Opening Doors

Contributed by Stephanie Willing

As a child I knew I wanted to be an actor, but not in an all-encompassing “This is my dream!” kind of way. I also wanted to be a marine biologist, a writer, an equestrian, a ballerina, and when I was very young, either a unicorn or a dinosaur--whichever happened first.

My early acting career was uneventful but satisfying. When I was handed my first script at Bible camp with highlighted lines, I was ecstatic. Later when I auditioned and won the part of the (I now realize) caricatured Jewish innkeeper’s wife in the Christmas play, I was triumphant. And when I played the Virgin Mary in sixth grade with a pillow tied under my robe with my father’s leather belt, I was happy. I dropped that baby weight with a slip of the belt loops, but I never dropped a line.

And then I stopped acting because I still wanted to be a dancer/writer/martial artist/
equestrian/ecologist. As the eldest of four in a household of specific and limited means, I was told, “Pick one.” I chose dance and stuck with it for the next twelve years, all the way through college, thanks to scholarships. Then, like many artistic and nerdy folks, I went to work for a couple years in a used bookstore, saving money and glorying in the dusty pages of potentiality. One day, while shelving a tray of battered romance novels, I knew in my bones what I had to do. Go to New York and be an actor/dancer/stage combatant!

While still in Texas searching Craigslist for jobs and auditions in NYC (I’d never heard of Actors Access or Backstage), I clicked on a “volunteers needed” ad for something called the IT Awards. I responded, emailed, confirmed. It seemed like a good place to begin my reconnaissance; I figured I could meet people, learn the names of the theater companies, and see what kind of work was being made. I found short-term housing in the Bronx, booked a one-way ticket, and flew to New York City. My first week in town I was an usher at the 2008 New York Innovative Theater Awards.

That was the year that the Vampire Cowboys swept with Fight Girl Battle World. I only saw screenshots of the cast and costumes, but I was in love. I was in awe. I said, “I need to know these people.” Again googling, I found The Saturday Night Saloon and signed up for the Rabid Vamps Fight Studio (the VC’s stage combat and choreography class). Through the Saloon, I met the folks behind Gideon Productions, Nosedive, and The Brick.

My first acting opportunity came through those connections, and I was cast in The Ninja Cherry Orchard with a huge bevy of actors that blew me away. Since then, almost entirely, every part I’ve played or production I’ve choreographed has come through a connection that began in 2008, even down to the man I married.



Stephanie Willing (left) performs with the Vampire Cowboys in the
Opening Number of the 2010 IT Awards

Just like my two years in the bookstore, I had found a group of passionate nerds who always had room for one more, and just like that, Indie Theater became home. I can directly trace my path in NYC theater from that single moment standing at the back of the auditorium at the IT Awards manning the doors. If you were there that night, you probably didn’t see me. You saw your friends, the wonderful people of our community that I had yet to meet. But when I held the door open for you to walk into the auditorium, I was also opening all the doors I’d walk through for the next eight years.
 

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Stephanie Willing is a dancer/actor/choreographer/stage combatant/voiceover artist, so the childhood dream is working out so far, but she’s still working on the marine biologist bit. She received a BA in Dance from Texas Woman’s University and studied Fight Choreography with Qui Nguyen of Vampire Cowboys. She is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing for Young People from Lesley University. Upcoming projects include fight directing for Flux Theater Ensemble’s production Rizing, opening May 2016. She will also be performing as Joan of Arc in MTWorks’s production of David Stallings’ Anais Nin Goes to Hell in October 2016.

Mistresses of Our Own Destinies

Contributed by Tanya O'Debra

Working in theater is for crazy people. Only the truly disturbed would hear the word “no” repeatedly, but decide that what they actually heard was “yes”. That’s doubly true for the Off-Off-Broadway community, which is made up of people who don’t have commercial looks or commercial ideas and who simply refuse to stop making work that doesn’t fit into the mainstream. This is an area where women are definitely crazier than men, because plays written by women are not produced even close to the rates of their male counterparts, and there are far fewer roles available to female actors (especially if you want to wear all your clothes and not cry to make up for a playwright’s lack of character development). And yet, here we all are. I’ve been around long enough to see Off-Off-Broadway basically crumble around me a couple times over at this point. But like a mischief of rats, we just scurry to the next available building.

I wrote my first play, Fuck You or Dead Pee-holes, an American Tale in Thirteen Acts, with a couple of friends from acting school. We put it up at the now defunct Present Company Theatorium in November of 2000. After our show closed, I worked the box office on and off until fate (and the rent being too damn high, and zoning) shut that space down in 2003. My heart broke a little every time I walked past that empty theater, and I’ll never forgive the apartment building that stands in its place. Unless, of course, they put a theater in the basement.

My partners and I took that same show to my first New York International Fringe Festival in 2001. Our venue was the chop shop next door to the Theatorium. It didn’t even have four walls. The staff put up a sheet of plastic to close off the space. Even with such a challenging venue, our show won an Excellence Award in Over-All Production. We thought we had been set up to fail, but the Off-Off Broadway community doesn’t work that way. We are used to dirty basements and all manner of less than ideal situations, so we can see the theatre beyond the theater. We can see beyond the dollar.

The Kraine picked us up for a five-week run after Fringe was over. Week two of that run was September 11th. The following week, as soon as people were allowed below Houston, there was a meeting of downtown theater artists at that very same chop shop next to the Present Company Theatorium, and the agenda of that meeting was to make sure everyone was still alive. My friends and artistic partners had a separate meeting to decide whether or not theatre was even valuable thing to do in a post-9/11 world. Ultimately, we decided that, of course, it was. We just had to be gentler.

After that, my life was a mess of open mics whose venues all subsequently shut down. RIP to Surf Reality in 2003, Collective: Unconscious in 2008, and The Bowery Poetry Club, which became Duane Park in 2012. And of course there was my regular haunt Mo Pitkin’s, where I performed as a member of the house sketch team for Radical Vaudeville, which closed in 2007. After I left my open mic in 2008, I took my play Radio Star to Edinburgh, then Horse Trade picked it up for a run at The Red Room (RIP in 2013). Boy, do I love Erez Ziv, though he’s basically an enabler who needs to be stopped. From then on, Horse Trade presented whatever crazy work I put out. And even though a car accident put a bit of an unexpected hiatus on my career, I’m sure I’ll be scurrying across one of his stages before long.

This statement reads like an obituary to Off-Off-Broadway venues that have passed on, but it is actually a testament to the idea that our community is not defined by our spaces, but by our passion and by our work. It is defined by the people and by the art. Even though we’ve lost so many of our performance spaces over the years, we are still here. And new artists and audience members join us every day. We will always be here.

                                       _______________________________________________________

TANYA O’DEBRA is a Brooklyn-based, Boston-born writer/performer/funny lady. One half of the ECNY Award-nominated comic sister duo, The O'Debra Twins, Ms. O’Debra has spread mirth and filth all over NYC. Their annual O’Debbie Awards garnered a Best of New York Award from The Village Voice. Her play Fuck You won The Excellence Award in Overall Production at Fringe NYC. Published by Original Works, her play Radio Star has been produced all over the world, receiving numerous awards and accolades. Winner of the Miss Fag Hag Pageant, other theater credits include Patrice O’Debra in Straight Up Vampire (Joe’s Pub), The Evil Queen in Snow White (The New Acting Company) and Amanda McCloud in The Ultimate Stimulus (Dixon Place). Her play, Shut UP, Emily Dickinson, was presented at the Orlando ad Cincinnati Fringe Festivals. She currently cohosts Hawaiian Nights, a comedy interview show on Radio Free Brooklyn. 

Perils of Preparation in Acting Classic Plays

Contributed by Alyssa Simon


Stella Adler was known for telling her students that their talent lay in their choices. But what function do they serve in performing classical plays? How do you act a choice you made the first week of rehearsal and expect it to be alive on the stage?

Alyssa Simon in The Storm at the
August Strindberg Repertory Theatre

For the purpose of this post, I mainly mean physical choices: how we think a character may have carried him or herself during the War Of The Roses, in a Russian dacha or a middle class home in Norway near the turn of the century.

There are choices the actor must make to illuminate a character’s psychological motives. But in order to put them across to an audience, they too have to be physicalized, either vocally or with gesture.

How many classics have we watched where we see that everyone learned in rehearsal how one held their teacup or broadsword back in the day, but it doesn’t inform us about anything else?

Although it seems counter-intuitive, the trick may be to practice the fan signals, hat doffing, curtsying, etc. so many times that the audience doesn’t even really notice it. It’s just that world. The tension lies in what is at stake if someone breaks form.
 
What would happen if one slurped their tea or slouched in their corset?

It’s not quite the equivalent of falling in love with the daughter of your family’s oldest enemies or slamming the door on your traditional marriage and children, but it’s knowing that doing so could be considered such a break with society, that the dramatic tension lies in the fear of doing it wrong, rather than executing a snuff dip perfectly.

In some modern adaptations of classic plays, directors do have queens lounge around on thrones and courtiers manspread to update what may seem dated and cliché. But I don’t think getting rid of mannerisms or ignoring them illuminates a text any more than a devotion to style.

The way people behaved in public and private, with their family and other people in the household, the way men and women acted with each other and how they treated children, all of that speaks to class, one’s place in society and how, by deliberately abiding the conventions of the day or being the one person who dares flout them, one is making active dramatic decisions all the time: in other words, a choice. 

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Alyssa Simon is an award-winning theatre and film actor, who has performed modern works, classics, cabarets and musicals in the U.S., Argentina and the Caribbean. She was selected as A Person Of The Year by Martin Denton of nytheatre.com for her acting work and she is also a Master Mason at the Caffe Cino award-winning Brick Theatre. www.alyssasimon.com 

My Career In Theatre: What A/An ____________ [ADJECTIVE] Road!

Contributed by Robin Rothstein

For me, working in the theatre has been a thrilling and ever-changing road map. I've been down quite a few roads in my career – actor, playwright, lyricist, producer, arts advocate, and commercial theatre professional, to name a few.

It’s not unusual, though, to wear different hats over the course of a theatre career and it’s also no secret that it’s a tough industry, loaded with personal and financial risk from indie theatre on up to Broadway, and beyond. But this is partly what makes it so rewarding and exciting, right? And the industry is expanding every day – artistically, commercially, globally. You can create opportunities everywhere if you know how to look for them.
What’s been so cool for me is being part of both the indie theatre world and the Broadway world. I owe a LOT to both for giving me a wide range of knowledge and experiences. In the indie world, I’ve been fortunate to have my writing produced in New York festivals over the years, including, once again, the NY Indie Theatre One Minute Play Festival coming up this May, and I’ve learned about local politics by getting into the trenches alongside my colleagues at the League of Independent Theatre (LIT), where the fight for more financial support for the arts goes on. My interest in arts advocacy also inspired me to join my community board where I was promoted to Chair of the Arts & Institutions Committee. I continue to use that as a platform to raise awareness and to remind people how instrumental the arts are to the well being of society, both culturally and economically.

And it is at this intersection, between the arts and economics, where I now find myself. Having worked in the touring division at Broadway Across America for a number of years now, I have seen time and time again how important commercial touring shows are to keeping theatre alive across the U.S., and how “the road” feeds back to Broadway in the tourist dollars that were part of the record numbers reported for 2015. This same paradigm of the arts benefiting local economies can be found across the country. It has also been a known fact for years that artists and arts organizations help the local economy here in NYC.

The past few years have been especially rewarding for me, as I took the initiative to combine my creative writing expertise, my theatre business know-how, and my interest in the arts promoting community prosperity. I got an idea for a project that fulfilled me artistically, and that I also believed had enduring commercial potential. This project was my family musical, MAD LIBS LIVE!

It took nearly eight years for the project to get from the “light bulb” going off in my head in my mom's kitchen to the world premiere Off-Broadway this past November at New World Stages. And while there were many challenges and unknowns all along the way, I wouldn’t trade a moment of it! What an exciting road the MAD LIBS LIVE! process has been and continues to be, as our team is now busy preparing for the exciting touring and licensing opportunities beyond our Off-Broadway run.

There will continue to be roads to choose from, but as long as I keep choosing, I’ll be on the right road, even if I end up making what feels like a wrong turn. (I’ve learned those can often turn out to be right turns in the end.) And as I move forward with MAD LIBS LIVE! and other endeavors, I can't wait to see where these next roads take me! 

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Robin Rothstein is a critically acclaimed playwright and commissioned book writer and lyricist whose writing has been produced in New York, across the U.S., and internationally. She is also Director of Operations at Broadway Across America and Chair of the Arts & Institutions Committee of Community Board 2, Manhattan. For more info on MAD LIBS LIVE!, please visit MAD LIBS LIVE!

Oversharing is Caring

By Mel DeLancey

My whole life I had been a singer. I took my first voice lesson at 9, went on to study music in college and until I was 24 every spare moment was spent singing, studying singing, talking about singing, or listening to Broadway cast recordings. I never envisioned a world where music wasn’t THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. Then at age 24 I met my ex-husband, and I stopped singing. Completely. I was in love and making money, and I don’t remember what else happened for the next 9 years but it wasn’t music. So divorced at age 33, I decided to reclaim my showtunes. I reconnected with my college voice teacher, and I enrolled in a cabaret class at the Y. This is where I started to develop a technique in “personal storytelling” which completely changed the singing game for me. It was a beginner class and, for the final performance, we got to sing 3 songs, and the teacher requested we do a little bit of “patter” before one song. “Patter” in cabaret is basically dialogue before a song to add context. One of my songs was “How Did We Come to This?” From the Andrew Lippa Wild Party. It’s a lush ballad that has a vocally dramatic arc that’s perfect for a belty-mixer like myself. With this song, I took on the “patter” assignment and ended up writing a whole monologue about the “wild party” I was having while owning the bar, and how, with my frosty beer goggles on, I was missing the signs of a marriage falling apart. I’m gonna pat myself on the back here and say: I took “patter” to the next level. But the coolest part was that after telling my personal story, singing the song was a completely different experience. I’d “made it my own,” and I turned the song into something the audience had never seen before and could never see again. After all the years of acting teachers preaching “make it your own,” I finally heard them! I found “my own”… and I started doing it with every song I sang… and wrote a one woman show called Tinder Roulette… and now I don’t ever want to stop telling stories with my showtunes.

My current project is The Over Share Cabaret, a Broadway variety show of my own invention. It takes place at 13th Street Repertory, which is not your usual cabaret venue. Cabaret is often defined by where it takes place: a nightclub where people can eat, drink, and dance. The acts are not just entertainment but ambiance. 13th Street Rep is in fact a standard theater, a cozy, 65-seat space with a rickety piano and a quaint wine barrel bar area in the lobby. Alcohol is of course an essential ingredient to a performance where the emcee talks openly about her sex life in between Rodgers & Hammerstein standards. I wanted to have this show at the Rep because it’s in the heart of Greenwich Village where I’ve lived for 20 years, the coolest place on Earth. For me, the “vibe” of the whole night is just as important as the show itself. I’m working hard at creating that vibe as I build the audience, company and structure of Over Share Cabaret. Right now, the show is a combination of musical theater tribute, sketch comedy and personal storytelling.


Thinking ahead for Over Share and myself as an artist:

1.  Keep singing my heart out, because physically, it feels as good as sex
2.  Showcase and collaborate with my talented friends, because masturbation is so   two-dimensional
3.  Find an audience who loves talking about sex and showtunes half as much as I do

I’ve been a wild child in Manhattan since 1996 and love sharing my adventures on stage. And I love my showtunes. I may never get to do that production of Guys & Dolls where I play all 4 leads at once like I do in my fantasy, but I can sing “Adelaide’s Lament” and make it relevant 78 years later by telling a story about a recent STD scare I had... which you only know isn’t true because, of course, I’m a virgin.

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Mel DeLancey is a cabaret singer and musical theater enthusiast living in Manhattan. She is the creator of The Over Share Cabaret, a new variety show and performance party at 13th Street Repertory. She's returning to 13th Street after her success there with Tinder Roulette, her autobiographical musical revue about her unconventional childhood, eccentric failed marriage and internet dating experiences. Mel has been an actress of the New York Indie Theater scene for the last 16 years, including 5 years as a founding member of the sketch comedy group, Slightly Known People, where she first got to flex her writing muscles. She is a member of the Dysfunctional Theater Collective and looks forward to bringing her original program I Heart Showtunes back to Governor's Island this summer as part of the artist residency program. In addition to her work in the arts, Mel is the founder of Joyful Fitness, her personal training company.

IG:@melercise
www.sexloveandshowtunes.com

NYIT April: Women in Theater

We at NYIT are thrilled to present this month's theme, Women in Theater. We want to celebrate artists who are consistently making theater in NY. We have an eclectic array of amazing women who will be writing about their art on this blog, just a small sample of those on stage and behind the scenes who put their skills to work in making innovative, creative theater year-round.

In asking the people you'll be reading this month, our approach was to encourage contributors to speak about their art and chosen disciplines in a way that was meaningful to them. I often feel grateful for the great number of wonderfully talented people I know in this city who are passionate and dedicated to their work, and this is an opportunity for you to hear from some of those artists. I'm excited for them and for you.


Ken Simon
NYIT Communications Manager