ALL THE WORLD’S
A S TA G E
24 Drew Magazine I Drew and Entrepreneurship
At Drew, theatre arts students don’t just act
in plays—they write them, direct them, even
build sets for them. Which might explain why
an extraordinary number of theatre alumni
have headlined in entrepreneurial roles.
THE
big show that Dan Studney and Kevin
Murphy wrote and staged together as
students—Valley of Kings, the one that cost Studney
a full semester and put him on the five-year plan
at Drew—was an Indiana Jones-style adventure
musical with a score for 13 instruments. Studney
squirreled himself away from classes in the
basement of Bowne Theatre to write the orchestrations, build a giant tomb for the set, and dream of
bright lights ahead.
ILLUSTRATION BY TOM FROESE
Summer 2015 25
ENTREPRENEURS
“Oh yeah, we saw that thing going to
Broadway for sure,” says Studney C’89, who
majored in theatre arts and minored in music.
“I figured I didn’t want to give myself a backup
option. I thought that was just an excuse
to fail.”
Valley of Kings didn’t make it beyond Drew,
but its two creators were determined to. “I
really didn’t think I could make a living doing
musical theatre, which is the thing I really love
to do the most,” says Murphy C’89.
So they headed to California—Murphy first,
then Studney—and wrote for a series of television shows, including Weird Science and Honey,
I Shrunk the Kids, but still dreamed of a musical.
“While we were making TV-writer money,
which was good money and pretty stable, we
decided we’d just write a musical,” Murphy
says. They collaborated on a musical adaptation
of the 1930s anti-drug movie Reefer Madness.
Murphy wrote the book and lyrics, Studney the
music. “Nobody paid us for it,” Murphy says.
“There was no reason to do it other than we
wanted to do it.”
Their Reefer Madness opened in Los Angeles
in 1998, played Off-Broadway in New York in
2001 and was made into a movie in 2005. The
musical has since been seen around the world
in a steady stream of productions—more than
100 are scheduled over the next two years—and
has provided a steady stream of income for
“I didn’t want to give
myself a backup option.
I thought that was
just an excuse to fail.”
Elizabeth Timperman C’92
won a Tony in 2010 as
co-producer of a revival
of La Cage aux Folles.
Dan Studney C’89
its creators. And when they recorded a Reefer
Madness cast album, they added a bonus track:
“Weather Changes,” a song from Valley of Kings.
“None of that would have ever happened
without that initial leap of faith,” Murphy says.
For theatre arts graduates, entrepreneurship
is often a means, not an end—a step along a
career path, not the final destination. Write a
play and try to produce it. Write a script and
try to sell it. Make an independent film and try
to screen it. Start a theatre company and try to
grow it. Then do it again. Theatre artists need to
be not only serial creators, making something
new again and again, but serial entrepreneurs,
selling their work again and again.
“The nature of the theatre is finite,” says
Elizabeth Timperman C’92, executive director
of Olympus Theatricals, which produces shows
Writing partners Kevin
Murphy C’89 and Dan
Studney C’89, here with
their 2005 Creative
Arts Emmy Awards
for their work on the
­musical Reefer Madness,
first worked together
as undergrads at Drew.
Rebecca Schlossberg C’09
Five theatre arts grads collaborate on a Philadelphia theatre company.
In the summer of 2003, in Gigi Naglak’s
apartment in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, five
recent theatre arts graduates finally took the
step they had been talking about for months.
“It was the Fourth of July, and we declared
ourselves an independent theatre company,”
says Naglak C’99, the oldest of the five, just
back from a master’s degree program in
England and working as a temp.
The youngest, Meghann Williams C’02,
pushed for Philadelphia as the location,
where she was working as company manager
of Prince Music Theater. “It seemed like a
place where we could really make a mark,”
she says. “New York just felt very crowded.”
The other three agreed—Derick
Loafmann C’01, Erin Lucas C’01 and
26 Drew Magazine I Drew and Entrepreneurship
Michael Osinski C’01, a Rolling Stones
fan who suggested they borrow the
name of a live album: Flashpoint. “It
means ‘the moment of combustion,’”
Williams says, “and we thought that’s
just what we want it to be.”
They spent a year raising money and
planning the first production. “The Drew
theatre department makes you do everything yourself, and it encourages you to learn
all sides of the theatre,” Williams says. “Thank
God, because Flashpoint would not have
happened if we did not have that knowledge
and that experience,” she adds.
Flashpoint Theatre Company’s premiere
took place in October 2004, in the 35seat Shubin Theatre just off South Street:
The Credeaux Canvas by Keith Bunin. The company grew
into larger quarters and more ambitious productions, acquired new members and gradually each of the original five
left for other projects.
Naglak, the curator of museum education at the American
Philosophical Society, recently attended the closing night
of Flashpoint’s latest production, Hands Up: 6 Playwrights,
6 Testaments. “I leapt to my feet for a standing ovation at
the end of the show,” she says. “I was the first person up.
I was so proud. I was like, ‘This is exactly what I had in my
mind in my living room 12 years ago talking about what this
was going to be.’”                    Kevin Coyne
Courtesy of Meghann Williams. Opposite: (above left) Stephen
Shugerman/2005 Getty Images. (above right) Bill Cardoni.
An Ensemble Production
in New York and London. “It opens, it closes.
Nothing runs forever. You’re always sort of
keeping an eye out for what your next job is
going to be.”
Like many theatre arts graduates, Timperman
tried to make her first job in acting, moving to
New York and auditioning for part after part.
And also like many theatre arts graduates, she
soon realized that she couldn’t just wait around
for callbacks. She took her head shot to a small
theatre on her native Long Island, Bay Street
Theater in Sag Harbor, hoping for a part but
settling for a production job. “You just don’t
turn down an opportunity,” says Timperman,
who later started a theatre company of her
own and worked for Off-Broadway companies
producing plays and musicals before landing on
Broadway with Olympus Theatricals, where she
won a Tony in 2010 as co-producer of a revival
of La Cage aux Folles. “If someone says to you,
‘Oh, you can sit on the sidelines and just wait to
get a job or you can have this smaller job,’ well,
I was always, ‘Well, I’ll do that.’”
Drew’s theatre arts program, long ranked
among the top 10 in the nation, has a broader
philosophy than other undergraduate
programs, offering a BA, not the narrower
BFA of a conservatory like Carnegie Mellon’s,
and requiring all majors to take a turn at all
aspects of producing a show, from hanging
lights to building sets to performing on stage.
“All the tools that allow them to be independently creative,” says Chris Ceraso, chair
of the Department of Theatre and Dance.
“So many people get the idea that what
the theatre world is about is walking into
somebody’s audition room, doing a great
audition, smiling and having somebody fall
in love with you and give you a part and then
you’re famous,” Ceraso says. “But that career
happens for very few people. The people I
know that are working are constantly creating
things on their own. They create their own
theatre companies, they do their own work,
they write their own plays.”
A lot of their own plays. “I’ve written more
Annalisa Ledson C’10
Madeleine Parsigian C’09
Summer 2015 27
ENTREPRENEURS
Bradley Wrenn C ’02
Theatre and Dance
Chair Chris Ceraso
says Drew’s curriculum
requires students to
hone “all the tools that
allow them to be independently creative.”
Steven Strafford C’99
mined his own struggle
with drug addiction to
create a darkly comic
one-man show.
28 Drew Magazine I Drew and Entrepreneurship
Christopher Shorr C’94
Liliana Ashman C’10
Whitney Estrin C’02
“Young adults do have the
power to run things.”
Catherine Spino C’15
Peter Murphy. Bottom: Bruce Frazier. Opposite: Lynne DeLade.
Jessica Loria C’09
plays than years I’ve been alive,” says Rebecca
Schlossberg C’09, who at 29 has written 40 plays
and co-founded a theatre company, Sunglasses
after Dark, with a Drew classmate, Madeleine
Parsigian C’09. They have cast Drew alumni
in their productions, and when filming one
of Schlossberg’s short plays recently used as a
set the Lower East Side rooftop of yet another
classmate.
Some start dance companies, like Angie
Phillips C’10, whose Full Force Dance Repertory
is based at Brooklyn Friends School, and who
also works as a dance therapist; and Annalisa
Ledson C’10, a choreographer who is launching
a performance company this summer, Current
Harbor, that will, she says, “create live performances with original movement and sound with
an optimistic viewpoint.”
Some try to make people laugh, like Jessica
Loria C’09, who helps run Go Comedy! Improv
Theater outside Detroit; and Bradley Wrenn C’02,
whose Philadelphia-based comedic performance
company, The Berserkers, has staged shows in
such unlikely venues as a fallout shelter and the
recreation hall of a Romanian Orthodox church.
Some bring theatre to places that haven’t
seen much before, like Christopher Shorr C’94,
who raised $1 million to open a theatre and
arts center in downtown Petersburg, Virginia;
and Whitney Estrin C’02, one of the founders of
Shakespeare in Clark Park in West Philadelphia,
which celebrated its 10th season this summer.
“We didn’t know if anyone would show up,”
says Estrin, who went on to earn a master’s
degree in theatre management at the Yale
School of Drama and is now director of development for Theatre for a New Audience in
Brooklyn. “But over 2,000 people attended the
first four performances.”
Some mine their own lives for one-person
shows, like Liliana Ashman C’10, whose
struggle with the Irish immigration authorities
was the raw material of How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Gardai; and Dana SumnerPritchard C’12, who developed her show,
Boobs and Hope, in a workshop at Drew with
Steven Strafford C’99.
“It began as an exercise in exorcism,”
Strafford says about his own darkly comic
one-man show, Methtacular!—about his
years as a meth addict in his 20s. “Rosemary
McLaughlin”—a theatre arts professor and the
director of the dance minor at Drew—“said
early on to me, ‘Don’t be afraid to be incredibly
specific about your own stuff because the more
you do that, the more universal your play will
be.’ That advice stayed in my ear for a really
long time.”
And some never give up the dream of
musicals. “I’m always going to be working on
a musical,” says Kevin Murphy, who later
became head writer for Desperate Housewives, and
is executive producer and co-creator of Defiance,
a series on SyFy. His Heathers: The Musical, based
on the movie and written with a different
collaborator, opened Off-Broadway in 2014.
“I’m trying to think of what the next music
project is.”                          Kevin Coyne
Command Performance
While still a teenager, Catherine Spino started
an acting company for teenagers.
Before she left home for first-year orientation at Drew,
Catherine Spino C’15 had some pressing business to attend
to—final rehearsals for The 39 Steps, the first play staged by the
Boston Teen Acting Troupe, the theatre company she had just
started. She was co-directing along with her co-founder, Jack
Serio, who had just finished his freshman year of high school.
“He sat me down and said, ‘I’m thinking of starting a theatre
company,’” Spino says, recalling the conversation that started it
all. “And I said, ‘OK, cool.’ And he said, ‘No, when I say I am, I mean
we are going to start a theatre company.’ I’m still kind of shellshocked we’ve made it this far.”
The 39 Steps was staged in a social hall in Boston. By the time
Spino directed J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls in the summer
of 2014, the company had been featured in The Boston Globe,
The New York Times and on National Public Radio, and attracted
a large enough audience to sell out five of its six nights in a real
theatre, at the Boston Center for the Arts.
Spino met Serio in a community theatre teen acting program
that cast her as Helen of Troy in Euripides’ The Trojan Women
(in her high school production of Gypsy, she’d played the back
end of a cow). “That’s our mission—to create really thought-­
provoking professional theatre for teens,” she says.
And Drew, where she received a Presidential Scholarship for
Theatre Arts, was a natural next step. “It stands above the rest in
the sense that it’s run by students,” Spino says, “and I think that
also empowered me to continue with the company, knowing that
we as young adults do have the power to run things.”
                                     Kevin Coyne
Summer 2015 29