Dennis Trainor Jr. is an actor, playwright, filmmaker, and teacher, currently on the faculty at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. He lives in Lowell in the lofts at Western Avenue Studios and stars in the play “Job” at SpeakEasy Stage Company in Boston. It opened last week and is on through Feb. 7.
Prior to teaching, he worked across media and activism, directing “American Autumn,” an insider’s documentary on Occupy Wall Street; serving as Jill Stein’s Communications Director in the 2016 presidential campaign; and spending months alongside water protectors at Standing Rock.
He eventually shaped those experiences into his solo play, “Manifest Destiny’s Child,” which was directed by Tony Award-winner David Esbornson, and which was a critical hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
In “Job”‘ he plays Loyd, a crisis therapist assigned to assess if Jane, a Big Tech employee, is fit to go back to work after her meltdown at work goes viral. But within moments of their meeting, the session explodes, and the audience learns that there may be more to Loyd than meets the eye. The result is a look at power, politics, and mental health in an age where identity is performative and everything is on the record.
Stages recently caught up with Trainor to talk about acting, his current play, and living in Lowell. Here are his answers.
STAGES: Tell us about yourself — where you grew up…how you got interested in theatre…etc.
TRAINOR: I grew up on Long Island, in a working, middle-class town, not one where you’re encouraged to say, “I think I’ll become an actor.” I studied aeronautical engineering and thought I wanted to be a pilot, but I think I saw the film “Top Gun” at a very impressionable age. I had no skills in physics or math, and was completely lost the first semester. It was in English lit class where I fell in love with Shakespeare’s language, left behind a trail of failing grades in classes like “Aviation weather” and wandered over to the theater department, where I found home. I earned my MFA in Acting from the American Conservatory Theater. Training at A.C.T. really sharpened my craft and helped me build a creative foundation for what would become a multi-hyphenate career path. I’ve worked on everything from Shakespeare to new plays, and I’ve also created a lot of my own work in documentary film, theatre, and audio storytelling.
STAGES: How long have you lived in Lowell and what brought you there?
TRAINOR: My wife, the visual artist Dina Mordeno, has been a part of the Western Avenue Studio community since right before COVID. About two and a half years ago, once our children were grown and out of the house, we became full-time residents of a living-work loft at Western Avenue Studios. What brought us here was a mix of practical and personal reasons: it’s a city with real character, and it has a creative undercurrent that feels honest. Living at Western Avenue means we’re not just near art… we’re inside a daily ecosystem of makers, shows, open studios, and the kind of casual hallway conversations that keep your creative life oxygenated.
Lowell has layers. You feel the old mill-town bones, the immigrant histories, the working-class grit. And you can also feel the city changing in real time, like the next chapter is being written while you’re walking down the street. We absolutely love it in here.
STAGES: Describe your character and the play “Job.”
TRAINOR: “Job” is a tense, darkly funny, razor-smart two-person play that starts as a workplace crisis-therapy session and quickly becomes something more unsettling and human. As the two characters circle each other—generationally, politically, ethically—the play (with an amazing script by Max Von Friedlich) keeps tightening the screws until: two people in a room, no escape, and every shift in power happens in real time. It’s the kind of play where the audience gets to watch two actors play high-level chess at close range: humor and danger, intellect and vulnerability, all inside the same conversation. My character, Loyd, is a crisis therapist. He’s the person you’re sent to when a company needs a professional stamp that says, “This person is safe to return.” He’s intelligent, compassionate, and experienced… but the play keeps asking what “compassion” looks like inside a system designed to protect itself. He’s trying to do his job, but the deeper question is: what is his job, really? And who does it serve?
STAGES: What are other roles you would like to play or that are on your bucket list?
TRAINOR: I’d love to work on any new plays by Brandon-Jacob Jenkins, Anne Washburn, Rajiv Joseph, or Susan Lori-Parks. And, yes, my first love is Shakespeare, so I hope the world keeps feeding me a steady diet of Shakespeare. But my short list of characters includes The Tiger in Rajiv Joseph’s “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.” Also, Vladimir in “Waiting for Godot,” for Beckett’s Irish gallows humor and the existential comedy and Malvolio in “Twelfth Night” is high on the list. He is hilarious, wounded, terrifyingly human.
STAGES: What insights do you hope students take away as they begin their careers?
TRAINOR: I hope they leave with a process they can trust anywhere, onstage and off. Prepare with depth and specificity so you can play with abandon, stay open, and listen. That’s not just an acting skill. It’s a life skill. It teaches you how to show up when it matters, how to collaborate without ego, how to fail without crumbling, and how to keep your curiosity intact.
STAGES: How is it working at SpeakEasy Stage? What is your favorite part of the theatre scene in Boston?
TRAINOR: The rehearsal room culture at SpeakEasy Stage is serious in the best way. The level of craft in the building, from design to direction to the acting ensemble, raises your game. What I love most about the Boston theatre scene is the people, and the way it feels like an ecosystem. I teach artists who will soon be working on stages in Boston, New York, and all over the world. For me it’s not just “the scene,” it’s a living pipeline of collaboration. Boston audiences are smart, and they’re not passive consumers. They lean in. And the theatre community here is scrappy in a way I respect: people are making ambitious work without waiting for permission.
For tickets visit: https://www.bostontheatrescene.com/shows-and-events/job/?_ga=2.240019146.854420706.1768946111-1647594036.1768946111
Nancye Tuttle’s email is [email protected].
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