Q: Can you talk about your artistic journey and how you founded Stay True Theatre Company?

I live in New York City. I moved to New York seven years ago with the dreams of being on Broadway, like so many individuals. I'm originally from the Chicago area, a small town in the west suburbs called Batavia Illinois.  I went to a really small college where the theater program was really small. It was technically  a community college, but the theatrical program was at a conservatory level. It was a great program because I got to work with Dr. Maria Bakalis. She's actually a dear friend of mine and a mentor. I was kind of late into the theater world. It (theatre) was not my original major. I started off as an Education major, and during my second semester I was in a classroom setting and I was getting sick like every other day. I was getting pinkeye and strep throat and the flu. I know they say that ear infections are not contagious, but when one of those kids had an ear infection, I had one the next day!

So I left school, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do with everything. So, I took a couple years off, and I was taken by my mom to New York for my birthday one year. I know this is gonna sound really corny...but like two minutes in Time Square and I was like, I need to get back here. So I went back to school and did the theater conservatory program at my college. It's called Waubonsee Community College.It was a great, a great theater program, with this professor named Dr. MariaBakalis and we took all kinds of classes there. We took, you know, every theater class you could imagine and then some great academic theater classes like Diversity of American Theater.  After I completed the program Dr. Bakalis asked me if I wanted to be her assistant director and assistant instructor and I was like, Sure. So I worked with her for three years and I learned a lot about all the aspects of theatre and how to put together a show and all that jazz.

So I moved to New York, about seven years ago, like I said, I really wanted to be on Broadway, but so does everybody. I tried it, I went to a few auditions here and there. I then got a job in the theater related world. I started working at New York City Ballet. Then I got a full time job at theThe John Gore Organization-Broadway Across America/Broadway.Com. And this was the summer of 2018.  I felt a little lost creatively. I had this great full time job, you know, nine to six, and I said, I'm going to do a benefit reading. So I organized, produced, directed the whole thing. It was the Australian play Holding the Man. It's a beautiful play and a really beautiful evening. I then went to my friend Morgan and he helped me put the evening together and I said, “I don't want this to be the end.” So, a couple weeks went by and I was having a wine night with some friends and after a few bottles of wine. I texted Morgan, I was like,  let's just start our own theater company... How hard can it be? So this was the winter of 2019, and we made our formal announcement about Stay True Theatre Company in June of 2019.we made it in honor  of world pride because we are an LGBTQ + Theatre Company. Then we had our debut production in November of 2019, and it was by an upcoming New York playwright named Craig Donnelly, and it was called Adam & Brian. It was a great experience. We used this little black box Theater in New York 62 seat theater. For a debut production for a new theater company, we did pretty good! It was two nights of performances and theater. It was one of those theatres where it was small but it still felt so grand.

Unfortunately the theater had had to shut down because of the ongoing pandemic which is just devastating. But we started the process of our second production. It's Jonathan Harvey's Beautiful Thing. It's this beautiful British play that hasn't really been performed in New York all that much since  the early 90s. We started that process in February. We found a director who's wonderful, we found an assistant director, we  cast. We were actually at our final callbacks at Open Jar Studios in New York on March 10th...and, you know, COVID-19 had been in the news. Someone asked us, what are your plans to handle COVID? I was like, I hopefully will pass quickly, it won't be as anticipated. Well, two days later, the world, as we all know, turned on a dime and everything has changed drastically. We went back to the drawing board and we were like well let's push it back to August. At this point it was only March. Then we finally figured out that August wasn't going to happen, The Playroom Theater had closed down. We knew we had to perform, Beautiful Thing and some respectable way just to display the beautiful individual work of our cast and the ensemble spirit. So we are doing a virtual reading. The virtual reading is actually this Thursday, August 6th 2020.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about how the performing arts specifically theatre and theatre arts can be a platform for social justice issues?

There are so many ways social justice issues can be handled and how it can be displayed. It's so important to have every diversity aspect, everybody on stage telling their stories. It's just so important to tell ALL of the stories, especially  running a LGBTQ+ Theatre Company. We have to be respectful and mindful of everybody's stories.

Q: Can you talk a little bit broadly about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected you as an artist as a creator as a person?

It really took a toll on the company. We were chugging along, all the stars were aligned and then COVID hit. We really had to put on our thinking caps of how we were going to remain a company because so many other small performing companies have shut down or, or gone on hiatus, or just have gone under. With Stay True being so new, I was like that can't happen to us! A few people advised me to just shut down and come back when it's safe like now's not the best time to be in a theater company.  I was like, “No we're gonna make it work!”

Beautiful Thing uses the music and hit tunes of Mama Cass Elliot. Her song, Make Your Own Kind of Music, has really been on like a constant repeat for me and getting us through the stuff. I was somebody who saw Broadway shows weekly. As a person, as an artist, as a theatre maker, as a founding artistic director and just do the best we can during these times.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about what a day or a week looks like for you in terms of what you've been working on right now and like specifically about how you've come to this reading and maybe how that's gonna work?

we declared and figured out a virtual reading, we went back to our cast, we were like, so we're doing this virtual reading. We hope you're okay with it. We hope you'll stay on board. And everybody was so keen. So, it was sitting down talking to our director and assistant director and figuring out which scenes needed the most detail because the play Beautiful Thing is a very intimate piece in some of its scenes, and we wanted to translate that, as well as we could through the virtual world. So it was discussing the scene work, figuring out a rehearsal schedule, working around eight schedules, figuring out a time that works for everybody. Generally the process for me is a virtual world. I've seen and talked to other artistic directors and other directors who take like three to two weeks doing scene work and blocking and recording and all that jazz. For us, I really wanted it to be just a beautiful production and it took us a little bit longer but in the long end it was a  really smart decision because Jenn Sus Who's our director has put together a stellar production.

Q: What would you like to see change and shift in the performing arts world after this pandemic ends?

My overall thing is that we have to have more diversity on stage. We have beautiful actors of all genders of all skin tones of all races that need to be on stage, regardless of what a script calls for. I remember that I was involved with a production of Hello Dolly back home. A couple of years ago, the director chose to cast an African American woman in the role of Dolly Levi. She got so much negativity for that and I was like, why? She's talented! She fits the age category. She's great. We need more and more diversity on the stage and regardless of what a character description calls for.

We definitely need people to come back to the theater. I do think that's going to be an issue for a lot of people because theaters are such small intimate spaces that they're going to be worried about, germs and sitting in an intimate space for over 2 hours , but we need people to come back and we need to have that feeling theatre brings, just wait till  when the curtain rises again