Class of 1993

CAROLYN CANTOR steps to the directing side of the stage.

As a struggling actress in New York, Cantor kept hearing the same refrain from directors: "You should be a director." "And I was offended," Cantor says." 'Why, don't you think I'm a good actress?!'" After three years of acting in off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions, Cantor "fell" into a producing job, eventually associate producing the Devil's Playground, an Emmy-nominated HBO documentary about the Amish directed by her brother, Steven. Then a theater residency program finally gave her a shot at directing. "As soon as I did it, it was like I found what I was meant to do," Cantor says. She quickly established herself as a young director to watch and was named a 1999 Drama League Directing Fellow and a 2002 Boris Sagal Fellow at the Williamstown Theater Festival. Cantor is now the artistic director of Edge Theater Company in New York City, which she co-founded in 2001 with husband and production designer David Korins. Her direction last fall of Eve-olution garnered good reviews from The New York Times, and the Edge's Orange Flower Water is expected to run through May 7 at the Theater for the New City. While Cantor hopes to ultimately break into film directing with a project she and her brother are writing, her heart is in the theater. "I love what I do and I feel lucky to be able to make a living doing what I'm doing," Cantor says.