Rebecca Noon & Martha Boesing
Rebecca Noon was born in Newport, OR in 1979. In 2007 she met her now-husband and creative partner Jed Hancock-Brainerd, who was ironically born in Newport, RI. Together they moved to Rhode Island in 2009, and though she’s lived in too many places to name a point of origin, Rhode Island will always be home. Together Jed and Rebecca manifest visions within an itinerant devising ensemble, Strange Attractor, which creates community-based theater-ish events and occurrences outside traditional theatrical spaces. They currently live in Minneapolis, MN, where Rebecca serves as the Director of Community Engagement at the Guthrie Theater after previously inventing and leading community engagement at Trinity Rep in Providence, RI. Rebecca holds a BFA in Acting from the College of Santa Fe, an MFA in Lecoq Based Actor Created Physical Theatre from the London International School of Performing Arts, and has won several grants and awards for playwriting and theater-making. She met Martha Boesing in 2003 when they both lived in the Bay Area, which was one of the best things that could have happened when she was that young and impressionable.
Martha Boesing was born in 1936 in Providence, RI, and had a bad childhood in New Hampshire that clung to her for decades. She fled New England in the 1960’s, heading progressively West, and lighting her personal spark through communal living, radical theater-making, Marxist principles, every kind of therapy you can imagine and counter-cultural, pacifist, humanist political movements. She made decades of live performance as an actor, writer, director, deviser, and producer, most significantly in Minneapolis at Firehouse Theater and then with her own company -- the longest-running feminist theater in the country -- At the Foot of the Mountain. Throughout Martha’s career, she won numerous awards and fellowships, including the first prestigious Bush Fellowship to go to a theater artist, alongside August Wilson. Martha moved to the Bay Area in 2001 to be near her kids, grandkids, and current partner, Buddhist writer and teacher Sandy Boucher. Today at 84, Martha continues to be active in progressive politics, as well as writing, teaching, and performing -- though never as much as she would like. Her Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron helps her remember to “turn toward everything that arises, with a kind and soft heart, a love for yourself, and really let yourself FEEL it.” Martha and Sandy live in Oakland closeish to two of her three kids and all four of her grandkids. They have everything they need except money, but it turns out if you have everything else that isn’t so important anyway.