At Axial Theater, a nonprofit now in its 24th season, we create bold, thought-provoking productions that invite audiences to confront their own assumptions and biases. We are committed to supporting the professional growth of playwrights and actors through staged workshops, development readings, and full productions. Join us as we explore the transformative power of theater and its ability to spark conversation, empathy, and change.
Axial Theatre is a Grant Award Winner! Thank you ArtsWestchester for selecting us for the 2026 Matching Grant!
WHO WE ARE
At Axial, we aim to deepen our understanding of the world through the arts. producers, presenters, and educators of theatrical experiences, we believe that live theater is a vital force inspiring social change. Performing the written word can shift our perspectives and enhance our awareness of our responsibilities in shaping the change we desire. We are dedicated to taking bold risks and creating opportunities for diverse voices to be heard.
Founded by Howard Meyer in 1999, Axial Theater Company is a collective of passionate artists dedicated to nurturing playwrights, actors, and directors who gone on to enjoy successful careers in film, television, and theater. In 202, we embarked on a phase of growth that reflects our commitment to developing talent while forging dynamic partnerships that Westchester's vibrant artistic community with the energetic theater scene of New York City. Under the guidance of Artistic Director Cady Mcain, who brings over 40 years of experience in the industry, Ax Theatre creates opportunities for local to collaborate with top professionals and for New York playwrights to refine their work in a supportive, safe environment.
Executive Director and
Co-Artistic Director
Cady McClain
Cady McClain is a history making, three-time Emmy© award-winning actress with multiple film, television, and theatre credits. Theater directing credits include Paint Made Flesh by Howard Meyer at The Cell in New York City (with support from Sothebys), which she then adapted into an award-winning screenplay (semi-finalist, Blue Cat); Never the Sinner by John Logan at Bethany Arts Community, Census by Susan Miller at Glass Ceiling Breakers, and multiple readings for Axial Theatre's Workshop Reading programs. Film directing includes the documentary Seeing is Believing: Women Direct (Jury Award Newport Beach Film Festival, Audience Award for a Feature Film at the SOHO Film Festival, Best Documentary Pro-Action at the Artemis Women in Action Film Festival) and seven award-winning short films including Robust Admixture - a short based on the work of Westchester poet BK Fischer featuring members of the Axial ensemble.
Other directing credits include a workshop reading of a new play by EST Playwrights Unit Eric Conger at MTC Creative Center in NYC and again at the Marilyn Monroe Theatre with the Lee StrasbergCreative Center, Susan Miller's Census at the Glass Ceiling Breakers Festival, multiple development readings for new plays by Jacquelyn Reingold, Alice Eve Cohen, Kate Benson and others, a new monologue by Jacquelyn Reingold for Paradise Theater on East 4th Street. She also produced a remount of Orson's Shadow by Austin Pendleton at Theatre for a New City in which she also starred.
McClain was honored to be awarded the International Matrix Award for her work related to supporting the female voice in film and television by the Association of Women in Communications.
She teaches acting in New York City both in the conservatory and weekly Scene Study classes at Michael Howard Studios.
"I am proud to continue the historic development of new plays through Axial Theater's playwriting programs and to expand the theater's professional footprint through thought-provoking productions, readings of new works and artful experiences followed by discussions with notable invited guests. I look forward to working with its talented ensemble as we expand the theater's reach and impact."
- Cady McClain
Co-Artistic Director
John Hickok
John Hickok is a director, actor, and educator with a wide-ranging career across theater, television, and voice performance. He directed the Olivier Award–winning Burning Blue at London’s West End (Theatre Royal Haymarket), and helmed subsequent productions in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Additional directing work includes an award-winning A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Off-Broadway premiere of Eye of the Beholder starring Kim Hunter.
On Broadway, Hickok appeared in Our Country’s Good, and Man and Boy opposite Frank Langella, and he originated roles in Parade (with Hal Prince), Aida (with Elton John), and Little Women. Favorite Shakespeare roles include Polonius, Tybalt, Aguecheek and Mercutio. His television credits include Law & Order, The Blacklist, Body of Proof, and Guiding Light. He is also widely recognized for his role as Special Agent Andrew Milton in Red Dead Redemption 2.
A longtime educator, Hickok has taught at Queens College and Bard College, directed productions at Central Connecticut State University, and currently serves as an adjunct professor at Western Connecticut State University. His four-decade career reflects a deep commitment to classical text, ensemble work, and actor training.
“I’m honored to join Axial Theatre as Co-Artistic Director and to work alongside Cady McClain in helping shape the company’s future. Axial is deeply committed to fearless, intimate, human storytelling, and I’m excited to be part of building its next chapter.”
- John Hickok
Board Members
Joe Daponte
Cheryl L. Davis
Tony DiFabbio
John Hickok
Dan Walworth
Honorary
Lisa Apkon
Howard Meyer
Advisory Board
(in alphabetical order)
Jane Dubin is a TONY Award-winning producer and the President of Double Play Connections, a theatrical production and management company committed to supporting emerging artists and playwrights in the creation and development of new works. Jane is a graduate of the Commercial Theatre Institute's 14-week (NYC) and O’Neill Center Intensive (CT) Producing Workshops and Director of Theater Resources Unlimited’s Producer Development Program Master Class.
Ms. Dubin is Chair of the Board of Directors of Houses on the Moon Theater Company and a recent Board member of the League of Professional Theatre Women. She is a member of the Broadway Women’s Alliance, the Off-Broadawy Alliance, and the Off-Broadway League. For two years she was co-curator of the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center New Play Reading Series. She co-produced Hudson River Rising, presenting events in Westchester for One Billion Rising (V-Day) 2013 and 2014. She was a strategic consultant to SPACE on Ryder Farm, an artists’ residency in Brewster, NY and a member of the Grand Jury for New York Musical Festival’s 2015 – 2019 seasons. She served as an evaluator for a NAMT innovation grant panel and for Bethany Arts Community’s residency program. She is a frequent panelist and guest lecturer on theater-related matters. Jane serves on the advisory boards of Elizabeth Mascia Child Care Center (Westchester), Axial Theatre and Dirty Laundry Theatre.
Productions: Broadway: Is This A Room, Dana H. Upcoming: The Village of Vale. Previously: The Prom (Drama Desk Award Best Musical), Farinelli and the King (starring Mark Rylance, nominated for 5 Tony Awards), An American in Paris (4 TONY Awards, plus London and National Tour), Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey (Westside Theater and on Tour), Ann, starring Holland Taylor (Lincoln Center); Bandstand (Broadway), Beebo Brinker Chronicles (2008 GLAAD Media Award for Theatre); Groundswell (the New Group), Peter and the Starcatcher (Broadway, Off-Broadway, National Tour), winner of 5 TONY Awards; The Norman Conquests (TONY Award, Best Play Revival), The 39 Steps (OB, Tour); The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (London) and the one-woman show that started it all, MentalPause by Margaret Liston. Film: Radium Girls.
Jane Dubin
Dominic Hoffman is a Double Ovation Award winner for his solo show: Uncle Jacques’ Symphony. He won an NAACP Best Actor Award for his solo play, Last Fare. Regional credits include: Michael in Lee Blessing’s play, Two Rooms, the role of the Magus in San Francisco Magic Theatre’s world premiere of Faustus, written and directed by David Mamet. Taming of the Shrew and Tamer Tamed at the Santa Cruz Shakespeare. Master Harold and the Boys at New Mexico Rep. He had the title role in the world premiere of Noah Johnson Had a Whore at South Coast Repertory, Flyin’ West at
San Diego Rep, That Serious He-Man Ball at Los Angeles Theatre Center, Gabe Gabriel in No Place to Be Somebody at San Francisco’s Victoria Theatre, Blade to the Heat at the Mark Taper Forum, and Circle X’s production of Brecht’s Edward II.
He was the recipient of an Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction for his reading of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Several of his plays have been optioned, including Emmitt and Ava, for which he has written the screenplay.
Mr. Hoffman was last seen in Los Angeles as Henry Brown in David Mamet's, Race at The Kirk Douglas Theatre. He lives in Venice, California and works in television, film and theatre as an actor/writer/director.
Dominic Hoffman
Craig Lucas
Craig Lucas. Craig Lucas' plays include Missing Persons, Blue Window, Reckless, God's Heart, The Dying Gaul, Stranger, Small Tragedy, Prayer For My Enemy, and The Singing Forest. He wrote the book for The Light In The Piazza ,music and lyrics by Adam Guettel; the musical play Three Postcards, music and lyrics by Craig Carnelia; the libretto for the opera Orpheus in Love, music by Gerald Busby; and he has recently completed the libretto for Two Boys, an opera with composer Nico Muhly, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and scheduled to premiere there in a co-production with the English National Opera. His new English adaptations include Brecht's Galileo, Chekhov's Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, and Strindberg's Miss Julie. His screenplays include Longtime Companion (Sundance Audience Award), The Secret Lives of Dentists (New York Film Critics Best Screenplay), Prelude to a Kiss, Reckless and The Dying Gaul, which he also directed. Last year Mr. Lucas directed the film Birds of America. Onstage he directed Harry Kondoleon's plays Saved or Destroyed at Rattlestick (Obie Award for Best Director) and Play Yourself as well as his own play This Thing of Darkness (co-authored with David Schulner) at the Atlantic. He has worked with directors Bartlett Sher, Norman Rene, Mark Wing-Davey, Daniel Sullivan, Joe Mantello, Michael Mayer, Lisa Peterson and Anders Cato. His work has been seen on and off Broadway, and at such institutional theaters as Actor's Theatre of Louisville, Berkeley Rep, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Circle Rep, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Goodman, Hartford Stage, Intiman, Lincoln Center, Long Wharf, Manhattan Theatre Club, New York Shakespeare Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Portland Stage, Rattlestick, Roundabout, Seattle Rep, South Coast Rep, Steppenwolf, Trinity Rep, and the Vineyard, and it is widely produced internationally.
Twice nominated for a Tony (Prelude to a Kiss and The Light in the Piazza), three times for the Drama Desk (Prelude, Missing Persons, and Reckless), he has won the L.A. Drama Critics Award (Blue Window), the Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Award for Best American Play (The Singing Forest), the Hull-Warriner Award (The Light in the Piazza), the LAMBDA Literary Award (for his anthology What I Meant Was), the Flora Roberts Award, the Excellence in Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Laura Pels/PEN Mid-Career Achievement Award and the Joan Cullman Award; he has twice won the Obie Award for Best Play (Prelude and Small Tragedy). He graduated from Boston University where he studied with poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck.
Mr. Lucas serves as Associate Artistic Director at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle, and he is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild, SSDC and PEN America. He lives in upstate New York.
Susan Miller is an OBIE award winning playwright and Guggenheim Fellow whose work includes the critically acclaimed one-woman play, My Left Breast (Obie), which premiered in Louisville’s Humana Festival and has been performed across the U.S, Canada, and France. Her play A Map of Doubt And Rescue won The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, as well as The Pinter Prize. Her play Average American recently won 2nd Prize in the 2014 Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation’s Playwriting Competition. A recipient of two NEA’s & a Rockefeller Grant, Miller received her first OBIE for Nasty Rumors And Final Remarks. Her other plays include: For Dear Life, Flux, Confessions of A Female Disorder, It’s Our Town, Too, and Reading List. She’s been produced at The Public Theatre, Second Stage, Naked Angels, New York Stage & Film, The Mark Taper Forum, with developmental support by The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Ojai Playwrights Conference, The Playwrights Center, among others.
Her articles have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, American Theatre, The Dramatist, Girlfriends, The Bark, and MS.
Miller was a Consulting Producer/Writer on the first season of The L Word as well as ABC’s landmark series, Thirtysomething. She’s written original screenplays for Disney, Universal, Warner Brothers, and her short film, The Grand Design, was directed by and starred Eric Stoltz with Frances Conroy.
She is the Executive Producer/Writer, with Tina Cesa Ward, of the highly acclaimed Indie web series, Anyone But Me, which airs on Hulu & YouTube and has over 50 million views worldwide. For her work on Anyone But Me, Miller & Ward won the Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in Original New Media, the first of its kind ever presented.
Miller is also the Creator/writer of Bestsellers, a webseries about women in a book club.
Susan Miller lives and writes in New York City.
Susan Miller
Jacquelyn Reingold
Jacquelyn Reingold writes for theater and television. Her plays, which include Kiss Me Somewhere Else, String Fever (starring Cynthia Nixon and Evan Handler), Acapulco, I Know, A Story About a Girl, Girl Gone, A Very Very Short Play, 2B (Or Not 2B), and Freeze Tag, have been seen in New York at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Naked Angels, The Working Theater, MCC Theatre; at the Actors Theatre of Louisville; Portland Center Stage, Oregon; Theater J, Washington DC; PlayLabs, Minneapolis; and in London, Dublin, Berlin, Hong Kong. Honors and awards include: Kennedy Center‘s Fund for New American Plays, New York Foundation for the Arts, EST/Sloan Foundation Commissions, New Dramatists' Whitfield Cook Award, finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Oscar Reubhausen Commission, plus MacDowell, Ucross, and Hermitage Artist Retreat Fellowships.
Her work has been published in two Women Playwrights: The Best Plays, several Best American Short Plays, and by Samuel French, Vintage Books, and Smith & Kraus. She wrote the Forward to Applause Books' 10 Minute Plays by Women+ over 40 and 100 Monologues by Women+ over 40. A collection of her one-acts Things Between Us is published by DPS. Four of her short plays have been recorded for radio/podcast by Playing On Air.
In television, Jackie was a Writer/Executive Producer for Paramount+'s critically acclaimed The Good Fight. Other TV writing includes Best of Both Worlds, a pilot for John Wells, East New York, BrainDead, Grace and Frankie, Smash, and all the Mia episodes for Emmy nominated Gabriel Byrne and Hope Davis for HBO’s In Treatment.
A member of Ensemble Studio Theater, an alum of New Dramatists, Jackie is also a founding member of Honor Roll! an advocacy group for women+ playwrights over 40, whose goal is inclusion in theater. She has taught dramatic writing at NYU, SUNY Stonybrook-Manhattan, Columbia University, and has been a guest TV or Playwriting teacher, often. She is currently a mentor with Laura Cahill’s Playwriting Workshop for Ukrainian teens, writing about the war.
John Patrick Shanley is from the Bronx. His plays include Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, Italian American Reconciliation, Welcome to the Moon, Four Dogs and a Bone, Cellini, Dirty Story, Defiance, and Pirate. His theatrical work is performed extensively across the United States and around the world. For his play Doubt, he received both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the arena of screenwriting, he has nine films to his credit, most recently Doubt, with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, which was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay. The film of Doubt was also directed by Mr. Shanley. Other films include Five Corners (Special Jury Prize, Barcelona Film Festival), Alive, Joe Versus the Volcano, which he also directed, and Live from Baghdad for HBO (Emmy nomination). For his script of Moonstruck he received both the Writers Guild of America Award and an Academy Award for best original screenplay. The Writers Guild of America awarded Mr. Shanley the 2009 Lifetime Achievement In Writing. The New York Observer called him this season's King Dramatist for his revivals of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea at the Lucile Lortel Theatre, Doubt at Roundabout Theater Company, and Brooklyn Laundry at Manhattan Theatre Club.
John Patrick Shanley
In Memoriam:
Athol Fugard
Rest in Peace Athol Fugard
June 11th, 1932 - March 8th, 2025
Hailed as “the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world,” South Africa’s Athol Fugard has won international praise for creating theatre of “power, glory, and majestic language.” In more than 20 plays, written over six decades, he has chronicled the struggles of men and women of all races for dignity and human fulfillment.
Born and raised in the Eastern Cape, he founded a multiracial theatre company in the 1950s in defiance of the South African government’s apartheid system. When he and a black colleague appeared as mixed-race brothers in his play The Blood Knot, it was closed after a single performance. In the 1960s, his work found an audience in other English-speaking countries. After he appeared in The Blood Knot on BBC Television, the government seized his passport.
Since the downfall of the apartheid system, Fugard has been honored by his country’s government and by critics and audiences the world over. An Honorary Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature, in 2001 he received a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. His novel Tsotsi was adapted into the film of the same name, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 2006. He has appeared as an actor in the feature films Gandhi and The Killing Fields. In 2014, he returned to the stage for the first time in 15 years to act in his play Shadow of the Hummingbird at the Long Wharf Theatre.
Biography Credit: Academy of Achievement
Axial Theater is committed to sustaining an equitable space where everyone who walks through our doors feels valued and respected regardless of gender, age, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, education, or ability.
We understand that the foundation of a vibrant, thriving arts theater and performance venue is the cross-pollination of creative programming, inclusive practices and strategies, and a team of employees and volunteers who share in these core values. We are deeply grateful to for the many supporters who stand with us.