Left: a headshot taken my third year in uni (2019-20); Right: a headshot taken under a lighting grid I designed and installed (2025)
It’s been over 5 years since I’ve walked onstage as someone other than myself.
After a two and half year hiatus after uni, I began my stand-up career and returned to the stage as an improviser, musician, and vocalist. But I had yet to add traditional acting back into the mix…until today.
Today I take the stage in my original piece, Where We Die; a piece I’ve spent the last three months as director, dramaturg, and lighting designer. But tonight I’ll step into the role of Sophie, a broken young girl from America who has lost more than her sister in the last five years. Now she finds herself among strangers, and we’ll see if in them, she can find herself.
I feel somewhere between anxiety and pride to be stepping back under the lights. I’m grateful to be joined by five other incredible, hard-working cast members. And while I’m excited to get to play, I’m nervous to “put my money where my mouth is” as it were; with minimal rehearsals yet speaking the words I, myself, wrote, a pressure weighs on me to be more than good.
But this is what I’ve been trained to do. Beginning at the age of eight, I’ve been in countless productions of drama, comedy, varying lengths and intensities, some with song and dance, some with puppetry and movement. I’ve almost two decades of stage time with the years between age 13 and 21 being the most intense, doing 2-6 productions every year complete with rehearsal, memorization, and of course, performances. I know what to do when something goes wrong, when you miss a line, when you get lost. This, too, is a play I know intimately as it was birthed from my own brain, the characters splinters of myself.
I have no idea what awaits me onstage tonight, but I know that the curtain will rise, and it will fall.