While we are all happy to say goodbye to 2020, we want to thank everyone who helped us do so in a grand style by contributing to our end-of-year appeal. With your help, we raised more than $60,000, which will help keep our staff and artists employed while we wait (patiently!) for in-person theater to resume. We are extraordinarily grateful and wish everyone a happy and healthy 2021.
In the Hot Seat: Kate Benson
Company Member Profile
Kate Benson is a performer and an OBIE-Award winning playwright. She was seen in the ERS production Fondly, Collette Richland and plays Arkadina in our upcoming production Seagull.
First job you ever had: Teaching swimming at the Evanston Township High School Summer Learn-to-Swim program.
Worst job you ever had:Telemarketing. I lasted 6 hours, and then I went home in tears, never to return.
Most surprising thing about you:Oh. Uh. I really like figuring out calculus problems. I’m working on learning how to solve separable and non-separable differential equations, very slowly. Or maybe that’s not surprising. I might already present as nerdy.
Weirdest on stage experience: I was playing an angel, in college, in Thorsten Veblen’s “Morality Play for the Leisure Class.” Someone pulled the fire alarm, and I had to scramble off a ladder and stand in the rain in my angel wings and tiny maid outfit on Lower Broadway (in the early 1990’s) waiting for the building to clear. Then we went back inside, and, damp from the rain, finished the show. The weird part: most of the audience came back to see the end of the play.
What do you love about what you do?Two things among many: the brilliance and the weirdness of the other people in the rehearsal room, and the sound/feeling of an audience laughing together. Also: surprises. Also: wearing other people’s clothes and saying other people’s words at the same time.
Favorite ERS show (whether you were in it or not):A tie: The Sound and Fury (not in it); Fondly, Colette Richland (in it.)
Best thing about working with ERS:There is always time to make a (good?) joke in rehearsal.
Town Tattle
News from Company Members and Friends
Sibyl Kempson’s new work THE SECURELY CONFERRED, VOUCHSAFED KEEPSAKES OF MAERY S. reinvents as many versions of the Frankenstein author Mary Shelley as there are definitions of the word “Gothic.” It will be available first as a 4-part radio play with all episodes available for streaming from January 25th to May 15th, 2021. Then in the spring, MAERY S. will continue as a series of video works presented by Abrons Arts Center and The Chocolate Factory Theater. More info here.
Robert M. Johanson will be performing with Nature Theater of Oklahoma in the premiere of Burt Turrido: An Opera, a piece of music theater which he composed, at the Bockenheimer Depot in Frankfurt, Germany on February 1st. More info here.
Gavin Price is the resident sound designer for Theater in Quarantine, which was launched by Joshua William Gelb shortly after theaters closed. Gelb transformed the 2’x 4′ x 8’ closet inside his East Village apartment into a white-box theater. Their newest piece TiQ/Untitled Bug Play, created in collaboration with Underground Railroad Game’s Scott R. Sheppard, premieres live on February 1st, 2021 at 7:00 and 9:00 pm.
Part of an ongoing series on translation and autocracy, Milan Vracar teaches Aaron Landsman how to make coffee with a candle, like they did in bunkers when the bridges were blown up. Created with Ogemdi Ude and Clarinda Mac Low, alongside collaborators in Australia, Russia and Serbia, Language Reversal is about what it means to lose, or almost lose, a country and what it means never to have had one. A short digital work and conversation with Milan Vračar of Kulturanova in Serbia streams on February 1st here.
Borne Back Ceaselessly
Glimpses into ERS’s Past
The Great Gatsby turns 95 this year and has now entered the public domain. This prompted us to take a look back at our very first incarnation of Gatz presented in 1999 at the HERE Arts Center as part of the American Living Room series. Pictured: Rinne Groff, James Urbaniak, James Hannaham, Scott Shepherd, Tory Vazquez.
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Kate Benson is a performer and an OBIE-Award winning playwright. She was seen in the ERS production Fondly, Collette Richland and plays Arkadina in our upcoming production Seagull.
