Conventional theater wisdom has it that you can only be a professional actor in New York or Los Angeles, or at least in a metropolis like Boston or Chicago. But if the mark of a professional is working regularly and getting paid for it, there are actors here in the Valley who do better than a lot of would-be's in the big city. And they get to live here into the bargain.
I spoke recently with four local actors who work pretty frequently in this area. All are members of Actors' Equity, the labor union that represents theater actors and stage managers. All have multiple credits with the Valley's two Equity houses, New Century Theatre, the summer theater housed at Smith College, and the year-round Majestic Theater, home of the Theater Project in West Springfield.
After getting bitten by "the theater bug" early in life, the four have pursued their muse along a variety of life paths.
Jeannine Haas grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and attended Catholic school, "so we didn't really have theater." As a child, she acted in community theater because "it was this other world. The people were liberal and fun and different. I remember sitting backstage one night, and I could hear the play going on, and I could smell the paint, and I remember thinking, 'This is it. This is what I'm doing in my life.'"
Van Farrier, growing up in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., saw a couple of shows in New York City, "and I was hooked. I said, 'Some day I'm going to be a working actor.' That was always my terminology, too. It was never about being professional, never about being a star. I just wanted to be doing theater and making money at it."
As a gradeschooler in Granby, Mass., Sandra Blaney went to a summer theater camp at the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke. "We wrote our own script and made the costumes," she recalls, "and it was the coolest thing ever, and that was it for me."
Steve Henderson hails from Granville, Mass. "I was a big hit in Peter Rabbit, at age six, and it never left me. But my family had no connection to theater, I knew of Broadway but I'd never been. I thought you could either be Harrison Ford or you could wait tables, and I didn't see myself becoming Harrison Ford, so I dropped out of college, where I was majoring in theater, and dropped out of theater too."
Henderson trained as a nurse and worked in geriatric care for 15 years before being drawn back into community theater in the mid-'80s. Years later, his experience working with old folks germinated into a one-man play with the painfully punning title Jerry Atric. The two-character sequel, Jerry and Ed, was part of the Majestic's fall 2008 season.
Before she finally settled here, Sandra Blaney moved away from the Valley several times—to college in Salem, to professional training in London, to New York, where "I had some luck, got an agent and a manager, was on the right track. And then 9/11 happened, and I thought, I don't think it's the right time for me here, and I moved back home."
Jeannine Haas and Van Farrier were both pursuing professional careers in the city when the Valley called. Haas came to Smith College as an Ada Comstock scholar in the '80s, "fell in love with the Valley—and fell in love—and decided to stay." Farrier discovered the area in the mid-'90s through friendships with members of the feminist ensemble Sleeveless Theater.
Like most actors everywhere, all these professionals do other things to help pay the bills. Farrier runs the theater program at Southwick-Tolland Regional High School. Blaney has a full-time job at Smith College and uses flex time and all her vacation time to keep performing. Haas and Henderson both teach part-time at the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School and do other theater-related gigs.
All four are devoted to live theater rather than TV or movies, and are far happier plying their craft in the hospitable Valley than reaching for that elusive star in the city. Haas recalls sitting in a Broadway house, looking around at the audience, and thinking, "They're just people, and it's just a stage and a script. I get to do this where I live. It's never seemed right to me that you have to leave your community to go do theater. It seems contradictory."
Next week: the pleasures and pitfalls of being a local pro.
Correction: In my last column, I misnamed Greene Room Productions in connection with their admirable staging of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Apologies for the error.
