Dan McCleary (TSC Founder and Nancy R. Copp Producing Artistic Director; Apprentice Director; Stage Director of The Tempest and A Streetcar Named Desire), a native of Memphis, last year directed The Trouble Begins at Eight: Mark Twain featuring Pete Pranica and played the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac.  For TSC, he also has directed/acted in As You Like It (playing Jaques), Ada and the Engine, Blue Roses of Tennessee Williams (playing Tennessee with his son, Collins), Julius Caesar, Waiting for Godot, The Glass Menagerie (playing old Tom), The Taming of the Shrew (playing Sly),  Richard III (playing Richard), To Kill a Mockingbird, Much Ado About Nothing, Ernest Hemingway in Key West, Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia Gothic, All’s Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, The Tempest, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the all-female Julius Caesar, Othello, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), Themes from a Midsummer Night with IRIS Orchestra, Classical Creations in Quarantine, and Shakespeare’s Election of Coriolanus.  Other regional theatre directing credits: The Servant of Two Masters, his adaptation of Anaïs Nin’s Henry and June, Vita & Virginia (Sackville-West and Woolf), My Own Stranger (Anne Sexton), and The Fiery Rain (Edith Wharton/Henry James/Morton Fullerton) at Shakespeare & Company, where Dan was Associate Artistic Director. He also has directed at Seattle Shakespeare, Orlando Shakespeare, and Georgia Shakespeare.  He has played over 120 roles on stage, including Coriolanus (thrice), Richard III (twice), Macbeth (twice), Falstaff, Marc Antony, Caliban, Brutus, Petruchio, Hotspur, Bottom, Master Ford, Stephano, Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus, Cassio, Bertram, Demetrius, Silvius, Herman Melville, Porfiry, Charles Dickens, The Gentleman Caller, Hannah from Hamburg in La Cage, and Bertha Bumiller et. al. in the Greater Tuna series.  Dan is a published poet, and the creator/director/actor of the plays Speak What We Feel: Shakespeare’s Radical Response to a Radical Time; Unto the Breach; Quintessence: Shakespeare in Performance; and Classical Creations in Quarantine.  Memphis Magazine has named him among the “Who’s Who in Memphis” for six years.  Dan presented his TEDx Talk “Shakespeare in Kindergarten, or Let Fall Rome” in Memphis in 2020, and the Germantown Arts Alliance honored him with its 2009 Distinguished Arts and Humanities Medal for Performing Arts.  He holds a B.A. in Advertising and Journalism from Temple University, has served on the Boards of Herman Melville’s Arrowhead and the City of Germantown’s Telecommunications Commission, and he is the dad and coach of all-star 13-year-old twin musicians, Sullivan and Collins.