Cynthia Ashperger:
Selected directing credits: Tilco Strike by D’Arcy Jennish (upcoming),The Great Shadow by Alex Poch-Goldin, The Women by Clare Booth Luce, George Kaplan by Frédéric Sonntag, Tales from the Vienna Woods by Ödön von Horváth, Tender Napalm by Philip Ridley, Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens adapted by Michael Hollingsworth, Peace by Aristophanes adapted by Velina Hasu Houston, and A Summer Day by Jon Fosse. Her forty year acting career in theatre, film and TV includes Canadian Screen Award and Dora Award nomininated performances. Cynthia has been one of the principal acting teachers at the School of Performance and Toronto Metropolitan University since 1994 and was appointed Director of the Acting Program between 2004 and 2019. A renowned teacher of Chekhov Acting Technique, she has lectured and directed nationally and internationally in Australia, Croatia, England, Finland, Germany, Holland, Japan, Korea and Serbia.
Her musical Foreign Tongue (book and lyrics) played in Toronto in 2019 at The Next Stage Festival (music by Justin Hiscox and Daniel Abrahamson). It was published by Playwright’s Canada Press in the anthology of immigrant themed plays titled Scripting (Im)migration (Yana Meerzon editor) under her nom de plume of Lola Xenos. She is a published author of numerous scholarly books and articles including: Anthology of Contemporary English Canadian Plays, an anthology of Canadian plays in Croatian translation (translation and anthologist, 2021. “Michael Chekhov’s Five Guiding Principles and Theatre Practice Today. The Case of “Tender Napalm” by Phillip Ridley”, in Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov (2015). Theatre Research Canada: Special Issue – 36.2, Theatre and Immigration “Foreign Accent Syndrome – An Auto-Ethnography” (2015).The Rhythm of Space and the Sound of Time. Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique in the 21st century (Editions Rodopi of Amsterdam; New York, 2007).