Company members Mahira Kakkar and Keith Randolph Smith are featured players in Addressless—an interactive, virtual, theatrical game where audience members encounter firsthand the complex challenges of housing insecurity. An immersive, choose-your-own-adventure experience, the production was created and directed by Martin Boross and written by Jonathan Payne, and runs through February 13.
A recent New York Times article on the vital role of understudies on Broadway features company member Reynaldo Piniella and his experience stepping into Trouble in Mind on short notice. “We’re the last resort,” Reynaldo says in the article, “But I do know, watching my understudies rehearse, these people are incredible artists.” ABC’s Nightline has chronicled the story of understudies who’ve gone on during the Omicron surge. Watch Reynaldo speak about his experience, including footage from curtain call.
Company member Jeb Brown is performing in Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow’s musical, Whisper House, produced by The Civilians, now playing through February 6 at 59E59. The cast also includes Samantha Mathis, Alex Boniello, Wyatt Cirbus, Molly Hager, and James Yaegashi. Steve Cosson directs, with choreography by Billy Bustamante.
The Winter 2022 programming season begins with two teaching artists working with The Actors Center’s Resident Company: Acting coach, film and theater director, and casting director Heidi Miami Marshall; and interdisciplinary performing artist, activist, and voice teacher, Micha Espinosa.
Company Member Eva Kaminsky contributes narration to two recently released audiobooks. The Swells by Will Aitkin is a darkly hilarious satire in which a class war erupts aboard a luxury cruise ship; and Seasonal Work a suspenseful collection of diverse and diabolically clever stories featuring fierce women by New York Times best-selling crime writer, Laura Lippman.
In an exit interview coming off of his run in Caroline, or Change on Broadway, company member John Cariani talks about how the pandemic shutdown gave John time to reconnect with his clarinet, helping him fully realize his character, a lost-in-grief musician. “The clarinet helped me with the singing and the singing helped with the clarinet. Ann Yee, our choreographer, said, ‘Remember, it’s all of a whole. So don’t think of it as the clarinet and the part.’ It was just continuing to realize how much he communicates through his clarinet.”
Company member Tonya Pinkins plays Alma Carthan, grandmother of Emmett Till, in the ABC series Women of the Movement, which debuted January 6th. The six-episode limited series tells the story of Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley with a cast that includes Adrienne Warren, Credric Joe, Glynn Turman, Chris Coy, Julia McDermott, Carter Jenkins, Ray Fisher and Timothy Hutton.
Company member Purva Bedi reflects on “the impermanence of 2021,” in a year-end article with American Kahani. “Moving into 2022, I don’t know how theater will go, but I will continue in whatever way I can to measure my years in the shows I get to experience,” writes Purva. “My sincerest hope is that however you used to measure your own years – the knitting circles and bowling leagues and book clubs and girls’ nights that transform your own life from the quotidian to the soular – that this year – this year, for all our sakes, that you can begin to measure the years in the ways that you love, too.”
Company member Elizabeth Van Dyke is interviewed in a new book by Ronald Rand, Solo Transformation on Stage. The book offers over twenty inspiring interviews by performers who have created their own solo plays. Elizabeth won an Ace Gold Award for Love To All, Lorraine, a play based on the life of Lorraine Hansberry that she wrote, co-directed and acted at The American Place Theatre and EST, which then became a TV movie directed by Woodie King, Jr.