About Me…
Joe Link recently directed Elf – The Musical at TCR and is our Summer Camp Director. Joe is a Language Arts teacher and the Director of Technical Theater of Jefferson High School and has directed 45 plays in the area over the past 18 years. Joe directs at Jefferson and The Giving Tree Theater, designs for Classics at Brucemore, builds sets for The Foundry Forge Performance laboratory, creates escape rooms for Shores Event Center, performs with SPT theater, gives workshops on stage combat and puppet making. In his spare time he teaches theater camps at TCR including such favorite themes as “Movie Makers,” “Minecraft,” “Harry Potter,” “Star Wars,” and much more. Joe has also written 10 plays, seven of which have been produced for the Brucemore Children’s summer show.
Joe runs on a steady diet of caffeine and any project that allows him to bring things to life. From play scripts, to puppets, the more imaginative the idea the more satisfying it is to collaborate, design, and produce the project. Joe is also a stage inventor of sorts. He designed and built a dragon for Shrek, all four Audrey II plants for Little Shop of Horrors, and Iago Puppet for TCE’s Aladdin, a Hiss puppet for TCR’s Jungle Book, puppets for Seussical at TCR, Fetch the T Rex for Brucemore, etc…
And he still somehow has time to play with Legos alongside his daughters.
Approach/Style…
I like to keep directing simple. Let the actor do what comes naturally, but add what would be fun. I love those early rehearsals when actors are simply reading, script in hand, and moving about the space, trying things out. It’s my job then to listen and watch for the change in a tone, a hint of a gesture, a build of a joke. When a moment starts to click we stop right in the thick of it and write it down so as capture that brilliance and make it a permanent part of the show. Now that we have acknowledged what makes that moment work, we can see how far we can take it, what we can build on it in the next moment, or simply what would be fun to try. If the acting comes naturally, and the choices are fun to do, the work of theater doesn’t feel like work at all.