Is there no play, to ease the anguish of a torturing hour?

Rouba recently lead two Advanced Acting Masterclasses for the Puzzlebox Theatre Company on the Central Coast and received some great feedback. Here’s one response:

‘Rouba is sincere and careful in how she looks after the wellbeing of each student as she trains them. Learning to act with believability was an important takeaway. Absolutely loved the process and know we all came a long way. We got out of our comfort zones and we will be better actors for the experience. Thank you Rouba, you're the kind of teacher I wish I had starting out. You are the kind of teacher artists need today.’

Rouba Palmer wrote and directed the first version of The Jewelry Box back in 2011, raising $10,000 for the A21 Campaign. Recently, one of her former students, Luke George, was approached by Destiny Rescue, another anti-human trafficking organization, to see if he knew of a performance they could present at their annual fundraising event in Melbourne. After liaising with Rouba, Luke was commissioned to direct an edited version of the play with a cast of 5 Sydney performers. They have been in rehearsal for a couple of months and will be flying to Melbourne to present The Jewelry Box for the Destiny Rescue fundraiser on August 2nd, 2024.

For her thesis production of the MFA in Directing degree undertaken at Florida State University, Rouba directed Mary Zimmerman’s The Secret in the Wings which takes a collection of lesser-known, dark fairytales and presents them in such a way that their telling evokes the fanning out of a wing. All but one of the fairytales is split in half and their conclusions occurs in the 2nd half of the show.

At the end of the Fall Semester of Rouba Palmer’s final year doing an MFA in Directing at FSU, she directed Ionesco’s The Lesson.

As part of the Shakespeare Shorts, Rouba Palmer collated and directed A Middle Eastern Night’s Dream, setting Shakespeare’s Dream in the Middle East.

At the end of her first year in the MFA Directing program at FSU, Rouba Palmer devised and directed The Human Circus, a social issues pieces about the atrocities of human trafficking.

Over the summer, Rouba was thrilled to attend two summer courses with America’s top Improv school, The Second City in Chicago. The first course, Improv Level 3 built on her already rich improv experience but also challenged her to take the improvisations created in class and use them to create comedy skits. The Stand Up Comedy course was extremely challenging but also very rewarding and Rouba even took the set she created to one of Chicago’s Open Mic nights in the city.