We asked our Resident Acting Company to tell us what they’d been up to this summer. Their answers included road trips, world premiere plays, and everything in between.

Dominic Cuskern. Photo by Luke Redmond

When I’m not at The Pearl, I can usually be found at Gallery Players out in Brooklyn. In July I ran the Peanut Gallery, a musical theatre summer camp for kids grades 1 through 6.  Each week in July they learned to sing, to dance, to act, and each week they wrote their own show which was performed for parents and friends each Friday. It was a lot of work but a hoot.

I also played Lear in King Lear in Players Shakespeare, Gallery Players’ newly-created Summer Shakespeare Festival. That was a wonderful experience for me and, I hope, for the audience.

–Dominic Cuskern

Robin Leslie Brown. Photo by Luke Redmond

Pearl company member Robin Leslie Brown also spent some time at Gallery this summer. She was part of the Black Box New Play Festival, directing Distastefully Yours by Denis Meadows.

Our company includes two resident stage managers, Dale Smallwood and Lisa Ledwich, without whom the whole place would shut down. Dale sent us an update on her summer activities—and as usual, she was hard at work.

I’ve been working for Premiere Stages which is an AEA company housed on the campus of Kean University in Union, NJ.  The company’s focus is to premiere new works in New Jersey.  This summer they decided to be a little risky and produce 2 new plays.  The 1^st show was Duck Crossing by John Wooten, who also directed.  It’s a humorous look at the night George Washington crossed the Delaware.  The play I am working on now is called Any Other Name by George Brant. Set in 1840′s London, the play is about a struggling poet looking for fame.  It has some interesting twists to it. On a personal note, I was also able to get away for 1 week to Cape Cod.  It’s been our family vacation spot since I was 2 years old.

–Dale Smallwood, Resident Stage Manager

But there was still time for a little fun in the sun—or in Jolly Abraham’s case, the snow . . . .

Jolly Abraham. Photo by Luke Redmond

1. My friends and I went on a road trip in the Rocky Mountain States, which included getting snowed in at Yellowstone in June, and spending the night under the Utah desert stars.
2. I was nominated for a Barrymore award for best supporting actress for Scorched at Wilma Theatre in the spring.
3. I just moved to a new apartment!
4. I spent 2 weeks at the Lincoln Center Directors Lab.

–Jolly Abraham

Carol Schultz. Photo by Gregory Costanzo

I spent most of the summer with family helping my Dad get through a total knee replacement and attending many Little League baseball games featuring my nephew, Steven (who was, by the way, inducted into the Little League Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, last summer). Also, at the end of the summer, I traveled with friends to the Baltic region of the world, specifically Finland and Estonia.

–Carol Schultz

TJ Edwards. Photo by Gregory Costanzo

T.J. Edwards’ adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide had a reading at Gallery (directed by Robin Leslie Brown), and his play Railroad Bill had its world premiere at the Chester Theater in Massachusetts in July and August.

Sean McNall. Photo by Gregory Costanzo

The theatre season, like the typical school year, ends in June; so I never quite abandoned my schoolboy expectation that as the temperature rises, my workload decreases.  Not so this year. The unnaturally cool summer made for an impossibly busy couple of months. Shortly after closing Vieux Carré, my wife and I flew down south to Nashville, her hometown, to purchase a new car and drive it back to New York.

After a week of catching up on many long overdue chores on my honey-do list, I began a three week Elizabethan workshop with voice and speech coach Robert Neff Williams, hosted by Theatre for a New Audience.  The workshop concluded, I booked the part of J. Edgar Hoover–no cross-dressing involved—in the forthcoming film No God, No Master, starring David Strathairn, which was shot in Milwaukee, WI.

I’ve been back in town for a week now, and am putting the house in order while preparing for the first day of rehearsal for The Playboy of the Western World.

–Sean McNall

Bradford Cover. Photo by Luke Redmond

This summer as part of my preparation for The Playboy of the Western World I went to an Irish bar near where I live on the Lower East Side and ordered a Guinness. The bartender who delivered this fine beverage is not Irish himself, he hails from the Midwest and is a fellow actor. I told him my reason for ordering the dark pint, and he said, “Oh you’re doing that play. It’s great. Audiences love it, but it’s very difficult.” I immediately recognized those words somewhere.  They seemed so completely familiar to me.  And then I realized with some pride, and a tinge of shock, that the same has been said of most of the plays I’ve done at The Pearl.

So after I’d had some more of the Black Stuff, as it is sometimes called, I started telling my Midwestern bartender about my trip to Ireland a few years ago. I won’t bore you with the entire conversation, but somewhere in the essence of this back and forth across the bar with him I remembered what it was like to sit in a country pub in Ireland, and talk with the locals.

When you open the door to a pub in Ireland, the first thing that happens is that the regulars sitting at the bar turn and look at you.   My first thought was always, “Whoops. I’ve come to the wrong place.” The next thing that happens is that they all beckon you to come in and sit down. Which I always did. After some very quick preliminaries I found that in most of these places my traveling companion and I were heartily laughing at their witty jokes and listening to their amazing stories. Now, anybody who has traveled there will tell you they had a similar experience. But for the two of us at that moment it was astonishing how quickly we became audience members to an array of funny, interesting, and moving tales from these people’s lives. When we got back to the hotel we would sift through these tales a bit, sharing our favorite parts and laughing, until eventually it dawned on us that these amazing oral histories might not be entirely true. In some cases perhaps none of the story was true. In fact, it could be that it is a local pastime to see who can tell the most outrageous story to the tourists and get away with it. But the thing that interests me most about this is that we didn’t care. The stories were too good.

–Brad Cover

Their summer adventures concluded, our actors come back next week to begin our annual workshops: a week of season specific training and team-building. We can’t wait to get started!

Kate Farrington (The Pearl’s resident Dramaturg) sat down this week with J.R. Sullivan, to find out a little more about his vision for The Pearl, how his summer was, and what he does in his free time.

J.R. Sullivan in his office.

Kate Farrington: What are you looking forward to most about working at The Pearl?

J.R. Sullivan: I’m looking forward to watching this outstanding company perform for this outstanding audience. I think our audience has high expectations for us—they come to see great plays succeed in new ways. And those expectations are wonderful; they are a great gift and a great opportunity for us.

KF: What is your greatest hope for The Pearl?

JRS: I have hopes fueled by . . . well, fueled by all the things I just mentioned, I want The Pearl to vault to a new stage of recognition in New York and across the country.

KF:  Funniest thing that ever happened to you at The Pearl?

JRS: Certainly the most unexpected thing that ever happened to me at The Pearl was our production of S. N. Behrman’s Biography back in 2007.  Here I was directing this utterly unknown play, and the farther we got into the process the more we realized the buoyancy of the script. It wasn’t just that the play was funny, it was that the jokes were landing like they’d been written yesterday—it felt like directing a new work.

That newness is what I want for all Pearl productions. Even if it’s a play we’ve done before I hope that we’ll always go for a fresh approach. We call these plays great—they should be great because an audience has a great time seeing them.

KF: Tell us something most people don’t know about you.

JRS: Most people in New York don’t know that I started a theatre at the ripe old age of 22—probably because no one told me that you didn’t do that at 22. It was called the New American Theater in Rockford, Illinois. I went in thinking I would get it going, and stay two years. I stayed for 22 years.

KF: You had a bit of excitement actually getting to NYC—any good stories?

JRS: I‘ve been an Associate Artistic Director of the Utah Shakespeare Festival for the past 9 years, so I spend my summers out there. When I took the job at The Pearl there was a great deal of pride and excitement on their part, but some sadness too. So when I left Utah for New York last month there were several tributes that caught me off guard. I was very moved; it made leaving sweet, sad, and wonderful.

KF: What’s the one thing you couldn’t live without?

JRS: Let’s see . . . red wine . . . baseball . . . This is a hard one. I would have to say, because it’s what’s put me here today, my love of the theatre.

KF: What is the first play you ever directed?

JRS: I both directed and choreographed (and THAT’S definitely something people don’t know about me) Damn Yankees when I was 19. I was hooked.

KF: Favorite play you’ve never directed?

JRS: Up until this year I would have said The Playboy of the Western World—so now I have to pick a new one. Probably The Seagull. I’ve also always wanted to work on The Time of Your Life.

KF: Favorite book and why?

JRS: After nearly a decade out at Utah Shakespeare Festival I have an ever-growing appreciation for Shakespeare, if that counts. But Ben Hecht (who wrote The Front Page) published a collection of his early journalism called A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago. It’s a series of short character sketches he wrote, modeling it off The Arabian Nights. I just love it.

KF: Favorite restaurant?

JRS: My absolute favorite restaurant is an Italian place called Maria’s west of Chicago. Here in New York, I like Pig Heaven at 2^nd Ave and 80^th Street.

KF: Favorite sports team?

JRS: The Chicago White Sox!

KF: Thanks for sitting down with me—shall we do this again in a month once Playboy is underway?

JRS: Absolutely.

Shep, your wistful look back accompanied by your bracing look forward heartens me greatly. People used to say that all you needed to start a theatre was a passion and a plank. But these were people who usually did not start theatres. Well, despite that host of other matters necessary to build and maintain a theatre company it is passion and purpose that matter most when all else is said and done and I believe that it is your great love of great actors and great plays, Shep, that remains luminous on the planks of the Pearl.

Paraphrasing Bernard Shaw a little bit, it is my great privilege to keep the torch in the air, and to work hard in order to make certain that the torch will always be the beacon that you have made of your passion and plank: your Pearl.

J.R. Sullivan and Shepard Sobel. Photo by Luke Redmond