Elissa Beth Stebbins

First Blog!

Hello!  And welcome!!  I’m very excited to have you here!!!  Can you tell!?

This, friends and family (for surely, those are the only people reading this), is my NEW space – a NEW blog, on a NEW site, in which I will share all kinds of awesome things.  Some of those things will also be NEW!  Things like upcoming shows, pictures, updated resumes, and performance related media.  Other stuff may be old like my journal from the Shakespeare & Co Month Long Intensive (which you may have already waded through once and are now obligated to do so again in order to leave comments.  kidding.  sort of.), or hackneyed and trite thoughts about state of the arts in our nation and lists of names for the dog I can’t get.  If I get really motivated I might post about the things I bake, because I’m sure I can find a way to relate brownies to acting (I’m not sure whether a “brownies and acting” post will fit under old or NEW. this is where I invite you to be the judge. and to leave glowing comments regardless of how you actually feel).

Enough introduction, let’s move on to more interesting items!

First!  I just started rehearsals for a NEW show with City Lights Theater in San Jose.  The play is called In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), and, to quote wikipedia because it’s brief, concise and infallible, “It concerns the early history of the vibrator, when doctors used it as a clinical device to bring women to orgasm as treatment for “hysteria.” Other themes include Victorian ignorance of female sexual desire, motherhood and breastfeeding, and jealousy.  The play was nominated for three 2010 Tony Awards.”

That description sounds totally boring and weird (except for the Tony noms which are exciting but strange considering how boring and weird the play sounds).  But the play is neither boring nor weird!  It’s actually a lovely play with a lot of humor and humanity, and it manages to touch on a whole lot of themes and issues relevant to your interests.  Trust.  Also, there are loads of awesome people involved and I’m incredibly excited to be a part of it.  We perform May 17-June 17, mark your calendars and breathlessly await more NEW posts about it!

Moving on to –

Second!  I’m also lined up for some summer Shakespeare!  That’s right folks, it’s back to the winery in Livermore to tragedy it up in Hamlet and make fun of a fat guy in Merry Wives.  Don’t wet your pants with excitement yet, I’ll be teasing this info out for another few months in order to whip your excitement up into a murderous frenzy!  Or, perhaps, a sit-and-watch-other-people-do-ridiculous-things-while-speaking-poetry frenzy.  Which is not so much a frenzy as it is a few steps up the energy-output ladder from a nap.  Unless you’re that guy in the second row, in which case it is a nap.

Are you jealous of my career choice yet?

Aaaaaaaaaannnnnd –

Last!  Some of you may have seen my awesome Bump-It (TM) parading around onstage during Seussical last summer.  Well, I’m proud to say that show was nominated for several Bay Area Theater Critic Circle awards, including Best Ensemble, Best Music Direction, Female Actor in a Featured Role (the lovely Rebecca Pingree as Gertrude), Female Actor in a Principal Role (the adorable Nandi Drayton as Jojo), Male Actor in a Featured Role (the awesome Benjamin Pither as Horton), Male Actor in a Principal Role (the incredible William Hodgson as the Cat in the Hat), Best Production, and Specialties (the terribly petite but surprisingly buff Kimberly Miller as our aerialist). For those who are curious about how this works, we’re only competing against musicals at places with similar house size (over 300 seats), which includes places like TheatreWorks, San Jose Rep and CalShakes.  We’ll be performing at the awards ceremony on April 2nd, after which I’ll let you know if we have any cause to celebrate.  (Also, is anyone else convinced it should be princiPLE role and not princiPAL role?  I took it from the BATCC site, which is no guarantee of correctness but I figured I’d respect their choice).

I reserve the right to threadjack myself at any time in order to discuss grammar.  It’s my blog.  Handle it.

Well, thanks for directing your eyeballs here for a bit, I hope you’ll come back soon.  Unfortunately, I cannot guarantee that the use of exclamation points will be any less excessive in future posts.  (!!!!)

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