Actor, Playwright

It is so lovely to have the chance to tell you what I’ve been up to, thanks to Joan! I just finished performing in John Jamiel’s autobiographical play HAIL MARY at The Wild Project in NYC. By the time you are reading this, I will be in rehearsal for Julius Caesar with NY Classical Theatre, performing in three NYC parks. I’ll play the wily, snarky Casca, among other roles, and support my wonderful husband, Clay Storseth, who is playing Caesar!

Last spring I had the real challenge of keeping my mouth shut for an hour and 20 minutes in a one-person performance piece called SWIPE, produced by Playwrights’ Arena in Los Angeles. SWIPE explores loneliness in the elder gay community by allowing the audience to be a fly on the wall observing an older gay man returning from work to his empty apartment where he prepares dinner, tries to distract himself by watching old reruns on TV, engaging with a pickup app, and finally getting into bed. The designers created a working studio apartment where I cooked, washed dishes, watched live TV, played a real phonograph, washed up for bed, and slept. Four of us played the same role on different evenings for the run of the show. And the food, décor, wall art, music, and TV programs changed with each actor to reflect our respective backgrounds: Latino, Black, Asian and Caucasian.  It was a wonderful experience.

As a playwright, I had my adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, called THREE, at The Los Angeles LGBT Center’s wonderful black box experimental theatre. It was a commission in which I was asked to write at least two lesbian roles, one gay male role, and to set the play in America. I gladly obliged. I also set for myself the goal of adapting some of Chekhov’s characters to be cast with Asian, Latino, and Black actors, making sure their different backgrounds were intrinsic to the narrative. And I transmuted the youngest sister, Irina, who, in the original, is wracked with a tremendous restlessness and yearning for change, into a person who presents as female for the first two acts, then gender non-conforming in act 3, and living as a trans man in act 4. I set Act 1 in 1946, the day after World War II’s VE day, Act 2 in 1983 during the Reagan presidency and dawn of the AIDS epidemic, Act 3 in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing, and Act 4 in 2021 at the waning of the Covid pandemic. I was really proud of the production.

Thanks to Joan and to all of you for allowing me to be in touch. Wishing you wonderful creative experiences in the days ahead!

Henry IV, NY Classical production