Student Blog: Acting Like an Off-Broadway Actor

At the end of October, I was given the incredible opportunity of traveling with a few other theatre students at my school to New York City, where for a whole weekend we lived the life of off-Broadway actors living in NYC.

I still feel like I haven’t fully processed the experience of making my off-Broadway debut. Getting to culminate almost 4 years of undergraduate acting training in an off-Broadway play and a showcase feels like more than I ever expected to do. But the opportunity gave me and my peers the unique experience that professional actors in New York have. We got to collaborate with the wonderful Royal Family Productions company and their director, Chris Henry. At the time, they were running two shows. We got to have a small singing/ensemble role in both of the unique shows, Anne of Green Gables and Marilla of Green Gables. The theatre also allowed us to perform our own showcase. We devised a 15-minute theatre piece based on Lucy Maud Montgomery’s short story Charlotte’s Ladies.

If you think this all sounds like a lot to do in one weekend, it was. Not only that, but my group devised our small theatre piece in under 3 weeks. But as I got to the theatre for rehearsals on the day we were going to be performing for the first time, I realized that it wasn’t necessarily “a lot”. I was truly learning what the life of a professional actor was. I got very little sleep that weekend and performed in 5 different shows over 3 days, with our showcase following 3 out of those 5 shows. The simultaneous feeling of exhaustion and gratefulness I had over those 4 days I recognized as a constant state professional actors lived in. And I loved it.

Getting to speak to all the professional actors we worked with was extremely helpful as well. The collaboration we had in terms of quickly blocking into the show as well as making connections between our showcase story to the stories of Anne and Marilla was a common conversation among our groups as well. I left feeling like I had made genuine connections out of a passion for theatre rather than for the purpose of trying to get ahead. 

Coming out of this experience, I will first and foremost take away the lesson that collaboration will make any big task seem smaller. My director decided to guide our process rather than dictate it, and because of that and the group of actors that I traveled with and met once I was there, the task of putting together two shows in that little amount of time seemed less daunting and more thrilling. I couldn’t have asked for a better look into the life of a professional actor.

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