|
Norma Combs, Actor
Norma was featured in PlayBuilders’ very first community based play, Wahiawa, Remembah Wen… and also participated in the Po’okela Award winning production of Houseless in Paradise. She is a special education teacher and currently teaches drama at Aliamanu Middle School in Salt Lake. She has a Bachelors of Business degree from the University of Hawaii and a Masters in Special Education from the University of Phoenix. She served 10 years in the U.S. Army, Air Defense Artillery and was honorably discharged as a Captain. She and her husband, Robert E. Combs, have been married for 26 years and have a daughter, Leilani Lariing Combs, and a 2 year old Chihuahua terrier, Paco. |
|
Laura Clark Greaver, Director/Playwright
Laura has an MFA in Theatre Directing from UH and a BA in Theatre with an emphasis in Acting and Directing from Cal State Northridge. She is a lecturer at UH and was an Acting and Improvisation teacher as well as producer and director with Teenage Drama Workshop at CSUN. She was also an assistant director and co-producer of the Chaminade Collegiate Theatre Festival. Aside from theatre, Laura has been owner of Clark-Greaver Bookkeeping since 2002. Her bookkeeping business services small businesses in both the Honolulu and Los Angeles areas. She has previously served as Treasurer on The Board of Directors of The Repertory East Playhouse and The TEAM Referral Network of SCV |
|
Lauren Ballesteros, Actor/Playwright
Lauren is very excited and honored to join the ensemble at Hawai'i Playbuilders! She has been a fan for several years and feels it is the perfect place to align her values in storytelling and community empowerment. Originally from East L.A., Lauren is an artist and third generation working class Mexican-American. Her identity informs her passion for justice and she channels it into her work and art. After graduating from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa with a B.A in Sociology and Theater Minor, she worked as a community/political organizer with UNITE HERE Local 5 labor union. There she was able to create art based protests for actions and rallies and got involved in several plays at Kumu Kahua Theater and TAG Theater. During her recent time in L.A., Lauren joined Latinx theater collective, as a writer, actor, and producer. Their objective was to organize theater festivals that provided a critical space for women and LGBTQ communities to speak their truth. All these experiences have affirmed Lauren's believe in the transformative power of storytelling as a way to make our lives and world more authentic. Since moving back to Hawai‘i in 2019, Lauren now works as a program manager for the Sierra Club O'ahu and focuses on climate change campaigns and youth empowerment. |
|
Terri Madden, Producer/Director/Playwright/Community Organizer
Terri Madden holds a BA in political science and an MFA in theatre from the University of Hawaii.
A proud grandmother of 6, she founded PlayBuilders of Hawai’i Theater Company early in 2011. Since then, she has spearheaded all of PlayBuilders community collaborative projects including Someone Else’s Slippahs, Chinatown, Wahiawa, Remembah Wen, Yes, I am; Stories from Honolulu’s LGBT Community, Houseless in Paradise, The Waipahu Project , and #Me Too Survivors Circle. Terri has also served as a director or playwright on several. In 2014 she was recognized by the Hawaii State Theatre Council in 2014 for directing Houseless in Paradise, and in 2017 for writing the play Dragonfly the Story of a Young Local Girls Journey Through Foster Care. Terri has also produced the annual PlayBuilders PlayFestival since 2011 and has introduced almost 90 new plays to Honolulu audiences over the years. Terri is a recipient of Lisa Toshigawa Inouye Award for Excellence in Playwriting, and a multiple Po’okela Award winning actress for both straight plays and musicals. |
|
William Ha'o, Director/ Actor/ Stage Manager
William Haʻo (Director) has been a professional actor for over twenty-five years. While based in New York City, he has performed for many of NYCs’ theater companies and toured in almost every state of the Union, with performances also in Vancouver, Canada, and Athens, Greece. His work includes various voiceovers for documentaries. He narrated the award-winning documentary On the Move: The Central Ballet of China. Since returning to his beloved aina several years ago, he has performed with Loʻi Theatre, Kumu Kahua Theatre, and the Oral History Department at UHM. For Hawaii Mission Houses (HMH), Will has directed Twelf Nite O' Wateva, The Tempest, Two Gentlemen of Verona for their outdoor summer shows. He also directs their popular Cemetery Pupu Theater series. He also performed at The Hawaii Theater in Eddie Wen Go, The Story of the Upside Down Canoe by Marion Lyman-Mersereau. In 2017 Will directed Dragonfly, The Story of a Young Local Girls Journey Through Foster Care for PlayBuilders. |
|
Becky McGarvy, Choreographer
Becky McGarvy was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and took her first dance class when she was 15. She received a BFA in Dance from the University of Hawaii and has also studied at the Boston Conservatory. She is a co-founder of Spatial Sculptors; Honolulu’s first all compositional and contact improvisation dance company, and is a dancer with the IONA Contemporary Dance Theatre and Divino Ritmo. Becky has choreographed for Playbuilders' Wahiawa, Remembah Wen, and "Dragonfly, The Story of a Young Local Girl's Journey Through Foster Care". She has also performed in numerous PlayBuilders productions with the Playbuilders Ensemble (PEN) as an actor and dancer. |
|
Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak, PlayBuilders Ensemble Adviser
Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak retired in July 2018 from her post as Professor of Theatre and Director of the Asian Theatre Program in the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Department of Theatre & Dance, where she received her Ph.D. in Asian Theatre in 1983. While carrying out the field research for her doctoral dissertation, she became the first non-Chinese to perform Jingju (Beijing/Peking “opera”) in the People’s Republic of China. Since that time she has written and published on the performance structure and aesthetics of Chinese theatre, and has translated and directed one modern, four “newly-written historical/mythological,” and five classical Jingju plays at the University of Hawai‘i; at Chinese invitation, three classical productions have been given performance tours of mainland China. Dr. Wichmann-Walczak is the first honorary (and first non-Chinese) member of the National Xiqu (“Chinese opera”) Institute and of the Chinese Theatre Artists Associations of Shanghai and of Jiangsu Province. She has been awarded the National Xiqu Music Association’s Kong Sanchuan award for excellence in research, creation, and performance, as well as the National Festival of Jingju’s Golden Chrysanthemum Award for outstanding achievements in promoting and developing Jingju. She was named a Founder of Asian Performance Study in North America by the professional Association for Asian Performance in 2014; received the 2018 Pierre Bowman Po‘okela Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Hawai‘i State Theatre Council; was awarded the 2018 international Dr. Shuang Xin Tsao Foundation Award for “outstanding, unique, and creative accomplishments” in the field of Jingju; and was one of ten people named “Person of the Year” at the “7th Annual Selection of Persons of the Year in the Transmission of and Propagation of Chinese Culture,” a ceremony taped by China Central Television in Beijing, 2019. |
|
Deanna Espinas, Actor
Deanna Espinas was born and raised in Honolulu and currently resides in Palolo Valley. She worked for the Department of Public Safety for over 31 years as a correctional librarian, and retired in January 2014.She serves on the board of directors for Hawaii's Plantation Village, the Filipino-American Historical Society of Hawaii, Friends of the Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, and Hawaii People's Fund. She enjoys participating in a variety of cultural activities which celebrate people's experiences growing up in Hawaii. She is a member of Keolumana United Methodist Church, Faith Action for Community Equity, and just began her term on the Hawaii District Board of United Methodist Women. Past performances with PlayBuilders include The Waipahu Project and Dragonfly, The Story of a Young Local Girls Journey Through Foster Care. |
|
Robert Yokoyama
Robert Yokoyama is currently a direct support worker at Winners at Work in Iwilei and has been employed there since 2010. He teaches a job skills program and works with adults who have developmental disabilities. He helps them improve their reading and math skills. From 1999 to 2009, Robert taught the competency based high school diploma program at Wahiawa Community School. He helped hundreds of students earn their high school diplomas. He enjoys reading, writing, surfing the Internet, and watching movies in his spare time. Robertʻs first play with PlayBuilders was Wahiawa: Remembah Wen, and we went on to perform in Houseless in Paradise, and The Waipahu Project. In 2015, Robert was featured in an award winning min-documentary in which his work with PlayBuilders was featured. |
