sun describes: "In the basement of a long-abandoned restaurant, two hired killers nervously await their next assignment. Barred from daylight and living public contact by the nature of their work, they expend their waiting time in bickering. So eerie is the situation that everything becomes comic, or grotesque, or both. Ben re-reading a newspaper and exclaiming in disbelief over the news items, Gus fussing with an offstage stove and offstage plumbing. Ben bludgeoning Gus into silence if he as much as mentions their work. Gus worrying that someone had slept in his bed. So then the ancient dumbwaiter comes to life, the suspense becomes almost unbearable—that expertly has Pinter put the nerves of his characters and audience on edge."
“Pinter x 2” succeeds on every level. It’s mesmerizing theater with outstanding performances, taut direction and impeccable staging. Adrian Wattenmaker’s tense direction will keep you engaged and enthralled.
- Jim Testa, NJ Arts
LAB 30 GALA CELEBRATION
Between Riverside and Crazy
LAB 30 GALA CELEBRATION
May 2023
LAByrinth Theater Company
The Cutting Room
Director. LAByrinth Theater Company's 30th Season Gala Celebration!
2023 marks LAB’s Thirtieth Anniversary!
For three decades, LAByrinth has developed and produced groundbreaking new work, centering forgotten and disenfranchised voices, and changing the face of America's theatrical landscape in the process. Raise a glass with us on May 25 at The Cutting Room as we present our four founders Paul Calderon, David Deblinger, John Ortiz, and Gary Perez with the Davie Hoghe Award, LAB's highest accolade, which honors those who have shown artistic courage and outstanding dedication to LAByrinth. All Proceeds will help support our mission to empower members, create new work, and keep our programming accessible to all New Yorkers.
LAB 30: THree DECADES OF WORK
LAB 30: THree DECADES OF WORK
LAB 30: THree DECADES OF WORK
May 2023
LAByrinth Theater Company
Director. Obituary by Lyle Kessler featuring Margaret Ladd and Lyle Kessler.
2023 marks LAB’s Thirtieth anniversary!
In honor of this milestone, we are hosting a four-day free reading series celebrating the voices that have guided us and the work that has sustained us. We would not be here, thirty years on, without this tribe and we share this achievement with all of you.
Please join us at the Chain Theater from Wednesday, May 10th through Saturday evening May 13th to hear excerpts from the plays you love, conversations among artists you admire and the new material taking us into our fourth decade.
DÍA Y NOCHE
LAB 30: THree DECADES OF WORK
LAB 30: THree DECADES OF WORK
March - April 2023
LAByrinth Theater Co | 59E59 Theaters
Producer. Sex, drugs, queerness, and punk-rock. Welcome to border city life in El Paso, Texas, 1984. DÍA Y NOCHE is an unfiltered coming-of-age story about class struggles and the search for acceptance between two unlikely friends. Danny is a lower middle-class Chicano punk-rock kid who thinks he might be an artist. Martin is a Black upper-middle class band nerd who is gay and in the closet. Danny and Martin double-date, watch X-rated movies, go to concerts and try to overcome great odds as they navigate the racism and corruption greeting them at the doors to adulthood.
GRACELAND TOO
LAB 30: THree DECADES OF WORK
GRACELAND TOO
March 2023
Hudson Theatre Works
NJ Theatre Alliance Stages Festival
Director. Inspired by a true story, Graceland Too: The Building Elvis Never Left is a bluesy, tragic tale about the galaxy’s number one Elvis fan, Paul MacLeod, and his antebellum home-turned-Elvis shrine in Holly Springs, Mississippi. As Paul gears up for Elvis Week with the help of former prisoner, Dwight Taylor, two very different worlds collide and Graceland Too will never be the same again.
This event is part of the New Jersey Theatre Alliance 2023 Stages Festival, made possible by support from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts; The Horizon Foundation for New Jersey; OceanFirst Foundation; Fund for the New Jersey Blind; New Jersey Manufacturers; and Customers Bank.