ABOUT

 

 

I am a professional actor based in Seattle, WA.

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I have worked locally at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, A Contemporary Theatre (ACT), Intiman Theatre Company, Seattle Children's Theatre, Seattle Shakespeare Company, Village Theatre, 5th Avenue Theatre Company, Book-It Repertory Theatre, Strawberry Theatre Workshop and many other smaller companies, as well as down in Portland at Portland Center Stage and the Portland Playhouse. I am a recipient (Shylock, The Merchant of Venice, Seattle Shakespeare Co.) and four-time nominee (Lennie, Of Mice and Men, and Letter Writer #1, Tiny Beautiful Things, Seattle Repertory Theatre; Ray, Yankee Tavern, ACT Theatre) of the Theatre Puget Sound "Gregory" Award for Outstanding Performance, and have garnered two nominations for The Stranger Genius Award (Shylock; and Roy Cohn, Angels in America, Intiman).

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Background

A San Francisco native, I survived an eight-year stint in the Midwest during the 1970s before returning to Northern CA and finishing secondary school, high school, and one academic year at CA State University, Sacramento. I then entered the Conservatory Actor Training Program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, emerging in 1989 with an Honors BFA. I promptly moved to Seattle, where for the most part I have stayed put.

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From my arrival in Seattle (June 1989) until the summer of 2002, I worked day jobs to get by, beginning with clerking at, and eventually managing, the Market Street Deli, a convenience store in the Fremont/Ballard area (aka Fre-lard). My first theatre gig in the region was out in Issaquah at the Village (in what is now their First Stage Theatre), playing Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew (with an oceanic Cockney accent and a fondness for drink) in the winter of '89-'90. An assortment of Fringe work followed, culminating a year later in my first job with a regional theatre, a brand new adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Chad Henry at Tacoma Actors Guild (R.I.P., TAG). Concomitant with visiting family down in NoCal the following year, I took a theatre job in Concord and stayed for 18 months, the bright spot in which was the creation of a one-person show called On My Way to Heaven. I pieced together some slides and a rollicking set of letters between Steven W. Howell, of Northern California, and a forest ranger, detailing the fallout from an alleged camping violation incurred during our private whitewater rafting trip down the Main Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho, called it "Trials and Tributaries," and paired it with a winsome monologue called "The God Guy Speaks," by Garry Eister, of San Luis Obispo, CA.

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Once back in Seattle, I returned to work at the Market Street Deli, began playing music, and slowly re-engaged with the Fringe scene, becoming a company member of A Theatre Under the Influence and working with Annex Theatre, AHA! Theatre, The Immediate Theatre Company, Theater Schmeater, the Seattle Fringe Festival and others. I also re-tooled the one-person show, replacing Mr. Eister's piece with a new monologue of my own called "Twice," another epistolary affair featuring a baroque Letter to the Editor of a newspaper; the whole evening is now titled The River's Invitation, after the oft-covered Percy Mayfield blues tune. In the summer of 1998, my then-wife, Sheila Daniels, and I spent the season in Astoria, Oregon, working at the brand-new River Theatre. Upon returning to Seattle, I signed up with temp agencies (despite only typing 33 wpm), working long stints answering phones for a Kirkland law office and a PVC pipe outlet downtown, packing and shipping at Mountaineers Books on Harbor Island, and stocking the Parts Room at Allied Safe and Lock in SODO, among others.

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More Fringe work ensued, culminating in my return to the regional scene--ACT, in The Crucible, 1999. It was then, at ACT in '99, that I ran into Chris Coleman, the incoming Artistic Director of Portland Center Stage. Chris had been earning his MFA in directing at Carnegie Mellon while I was there, and had directed me in Ibsen's Ghosts, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and Caryl Churchill's Traps. In 2000, I earned my Equity card in Mr. Coleman's first production at PCS, Elizabeth Egloff's adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel The Devils. 18 years later, I would go on to appear in Chris's final production there as AD, playing Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara.

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Image: Across an inlet from The Black Fort, Inis Mór.