I’ve been an actress since I was 16 when I did my first holocaust play, called “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” at the local JCC in Bethesda, Maryland directed by a Russian lady named Sabina Lozovsky. My father had died of a sudden heart attack the summer before and in this play, at least, I was allowed to live in the intensity I felt over my father’s death, an intensity that wasn’t “appropriate” in my life in an upscale Maryland suburb where high school was supposed to be about malls and cheerleaders and keg parties. Not surprisingly, I became a drama queer, and, to this day, can never quite pull off being “cool." In years to come, I’d get cast in holocaust plays a lot, so much so that I have been dubbed an honorary Jew. I moved to New York City the summer after graduating from Catholic University with a degree in drama and started a theatre company called “The Flock.” Our "mission" was to produce all the plays we were dying to act in! We took one of them, Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls,” all the way to a successful Off-Broadway run and had a great time (special thanks to my friend Boris Said).
After that, we devoted ourselves to developing new works. In 1997, I myself wrote a terribly earnest first play called “The Crossing." The story was set in Greece in 1967 during the military junta and concerned a Greek woman, Nana, now an American, who goes back to save her brother from torture and death. A sort of homage to my Greek heritage. Predictably, I played Nana. One reviewer wrote that I “sank in an Ouzo stew.” Thems fighting words in Greece, but it’s fine. It took me a long time to get this but being "unobjectionable" is entirely overrated. It creates a false sense of acceptance. They like you because they don't know you! Define yourself.
In between doing theatre and working all I could on film and tv, I studied with the most gifted teachers I could find – Suzanne Shepherd, Sandy Meisner, John Uecker, Diaan Ainslee, Terry Schreiber, Sally Johnson -- who taught me that the classroom can be a creative end in itself. It creates the conditions in which talent truly thrives, in which artistic values can be respected and transmitted -- where, after all, the only reviewer is your own good heart.
For the past 5 years, I have been working with a group of fantastically talented solo performers in a workshop called “Risk” at the Sally Johnson Studio directed by Brad Calcaterra. There, the Truth is force majeure, and we are all force majeure when we tell it. We meet on Mondays to explore our truth in front of each other. We call it "Live Diary" or "Stand Up Drama." Out of our improvisations, characters emerge, and stories begin to take shape. We believe that the things we want to hide or about which we are ashamed are actually the seeds of our creativity. Through character, we find vivid ways of telling our own truth. Recently, I created a solo show out of a year of transcribed Mondays. It’s called “Y, marilyn unstitched” and is about a woman who needs to believe she is Marilyn Monroe. We shot “Y," the film last year (one take, 88 minutes, no rehearsal -- and I dyed my hair blonde!), and performed the stage version at Frigid Fest 2009 last winter.
As an artist, I believe deeply in discoveries you can only find in the moment, in the transformative power of community, and in the genius that can happen when incongruous things mix.
I leave you with a quote from Stella Adler that I love: "This is not a 'course in drama.' It is a course in opening up the vastness in you as a human being...There is no other way to grow except through an art form today. A few hundred years ago, maybe religion could do it. But today, only the art form is able to stretch a human being so he can measure up to his potential to grow and grow and understand himself and his life until the end. We are here to get that."
