Artistic director/co-founder of The Gift Theatre Company, Thornton recently directed John Conroy’s My Kind of Town for Steppenwolf’s First Look Festival as well as Of Mice and Men at Steppenwolf. In addition to his numerous directing credits with The Gift, he has directed We’ve Got Our Own Problems, Natural Gas, Best of Second City Directors’ Showcase at Second City, Picasso At The Lapin Agile (Noble Fool), and Julius Caesar (Crew Of Patches), among others. Thornton was an assistant director of Steppenwolf’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning August: Osage County.
A Jeff Award-winning actor, Thornton most recently appeared in Natural Gas, The Ruby Sunrise, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (The Gift), Museum Pieces (Second City), Messing With A Friend (with Susan Messing), and Steppenwolf’s The Elephant Man. Michael is a graduate of The School at Steppenwolf, The Conservatory Program and Directing Program at Second City, has trained in improv at iO and Annoyance and teaches at Second City, Columbia College, and The School at Steppenwolf. As a playwright, Thornton’s play, The Princess and the Bear, was published in excerpt by Third Coast Press and is being workshopped through a grant from The Second City Foundation.
Michael has received numerous awards including: Chicago Finalist: National Shakespeare Contest (Mitzi-Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center, New York), Northlight’s Jack Springer Award for Outstanding Performance, The Second City Foundation’s 2009 Jim Zulevic Chicago Arts Award, The 2009 3Arts Artist Award, and The Joseph Jefferson Award for Solo Performance.
Thornton currently plays Dr. Gabriel Fife on ABC’s “Private Practice.”
PJ POWERS was a co-founder of Chicago’s TimeLine Company in 1997 and became Artistic Director in 1999. Since then, he has overseen the production of more than 85 plays, including 13 world premieres and 40 Chicago premieres. During his tenure, TimeLine has garnered 60 Jeff Awards, including 11 for Outstanding Production, as well as awards for excellence in arts management, including the 2016 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. PJ also was instrumental in establishing TimeLine’s longtime home on Wellington Avenue in 1999; expanding the company’s programming to include productions in numerous other venues, including the Broadway Playhouse; creating the TimePieces play reading series and First Draft Festival of new work; launching the Living History Education Program in Chicago Public Schools under the direction of TimeLine co-founder Juliet Hart; and planning for TimeLine’s new home in Uptown. A graduate of The Theatre School at DePaul University, PJ has served on the Board of Directors for the League of Chicago Theatres and received a Goldman Sachs Senior Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. As an actor, he has appeared in 18 productions at TimeLine, and for TimeLine he also directed the Chicago premiere of J.T. Rogers’ ONE GIANT LEAP: THE APOLLO 11 MOON LANDING in a one-night event at the Broadway Playhouse.
Mark Messing is a composer and musical agitator. He is Musical Director of circus punk marching band Mucca Pazza and has led the band from coast to coast through concert halls, public parks, neighborhood pubs and a dozen canoes on the Chicago River. They have travelled the country with their message of frenetic joy and through their benefit series they have brought funding and exposure to small local community organizations.
He has composed music for numerous independent films including The First Breath of Tengan Rei (2009) by Junko Kajino and Ed M. Koziarski, and has been musical director for hundreds of theater performances. As Musical Director for Redmoon Theater he composed for 100 tiny radios at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a 35-foot drum tree at Millennium Park and musicians on stilts at Puppetropolis.
His new company, Opera-Matic, performs Lullaby Parades on bicycle powered floats in Chicago neighborhoods at twilight.
