Stephen Thorne came to Trinity Rep during the 2000-01 Season when he was invited by then-Artistic Director Oskar Eustis. During the previous summer, he and future wife Angela Brazil, who met in graduate school a few years prior, were at Bread Loaf in Vermont. Stephen and Angela have both been at Trinity Rep as members of the resident acting company ever since and do their best to return to Bread Loaf each summer. In 2019, Stephen directed All’s Well That Ends Well featuring many others associated with Trinity Rep, including MFA student Haley Schwartz and MFA alums Rachel Christopher and Anita Castillo-Halvorssen.
Stephen credits the 2000-01 Season as being formative in his experiences at Trinity Rep. He was able to play Homer Wells in The Cider House Rules. He says, “It was a beautiful story, wonderfully told by this amazing company.” In his time at Trinity Rep, Stephen has performed in many roles that our audiences have loved. Recently, he played The Dentist in Little Shop of Horrors and was Ebenezer Scrooge in 2018’s A Christmas Carol – which is also our highest-selling production of all time. Stephen also wrote The Completely Fictional – Utterly True – Final Strange Tale of Edgar Allan Poe which was directed in the 2010-11 Season by Curt Columbus as a nod to Poe’s Providence roots. You can see clips of the show here and here.
This past December, Oskar Eustis reached out to Stephen regarding a production of Lawrence Wright’s play Camp David that Oskar was directing at the Alley Theatre in Houston. The play centered on the peace negotiations in 1978 between Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. Stephen says, “I sent them an audition tape and was delighted when they made me an offer to play Jimmy Carter.”
While preparing for Camp David, Stephen rehearsed in New York for about 3 weeks and then traveled to Houston to tech and do the run of the show. Stephen says, “It was an incredible experience for many reasons. I got to be in the room with Oskar again, working on a really fascinating play by Larry Wright – I got to work with an extremely talented group of actors from New York and Los Angeles – and I got to work at the Alley Theater which also has a resident company of actors – and two of them are very good friends of ours!” The play was very well received by Houston audiences and had only five performances left before they were forced to close due to the pandemic. Stephen is grateful for the experience, saying, “It was such a gift to step into a new environment – I am very grateful that Curt Columbus is so supportive of the company working outside of Trinity Rep.”
