I have once again neglected updating this blog for several months! So much has happened since my last entry in April. I got vaccinated against COVID-19, huzzah! I am still trying to do my part in fighting the virus by limiting my social activities and wearing a mask indoors and all that, but it's still a great relief to be vaccinated. Please do your part too! Get vaccinated and WEAR A MASK!!!
In July, I was one of the playwrights in the PGE's 16th First Reads Festival and got a Zoom reading of my play Honeybees. It was great and very helpful to get some feedback & insights on my play. And now you can read the current draft on New Play Exchange! Here's a picture of me with my lovely cast for the reading:

And  the same week we were rehearsing for the reading of Honeybees, I was filming a commercial! It was super fun, I just got to lay on a couch and pop bubblewrap! And get paid to do that! You can watch the Roadway Moving commercial here. 

The last couple of weeks have been full of creative goodness: I organized an audio recording of my play, Florence the Firefly, with my dream cast and my amazingly talented brother working as sound engineer/editor. It will be many months before it's all edited together, but it's on its way! And it was a fun night. (Even though we were all recording remotely from our own apartments/bedrooms/closets...)

Then I took an Intimacy Captain workshop led by Ann James from Intimacy Coordinators of Color, and am now certified to be an Intimacy Captain, whenever we get back into spaces to do shows again! I highly recommend this workshop for anyone in the theater (especially relevant to actors & SMs who may become Intimacy Captains on shows, but informative for directors and other stage professionals too). I was educated and inspired by this workshop. 
More info here: ​https://intimacydirectorsofcolor.com/ 

Then I was honored to play the title role in Erin Moughon's Gertrude in the Dramatists Guild's Friday Night Footlights reading series (again, from my closet, but still). This is a juicy play that I would really love to get to do once we can do in-person theater again! 

And tonight I'm performing in a scene at the PGE, playing...myself! Ha! Matthew Menendez wrote me into his first play and I couldn't be more excited and proud! 

It's been a fun couple of weeks! 

Happy to report that The Last Cyclist has won two more awards at NYC's Chain Film Festival: Best Ensemble (woo hoo!) and an Original Ideas Award for our writer Naomi Patz! I am so glad that this film/play is receiving some of the attention it deserves and I am so proud to have been a part of this ensemble! We had a Zoom reunion the other week; it was great fun. 

My monologue was one of 25 chosen out of about 200 submitted for the PGE's 2nd Annual Faces of America Monologue Festival. Inspired by Julia Butterfly Hill and the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers, my monologue is called "Tree Sitter" and was absolutely beautifully & movingly performed by actor Mackie Raymond. You can watch it here. All the monologues are great! But mine is at approximately the 39 minute mark. 
I presented the next 15ish minutes of my Honeybees play at PGE's Volume 130, being blessed with terrific actors once again. I need to keep working on this play so I can give all these actors a full through-line with their characters! You can watch this work-in-progress here. My scene is around the 54 minute mark. 
And finally, The Last Cyclist will be streaming as part of Chain Film Festival Dec 4-10, (virtual tickets here) and The Jewish Renaissance gave us a sweet review here! 
​Good stuff!! 

Last night I had the great honor to perform in an online reading of Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner. That reading can still be seen on New Ambassador's YouTube page here. It's a very dark play of course (and has sadly never been more relevant in this country than now), but it was an absolute joy to rehearse & perform. We only had four hours total of rehearsal which can't even really scrape the surface when it comes to the writing of Wallace Shawn, but it was enough to remind me how very much I love to act, to work on a script, to delve into great writing & just play within the structure of the words. Ironically perhaps, this dystopian play reminded me to take time for joy. Because acting is the thing that brings me the most joy in all the world and too often I shove it aside for things I think are more important. Well, arguably, they are more important (like volunteering to get out the Blue vote, so that what happens to the country in The Designated Mourner doesn't happen here, or just doing the things I need to do to pay the bills)...but. But. Joy. Joy makes life worth living, right? I love Congresswoman Ayana Pressley's quote, "Joy is a necessary act of resistance." I am so grateful to Paul Pakler for inviting me to play and to New Ambassadors for producing the evening, and that I chose to take a little  time to do the thing that brings me the most joy. 

Thrilled to have some good news during these anxiety-ridden times. The Last Cyclist continues to play the film festival circuit and recently won "Best Cast Performance" at the Melech Film Festival in Tel Aviv! See the announcement here. And look who's prominently featured in the image for their announcement (spoiler alert, it's me):

And much more about The Last Cyclist here. 

In other news, I recently wrote and presented the next 15-ish minutes of my in-process honeybees play at PGE's Volume 124. You can watch that scene here! My scene starts at about the 42 minute mark, a auspicious number if ever there was one! (And actually, one of the characters in the play is called "Worker 42".) It's the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Anyway, very grateful for the PGE community for their support and my lovely cast of actors for this particular scene! And I have a feeling I probably won't finish writing the play until I've signed up to present at another Volume because external deadlines are extremely helpful! 

Take care, everyone. These are scary, sad times. But I do think some good will come out of it. I think some good is already coming out of it. All the consciousness-awakening. Meanwhile, I am working to Get Out the VOTE!!!! Please vote and vote blue, even if that blue is not as blue as you want it to be. And encourage others to vote. And tell your senators to extend the PUA. Artists and others are literally going hungry right now when our government could so easily help out. And tell your governors to CANCEL RENT.

Love, Peace, Understanding, and All That Jazz, 
​Kirsten

I've been acting in a web series called "Remote Teaching During COVID-19" by playwright and public school teacher Erin Moughon! The episodes are under the umbrella of New Ambassadors' "The Corona Chronicles". You can watch the first episode here: https://newambassadorstheatre.com/corona-chronicles. We just filmed the third episode yesterday (over Zoom, of course), in which my character has just drunk an entire bottle of wine. That was a lot of fun. Did you know turmeric kombucha looks very much like white wine on camera? And did you know it is very easy to feel drunk when it's 90 degrees in your apartment? It's true. 
And I'm also continuing to occasionally appear in PGE events. I co-hosted the most recent Volume 121, which was a lot of fun. A lot of good writing appeared that Volume & some fantastic and hilarious Zoom acting. And I'm busy procrastinating, uh, writing more of my honeybees play, currently titled...Honeybees. (Shrug. You can't tell me you don't know what it's about, with that title.) If you want to watch the first 10 minutes of that play, that was presented at the PGE's last Drop & Give Me 10, you can watch on the PGE's YouTube channel here. My scene starts around the 22:40 mark! I'm proud of the lovely actors who read my script over the challenging medium of Zoom! 
Meanwhile, the pandemic continues...As Samuel Beckett said, "I can't go on. I'll go on." Be well, loves.

It's taken a while to adjust to the world of acting in plays over Zoom, but it's happened. Obviously the past couple of months of the pandemic have been frightening and the world has been turned upside down in a way none of us have really experienced before, but I am extremely fortunate to be able to continue doing some acting projects in the virtual realm. (Nothing paid, of course, but that's often the life of an actor anyway!)
Last weekend I acted in a Zoom reading of Rachael Carnes's play, "Practice House" with several of the same actors that I read with when we did a reading of it here in NYC back in August 2019. The reading this Saturday was for the Great Plains Theatre Conference. "Practice House" was one of 20 plays accepted out of more than 800! I felt honored to be asked back to play the same role I played in the August NYC reading (an advantage of having the reading over Zoom, actors and auditors from three different time zones could participate together!), and it was really great to see how Rachael had tinkered with the play over the past year, and I loved getting to give feedback afterwards. I really love when I can give feedback to writers about how the play was from my perspective as an actor playing a character--"I loved the clarification of her character here, but then in the middle I wasn't sure what I was doing, was I really drawn into the brainwashing of this world here or was I just play-acting for survival...why did the character act like this here but not here?" etc. I should clarify, I love giving feedback when I feel like it is received and helpful and welcomed by the playwright, which with Rachael it definitely was. 

Speaking of writing, I myself am trying my hand at playwriting again with this Sunday's Drop and Give Me 10 at PGE. I have written the first 10 minutes of a new play and it will be read over Zoom and YouTube Live this Sunday evening. I'm excited about this play, I think it might ultimately be the companion piece to my one act play Florence the Firefly. But of course I have only written the first 10 minutes, so I'm not sure where it will end up! I'm hoping it's funny. Listen in and let me know what you think! More info here!
Be well everyone. Please stay as safe as you can for all of our sakes. Wear masks and stay at least six feet away from people whenever you can, even if you live in a state that is relaxing its restrictions. Our country does not yet have the adequate testing or medical resources to re-open. And sadly it will probably be many more months (years? Eep.) before we are able to safely gather again. Performing live in front of people, and singing with people are the two things I do for my livelihood and my life, and those are put on pause right now. Thank Science for the technology that allows us to keep doing at least some of that art together/apart online. It feeds our souls. And keep singing at home, even if you're by yourself. It's good for you. xoxo.

Once again I have been neglectful of my website! I forgot to note here about performing in The PlayGround Experiment's inaugural Faces of America Monologue Festival at the Kraine Theater on November 18, 2019. I had the honor of speaking Erin Moughon's words once again, this time, in a monologue, as a teacher dealing with the looming possibility of school shootings. The monologues that were presented this evening were published in a book, and you can find my name inside, as the proud first performer of Erin's monologue. You can buy this book at Shakespeare & Co in NYC or at any PGE event! (If you're not in NYC, I can always procure a copy for you & send it to you!) I think it will be available to purchase on the PGE website soon. 

Speaking of being mentioned as a performer in published books, you can also find my name in the casts mentioned in the published script of An Actor's Carol! Buy one here: https://www.anactorscarol.com/ 
And speaking of An Actor's Carol, our ensemble of actors was nominated back in November for Best Ensemble of a Play in the 2019 Broadway World New Jersey Regional Theatre Awards. How nice is that!