2018-present
Director/Producer & Creator or Co-creator
"The experience has been profoundly positive - and one that has cultivated growth socially, creatively and consciously." QC Nerve
Developed over the course of six months to a year or longer, these projects are created with groups of people whose life stories are close-ups on the history and culture of their time. With director and creative team, projects are developed from writing and discussion, telling the individual stories of those involved and a bigger story of the collective experience. The result is a live theatre production, and a film version of the event or documentary film about the chosen subject. These projects create new communities, and encourage ideas about the future by exploring how the past became the present.
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Acting Our Age (2019-2024)
A series with people whose life stories show how history was made
Project created by Lyndall Hare and Steve Umberger with the casts
Directed by Steve Umberger
Director of Photography Jay Thomas
Music Fred Story
Series developed and produced by The Works (Playworks Group)
2019-2022 projects sponsored by Aldersgate, Charlotte
2024 project sponsored by Plymouth Harbor, Sarasota
2018-2024
One Century Seven Voices (2019)
Voices of the Pandemic (2021)
Using Our Voices (2022)
Voices of the Harbors (2024)
"The collaboration between director and gerontologist turns decades of memories into a collective whole.” Charlotte Observer
Acting Our Age series developed by The Works and sponsored by Aldersgate & Plymouth Harbor, non-profit organizations, to recognize individual lives in historical context.
Each Acting Our Age edition is 60-120 minutes long.
Watch the 5 minute trailer for the Acting Our Age project 2018-2022
and scroll for more information.
Telling the Times series
The Voices Project: A City Church (2026)
A project and film about the community at an iconic Greenwich Village church
known as “The Church of the Patriots” during the American Revolution
Directed & developed by Steve Umberger
Director of Photography Jay Thomas
Composer & Sound Designer Fred Story
Sponsored by The First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York
Call Me By My Name (2023)
A project and film about the creativity of the unhoused community
Project developed by The Works (Playworks Group)
Part of The Works documentary series Telling the Times
Created and directed by Steve Umberger / Director of Photography Jay Thomas
Developed 2018-2022 / Recipient of NC Humanities Council Development Grant
StreetsmARTs project created for and sponsored by First United Methodist Church
"The experience has been profoundly positive - and one that has cultivated growth socially, creatively and consciously." QC Nerve
"This is an example of how we can save the world - conversations, empathy, engagement." Patron Rosemary Monaghan
"We were at times filled with laughter, other times brought to tears by the shared life experiences. They were able to weave so much history while telling their own stories." Patron Annie M. Brooks
"These documentaries on stage and film give people a very long time to develop trust, and you feel the depth of that commitment in what they do on stage. The audience recognizes their own lives in these real stories. The 'actors' also learn surprising things about themselves. And it's a very, very interesting thing to create a story arc from the collective experience of a group. We can literally watch our own history unfold through their lives."
Interview for ASweatLife/Chicago © 2019