Bad Dates’ Harris in good company
Posted on Sunday, May 14, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/154708/
FAYETTEVILLE — Rebecca Harris believes in coincidences. And, rightly so.
Consider this: Her freshman year at Trinity University in San Antonio, her drama teacher was Amy Herzberg. Herzberg, who was only there one year, applied for a job at the University of Arkansas because she knew five people who hailed from Fayetteville: Harris and four other students and colleagues. Now, 17 years later, Herzberg will direct Harris for the first time in the one-woman show Bad Dates, the premiere production for TheatreSquared. Harris began rehearsal for Bad Dates the week after a large weekend celebration for her father’s 70 th birthday. Though Harris was performing in Fiction a year ago when Bad Dates was produced in Pittsburgh, her legs were used for its promotional poster.
Coincidences and all, Harris performs in Bad Dates Friday through June 4 at Nadine Baum Studios.
Harris, who now lives in Pittsburgh, grew up with her two older sisters and brother on land west of Fayetteville, with horses and a big garden. Through her oldest sister’s involvement in theater, Harris discovered it appealed to her too; she was in several local productions.
Her senior year at Fayetteville High School, Harris played Patty Simcox in Grease, alongside then-junior Jason Moore. Moore has since directed the Tony Award-winning Avenue Q and was associate director for Les Miserables when it came to Fayetteville last May. In the late 1980 s at Trinity, Harris took Herzberg’s acting and musical-theater classes and was in one of two productions that year. Herzberg directed the other show, and Harris was jealous then that Herzberg wasn’t her director. “It’s kind of insane that we’re working together again after all these years,” Harris says.
Harris, now 35, studied theater for a year in London. She worked as an intern at the Alley Theater in Houston, where she later returned to be directed by Edward Albee in the U. S. premiere of his play, The Play About the Baby.
After graduate school at Columbia University in New York, Harris got an agent and went to auditions. When working with Signature Theater, she got her Actors’ Equity card. Acting is a freelance job, and members of this actors and stage managers union are guaranteed certain wages, work environments and benefits.
“So that you don’t have to negotiate for yourself every time you go out there,” Harris says.
The union requires 20 weeks of Equity work to receive benefits. This one-woman show will put her at that mark.
“I couldn’t afford to come here and do this show if they weren’t paying me,” she says.
Bad Dates has been compared to television’s Sex and the City, which is also set in New York, about a single, thirtysomething woman who’s on the dating scene.
“It’s topically the same,” she says. But “it’s not as vulgar.”
Before arriving in Fayetteville, Harris had worked alone on the script for Bad Dates, her first one-woman show, committing it to memory. She says Herzberg will “help make the character deeper.”
The show runs an hour and 10 minutes, “and it’s just me.” She knows she’ll use many of the props — clothes, shoes, purses — as prompts to help her find her way.
“I’ve made a lot of decisions about Haley already,” she says of her character.
The show, by Theresa Rebeck, reveals Haley Walker’s life through five scenes. Though the script is written realistically, in many partial sentences and interrupted thoughts, it’s also very “lyrical.”
“I love the way that she talks,” Harris says of the character. “And she doesn’t take herself too seriously.”
Harris describes Haley as a “sassy, resourceful, independent woman who was married, had a kid and got divorced.” She put all her energy in giving her child a great life, but now she’s decided to explore the dating scene again.
Her character has bad dates mostly because of her unrealistic expectations — “and some of it’s just bad luck,” Harris says. Her character is personable, and “she’s talking to you like you know her.”
“She’s somebody I would want to hang out with,” she says.
Harris gets the play’s references to New York because she lived there for 10 years. And the material isn’t just for women.
“I think it’s a good date play, oddly enough,” she says.
At the Pittsburgh Playhouse, Harris appeared recently in The Exonerated, about six people on death row, and The Birthday Party, a dark comedy by Harold Pinter.
“As an actor, there’s nothing better than work back-to-back like that,” she says.
Harris receives residuals from television and film work she’s done. That’s her giving Matthew McConaughey a sisterly smooch in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003 ) while their characters’ family plays a bluffing card game. And that’s her in a fifth-season episode of Sex and the City, getting advice from character Samantha Jones while shopping.
For the Sex and the City part, Harris met the casting director when auditioning for something else. When the shopping woman character was added, she was called in that afternoon and found out the next day she got the part.
For the movie, it was weeks until she heard back about her part, which involved about two minutes of the romantic comedy.
There are several Equity theaters in Pittsburgh. But she has to make money other ways to support her theater career. For a while, film and television parts played that role, but now she leans on teaching and radio and voice-over work.
Harris recently started teaching theater classes at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. She’s looking forward to talking to Herzberg about acting from a teacher’s perspective.
She says Herzberg has a “fearlessness” about acting. And she remembers something Herzberg emphasized about auditions:
“You have to walk in there and show them a piece of your soul,” Harris recites, tearing up.
Another piece of advice: When you get a job, start looking for your next job.
Oddly enough, for the first time in six months, Harris doesn’t have that next job lined up. She does, however, have her fall wedding to plan.
Though people tell Harris they’ve seen her in those television and film roles, her heart is in theater. She’s glad to be in Bad Dates here.
“It’s a way to kind of bring back the thing that I do,” she says. “It’s a little terrifying because it’s in your hometown.”
The critics here aren’t from The New York Times, they’re former junior high and high school classmates. But that’s also where much of her support is found, along with her family.
Though she’s been back for maybe a week’s vacation, she’s here this time for about six weeks.
“I feel very fortunate getting to come back and do this,” she says. “I’m glad the community has grown to be able to support a professional theater.”