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Vol. LXIII, No. 40
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Wednesday, October 7, 2009
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Vol. LXIII, No. 40
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Wednesday, October 7, 2009
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Princeton Day School Class of 2007 alumna Krissy Garber is producing and acting in Alan Ball’s play, Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, which opens October 29 in New York City.
Having graduated from the prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in May, Ms. Garber commiserated with a fellow actress about the process of auditioning for less-than-scintillating projects.
They decided to “stop waiting for other people to help us, and to take matters into our own hands,” Ms. Garber said of her current endeavor. The goal was to find a play with a piquant female lead, and in Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, they found not one but “five strong female characters.”
Though Ms. Garber acknowledged that “I’m a much better actress than I am a producer, because all I want to do is to delve into my script and do my character analysis,” her first attempt at producing a show is proving to be a success.
Screening over 600 headshots, Ms. Garber narrowed down the list and auditioned actors, located a theater, and secured Neighborhood Playhouse instructor John Gallagher as the director.
A snafu at the end of that process forced them to relocate to a different theater and recast three of the parts. “But we found an amazing space, where Godfather II was actually filmed,” Ms. Garber said of the Duo Theatre.
Working with the rest of the cast members and her director “has been tremendous,” enthused Ms. Garber, who said that the play centered around five bridesmaids during a wedding reception, with all of the action taking place in one room and the audience never actually meeting the bride.
Ms. Garber’s character Meredith is the bride’s younger sister, whom she describes as abrasive, rebellious, and bitter, with “a deep-rooted secret.”
With her first major foray into acting coming at age 12 when she starred in a community theater production of Anne of Green Gables in Hong Kong, where she grew up, Ms. Garber said that she has always been comfortable onstage.
Having acted throughout high school, Ms. Garber singled out her studies at the Neighborhood Playhouse as providing her with the kind of background she was looking for.
“I love to act and I know I’m good at it, but I wasn’t consistent, so having a technique to ground me makes me know I can walk into any audition,” she said.
The Playhouse specializes in the Meisner Technique, an acting method developed by Sanford Meisner, who taught at the school. Notable alums of the conservatory include Sandra Bullock, Robert Duvall, Jeff Goldblum, and Gregory Peck.
Of the methodology, Ms. Garber said, “I can perform this show 300 times, and each time it’ll be like I’m doing it for the first time, and each moment will seem spontaneous and real, because I’ll really be living through it.”
Five Women Wearing the Same Dress opens at the Duo Theatre at 62 East 4th Street in New York on October 29 at 8 p.m. For information about additional performances and purchasing tickets, send an email to www.smarttix.com or call (212) 868-4444.