This month, Marin Theatre Company welcomes back five of our – and your – most loved Bay Area performers for the wild and whimsical, music-filled West Coast premiere of Philip Dawkins’s Failure: A Love Story: Brian Herndon, Patrick Kelly Jones, Megan Smith, Liz Sklar, and Kathryn Zdan. Not only is every member of this "terrific cast" a returning MTC favorite (Marin IJ), three of them got their first real taste of theater in Marin County.
Zdan, Sklar, and Jones all grew up here – in Mill Valley, San Rafael and Kentfield, and Larkspur, respectively. In fact, Zdan’s parents had season tickets to MTC throughout her childhood and Sklar performed in an MTC summer program as a 12 year old. For all three, their work in Marin is a return to their theatrical roots, as it was within this county’s rich arts community that each was first bitten by the performing bug.
“The first thing I ever performed in was a Steve and Kate’s camp talent show,” said Zdan. “I did the hula when I was four, and I was sold.”
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Sklar too had the experience of being hooked at an early age. “I was pretty obsessed from the get-go,” she said. “As a kid I was super shy and very uncomfortable in groups. I didn’t feel like I could be myself. In 4th grade, I was determined to be in the school play and after willing my way through an audition I got a real part in the show. The director encouraged me to make big, outrageous choices…to be my weird self. And everybody liked it! It was the first time I felt like other people appreciated me for me. For the first time, I had the extraordinary experience of having my voice heard instead of always hiding in the background.”
Jones, who attended Redwood High School, Zdan, who attended Tamalpais High School, and Sklar, who attended The Branson School, all gave credit to their high school drama teachers for encouraging them to express themselves and push their limits theatrically. Each of their teachers – Britt Block at Redwood, Ben Cleveland and Susan Brashear at Tam, and Maura Vaughn at Branson – has remained a pillar of their school’s arts program to this day.
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“Maura Vaughn had been an actor in New York, so she showed me that acting was a real possibility,” said Sklar.
Though Jones was involved in theater from middle school onward, it was more of a social activity than something he thought might have long-term potential. But something clicked for him when he had the experience of playing Bottom in a Redwood High production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by David Smith, who is still the drama teacher at Drake High School. “He was so permissive in terms of letting me be me. He said, ‘I like what’s goofy and weird about you – let’s pump that up.’ I realized that, in a way, I could be more myself in that context, with the right encouragement and the right scenario,” he said, noting, “That was sort of my falling in love moment.”
Despite the ongoing battle between balancing budgets and maintaining arts programs, an astounding number of the schools here in Marin have managed to sustain flourishing drama departments that give students early and hands-on exposure to the power of theater and performance. Having moved back to the area as theater professionals, Sklar, Jones, and Zdan all see great value in giving back to the theatrical community that raised them. Sklar taught Shakespeare to middle school students through an MTC artist-in-residence program that culminated in them seeing her perform in Othello in 2012; Jones regularly teaches drama at Redwood High; Zdan teaches all over the Bay Area, but is primarily the movement and physical theater teacher at Tam High. All are thrilled to continue to be part of the Bay Area’s unique and passionate artistic community.
“It has been particularly rewarding to have to opportunity to work at the theaters I grew up going to: a literal dream-come-true,” said Zdan. “It is also incredible to get to be a guest artist at Tam High, and to be a part of the ecosystem that fed me and lit my creative fire. It is such an honor to be a part of that legacy.”
Come see the entire cast in the "crisp, quirky, ultimately delightful and moving" Failure: A Love Story (SF Chronicle), playing June 5-29 at Marin Theatre Company! To purchase tickets, visit marintheatre.org or contact MTC’s Box Office at (415) 388-5208.
- Rachel Wiegardt-Egel
