Damon Bonetti is an actor, director, theater producer and teacher.
He is the co-founding artistic director of The Philadelphia Artists’ Collective (The PAC), Philly’s only theater dedicated to rare-classical plays produced in site-specific locations. As an actor and director he has worked extensively in the Philly area, regionally and on national tours. He can be seen on camera in commercial and industrial work and is a professor at Rutgers University – Camden and Drexel University. Damon received his BA in Theater at Allentown College (now DeSales University) and his MFA in Acting from Florida State University / Asolo Conservatory.
Acting Reviews
ARSENIC AND OLD LACE
Damon Bonetti delivers a sidesplitting performance as nephew Mortimer Brewster, a relatively sane theater critic in love with Elaine Harper (Jennie Eisenhower), the minister’s daughter. With expert comedic timing and physical brio, he registers concern, shock, confusion, and near-hysteria as he discovers the secrets of his aunts and acknowledges to Elaine the insanity that runs– “practically gallops”—through his family.
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GOD OF CARNAGE
Damon Bonetti perfectly embodies a high-powered attorney whose business, the one that makes Cobble Hill affordable, comes first. Bonetti beautifully signals contempt for what he considers to be Veronica’s mountain-making regarding their sons. Bonetti is a great physical comedian, but his best comic moment comes when Alan, exasperated because Annette has deadened his attached-at-the ear cell phone by immersing it in a vase of flowers, sinks to the Novaks’s floor in a helpless, inconsolable heap while maintaining the idea of Alan’s in-command crispness.
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HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
Returning for the third time as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (and others), Damon Bonetti and Dave Johnson have a sparkling chemistry. Bonetti’s Holmes is an overconfident, narcissistic dandy. Johnson’s oft-ignored and overlooked Dr. Watson plays the (not-so) straight man to Holmes. Pacek and Bonetti offer a masterclass in differentiating character roles and rounding out sparsely written characters. In particular, Bonetti’s Barrymore and Stapleton ooze with mystery and menace.
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Directing Reviews
THE WHITE DEVIL
This wild Shakespearean-era gem could run away with a less talented troupe. But PAC turns this White Devil into a lean, muscular banquet of evil. With aggressive yet sensitive trimming, director and PAC cofounder Damon Bonetti tames this mad beast, and, in a master-stroke, he sets the play in the world of 1940s-'50s film noir. The cast trusts Webster's poetry to reveal character and create momentum.
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HE WHO GETS SLAPPED
Director Damon Bonetti transforms a complicated script into a sustained and haunting tremolo. For this play-behind-the-play, a theatrical nature inherently infuses the action. On top of which Bonetti adds bits of acrobatics, juggling, tumbling, balancing and dancing of all kinds (led by Terry Brennan), to give a small taste of what’s happening in the ring, just on the other side of the curtain. What results is a mixture of realism and surrealism, and a story doing it’s own kind of daring tight-rope walk.
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AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS
The first time I saw a stage adaptation of “Around the World in 80 Days” it seemed to go on for 80 days. Non-stop adventure after adventure grew tedious in a lackluster telling. So for me, the production that opened Friday night at Hedgerow Theatre Company is a revelation: constantly amusing, moving like a typhoon (it includes a typhoon), and beautifully acted to boot. Its success depends greatly on the inventiveness of a five-member cast and the director, in this case the all-around theater artist Damon Bonetti. In his staging, people pop from windows, doors and balconies. They use props, trunks and movable boxes and their own bodies to conjure everything from the typhoon I mentioned to a quick ride on an elephant.
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Philadelphia Artists' Collective
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The Philadelphia Artists' Collective (PAC), co-founded in 2008 by Damon Bonetti is an award winning site-specific theatre company committed to promoting rarely performed classical plays through productions, workshops and readings in the greater Philadelphia area.
PAC's past workshops and readings have featured some of the region's finest artists, and its full productions have garnered wide audience and critical praise. PAC prides itself on staging rarely produced classics in unexpected, site-specific locations, such as the Tall Ship Gazela, The Franklin Inn Club, Powell House, the USS Olympia and the Woodlands Mansion & Cemetery among others. |