Episode 73: Sarah Newhouse (Actors' Shakespeare Project)

Meet Sarah Newhouse! She's a Watertown resident and founding company member of Actors' Shakespeare Project, a longstanding Boston-area theater company that is now company-in-residence at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. In this conversation we get into Sarah's career from her first lead at 11 in The Saving of Little Sarah (a play her music teacher wrote), to being taught in high school by the playwright of Driving Miss Daisy, sharing the stage with Cicely Tyson and Hector Elizondo in the Berkshires, and having an inside joke with Steve Martin when she acted in the East Coast premiere of one of his plays. We chat about the long road to "making it", including what it's like to be thrown into a long-running show like Shear Madness, and starting Actors' Shakespeare Project over 20 years ago. Then we talk about what Actors' Shakespeare Project is, a bit of its journey, and its upcoming play, Little Women.

Released January 29th, 2026

(Click here to listen on streaming apps) (Full transcript below)

Find more info about Actors' Shakespeare Project here

And grab tickets to see Sarah in Little Women at the Mosesian Center for the Arts in February here

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Transcript

Matt: 0:07

Hi there, welcome to the Little Local Conversations Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode I sit down for a conversation with a guest to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This time I sat down with Sarah Newhouse, who's a founding member of the Actors’ Shakespeare Project, which is now housed here at the Mosesian Center for the Arts in Watertown. So I’ll let her introduce herself, then we'll get into the conversation.

Sarah: 0:29

I am Sarah Newhouse, and I live in Watertown. I've been here for 30 plus years now, and I'm a founding company member of Actors’ Shakespeare Project.

Matt: 0:41

Nice. Great. We'll definitely get into that work. But first, I always like to go back in time and kind of get the story of how you got to where you are. So are you from this area? Where did you grow up?

Sarah: 0:50

I grew up in New York City, actually. During the gritty 70s and 80s, I grew up on the Upper West Side. It was kind of a rough and tumble place. My parents bought a brownstone in 1965, I think it was, for something like $30,000. And people thought they were crazy because it was on 91st and Amsterdam, and there was middle income project housing across the street, and it was like quote unquote Harlem and it was kind of intense. I mean, when I was a kid, it was kind of wild. There were kids roaming all over the place and muggings, and it was when the city was very unhinged, I think. It's hard to imagine that now. But I feel so fortunate. Growing up in New York City, I walked to school, I took buses and trains everywhere. I kind of saw the best of everything and the worst of everything in that giant city.

Matt: 1:47

Yeah. Yeah. And what did you do for fun when you were a kid then in that rough and tumble area?

Sarah: 1:52

Oh, played in playgrounds and went to Central Park and sledded and went ice skating at Wolman Rink and went to movies, went to theater. My parents dragged me to museums. There was a lot of culture in my family. My mother was an artist, but my father was a physician. And there was a lot of extra education in those, you know, artistic departments like dance and music and art. That was very important to them. So we were always doing classes and things. But you know, I had a lot of friends that I could just walk to their houses.

Matt: 2:27

Different time. 

Sarah: 2:29

Yeah, kinda.

Matt: 2:30

Yeah. So when you were trying out all those arts and stuff, were you drawn to theater or were you kind of into all of them? Or where did the theater-specific love come in?

Sarah: 2:37

When did that pop up? I would say I was more actually drawn to dance more than anything else, which I did my whole childhood basically. When I was in sixth grade, our school play that our music teacher wrote and developed was a silent movie. And I was the heroine. Little Sarah. The Saving of Little Sarah, it was called. So I was 11. And I think that was the first time I had actually been in a play. And of course, you know, putting me as the star was that was it. That was fate.

Matt: 3:10

Got it in your head.

Sarah: 3:12

Yeah. So that was the first time I was in a play. And then I took some classes outside of school. I was in a little operetta class that performed. But then I didn't really do it for a while. I did other things. You know, I concentrated on art and dance and music. I was a violinist, took pottery. I didn't do theater until I was in high school again. And my drama teacher was Alfred Uhry, who wrote Driving Miss Daisy and Parade and Last Night at Ballyhoo. And he had just started to become published. He wrote a musical called The Robber Bridegroom. And he was my high school drama teacher.

Matt: 3:50

That was, must have been a great early experience.

Sarah: 3:52

It was amazing. But we didn't, you know, he was just our teacher. He didn't have any cachet at that point. But the shows that he put up my senior year in high school were Hamlet, The Matchmaker, and The Glass Menagerie. So we weren't doing like cheesy musicals.

Matt: 4:09

Or even like Peter Pan or you know.

Sarah: 4:11

Right. He was serious. And our classes were really interesting, our drama classes. The material that he chose was a little bit more, I would say, elevated. And he cast me as the lead in Glass Menagerie when I was like 16, and I had braces and that was it. From then on, I, that's kind of what I did. Yeah.

Matt: 4:32

Yeah. Was there any particular moment in that show or preparing for that show that really made it click for you? Can you remember any specific moment?

Sarah: 4:40

I think having to do a southern accent. I had always been a huge clown and mimic, you know, as a child, really imitating people as often as possible, people on TV, my friends. That having to do that accent in a sustained way over time for a few performances, I loved it. I just loved it. I loved kind of dropping into the persona of somebody else. I think, I think that kind of hooked me.

Matt: 5:09

Yeah.

Sarah: 5:10

Yeah.

Matt: 5:10

And so where did you go from there? So from high school. So was that like a performing arts high school specifically?

Sarah: 5:14

No. It was just.

Matt: 5:15

So this gem of a teacher just happened to be at a regular high school?

Sarah: 5:20

Yeah. It was a private school called the Calhoun School, which a lot of actually well-known people and their kids have gone. Like Ben Stiller went there and his sister and Frances McDormand's kid went there. And nobody really when I was there, but it was kind of. 

Matt: 5:35

You were the trendsetter? 

Sarah: 5:36

I don't know. I don't know. But it was more like, you know, wealthy upper west side people. After that.

Matt: 5:43

Yeah. So did you go on to study theater then? 

Sarah: 5:45

Yes. Yes, I went to college.

Okay. So you flipped the switch and you're like, this is it.

Sarah: 5:49

Yeah. I flipped the switch. I went to Hampshire College in Western Mass. And I did something like five shows my first year of school. Because the way Hampshire is set up is a little, you know, untraditional. You can kind of do whatever you want as long as you complete these courses of study.

Matt: 6:06

I went to Bennington College, I understand. 

Sarah: 6:08

So you get it. So I just jumped right in and it was amazing. I was in heaven.

Matt: 6:14

And were you still getting the leads when you went to college or did you have to? 

Sarah: 6:18

Sometimes. Yeah. My first show was Exit the King, and I played one of the Queens. Yeah, I mean, it was a small school and a small program. So the odds were in your favor. Yeah, it was great. We had to do other, you know, aspects of the theater. We had to run lights or learn about sound or that kind of thing. But halfway through college, after my sophomore year, I went to the Berkshire Theater Festival to be an apprentice because my acting teacher at Hampshire was the artistic director, Josie Abady, at the time. And she invited six or seven of us to come and be apprentices that summer. And that's where I really got immersed. Had to build saw horses and sew things and sweep the stage. But we got to be in the shows. I got to be in the Rose Tattoo with Cicely Tyson and Hector Elizondo when I was like 18. And there were other people there that summer, like Tom Hulse and Frank Converse, I think. There were a bunch of actors there who I didn't know who they were, but they were relatively well-known people.

Matt: 7:24

You knew that they were big, even if you didn't know who they were.

Sarah: 7:26

I knew that they were working actors for sure.

Matt: 7:29

Right.

Sarah: 7:29

And that was a wild place. You know, we all lived in this big house and we had acting class every day, and then we had to go, you know, labor the rest of the day and then do a show at night. It was great. That was also heavenly in Stockbridge in the summer. It was beautiful.

Matt: 7:47

Yeah. Did you learn anything about the working artist's life from that time?

Sarah: 7:50

I don't know if I learned um the good habits that actors have. I certainly learned what they do to let off steam.

Matt: 7:59

Sure, sure.

Sarah: 8:01

Yeah. They partied a lot, for sure. For them, it felt like they were at summer camp, you know. They were away from whatever responsibilities they had, also. But also very dedicated and showed up and did the work.

Matt: 8:13

Right.

Sarah: 8:14

Yeah.

Matt: 8:14

Yes. Set the record straight. They weren't party animals.

Sarah: 8:16

Don’t want to trash them.

Matt: 8:18

So then what was the next step for you in your journey to becoming one of those working artists as well?

Sarah: 8:25

Yeah. It took a while. I moved here to Boston after I graduated and didn't do any acting, just kind of took a year off. I feel like my generation wasn't so pressured to achieve immediately after graduating from college or have a job lined up. You know, I waited tables, I worked in a bar, I hung out with my boyfriend. I wasn't really motivated to act in a new place. Like I didn't really know how to go about doing that. One of the drawbacks of my college program was that it didn't really offer any kind of like business model for actors, which now happens in a lot of theater programs. The business of acting. How to get an agent, how to go on auditions, where to find the auditions. I think I just also needed a break from school, from life, you know. And that was okay. I mean, I'm glad I did that. My parents didn't pressure me, you know, I had to make some money, but they let me kind of do what I wanted. And then I moved back to Northampton for a year, because my boyfriend at the time, who is now my husband, was still in school. He had taken some time off and he was finishing his degree. And then I started acting again. I did a couple of shows in the Northampton Amherst area. And then I moved back to New York. I knew that there were limited possibilities in the Pioneer Valley for me, or I just didn't know I didn't know what I was supposed to do and I needed kind of a home base. So I moved back home and I started taking classes again, acting classes. But it took a long time for me to kind of get anywhere. I did a lot of extra work and films.

Matt: 10:09

Any fun extras? Hey, I was in that one. 

Sarah: 10:12

I did a couple of promo spots for MTV that you could probably still find somewhere on the internet. And I, gosh, I barely remember it. There was a, trying to remember the name of this movie. It was called Catholic School or Catholic Boys or Catholic Girls or something like that. I was one of a million extras in that. Yeah. I don't even remember all the ones I did. I did a lot. Got, you know, $5 or a subway token as payment. 

Matt: 10:41

Thanks for coming.

Sarah: 10:42

No money. No glory. And you know, I had odd jobs. I was a messenger. Mostly I worked in restaurants though.

Matt: 10:50

The classic.

Sarah: 10:51

Yeah, the classic waitress thing, because you could take time off. And I studied at Ensemble Studio Theater and then Playwrights Horizons, which are both small off-off Broadway houses. Had some great teachers. And then I guess like by the time I was about 26 or 27, I had been in a Theatre Row production. And that was kind of like a big thing. But it still never led to the next step. I still was like, I don't know how to go about getting an agent. I had a manager, and the manager would send me out on auditions, but nothing big ever happened from that relationship.

Matt: 11:28 

How did you even come across a manager to begin with? 

Sarah: 11:31

A friend of mine who was a standout comedian. He was his manager. And we met and he wanted to take on some serious actors, I guess, not just comedians. So I mean, I was doing things and I was working, but I wasn't really making any money. I wasn't in the union. I did a bunch of stuff way downtown, you know, off, off, off, off Broadway, in the village, all over the place. And that's kind of like what you did. You were working in storefronts and basements. But always I was studying at the same time, taking classes and waiting tables.

Matt: 12:06

So what was the first step that really started changing the direction of that?

Sarah: 12:10

I did a film when I was 27 that ended up going to festivals. So I got to go to LA and that was kind of really exciting. And then I did another film. Both of these were independent films. I still wasn't in the union. I wasn't getting paid anything, but it was a great experience. And around that time, I kind of started to realize that I either needed more training because I wasn't really doing what I loved, which was theater. I ended up doing so many new plays in my 20s off off Broadway. I kind of was hungering for classical because that was really what I loved. And there was very little opportunity there, or I couldn't find that opportunity. I started to think about graduate school and graduate programs. And I applied to the ART Institute and the Yale School of Drama and Juilliard. I got into the ART Institute and I went. And I had just gotten married, actually. And my husband is from Watertown. So moving back to Boston felt like a no-brainer to me just because my mother was from Fitchburg. Half of my relatives were here. We had always come to Massachusetts for holidays. I was really excited to up my game and go to grad school. I was excited about ART. I was excited to study Shakespeare and classics again. I knew I needed more kind of vocal training, movement training, all the stuff that comes with a conservatory program. I was really excited about that. It was a very fulfilling time of my life. It was incredible. The artists that came in and out of there, this was like mid-90s, early mid-90s. You know, Gary Oldman walked through one day, auditioning on the main stage, and all these incredible actors and actresses came through there. We had this Friday class called Rep Ideal, which Robert Brustein led. And it was kind of like his ideas about having a repertory company in America. And we would often have guest speakers, guest artists who would come in. And if they were on the main stage in a show, they would come and talk to us. I'm really grateful for that opportunity to listen to actors who are really working in their fields in a very deep way.

Matt: 14:32

Yeah. Was there any moment in that training where your acting changed, or was there a skill or something that you picked up that you're like, I can feel myself developing deeper or? 

Sarah: 14:42

Really the whole time. There's something about really being immersed in the daily practice of what you're doing, whether it's music or art or that you're forced to do it every single day, except Mondays, that was fantastic.

Matt: 14:57

So the rigor.

Sarah: 14:58

Yeah, the rigor, yeah. The discipline, but also just growing up. I mean, like any artist, you get better as you get older. You get more mature in your approach and your skills deepen. So that was fantastic.

Matt: 15:14

Anything else of note to talk about in that time period, or are we ready for a next jump from there?

Sarah: 15:20

Well, at the end of my two years, I had a couple of fantastic opportunities there. The second of which was being in Steve Martin's play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which had premiered in Chicago already, but had never had an East Coast premiere. And I was cast in that. Through the conservatory, all of us students were put under contract the last, you know, few months of our education. It was a two-year program after which we could join equity as a union member. The way unions work, you have to like have enough work to be eligible to join, but you also, you know, they're not going to hire you if not. It's kind of this catch-22 thing that drives people crazy before they figure it out.

Matt: 16:07

So this program helped you out with that.

Sarah: 16:08

Yes, absolutely. And he was there during rehearsals. He was doing some tinkering with the play. He was great just to hang out with in the room. It was fantastic. And then that play, it was at the old Hasty Pudding theater in Harvard Square. And I think it had like a six-week run or something. It kept getting extended and ended up running for like three months. And I had this tiny little part. I actually played two roles, and one of them got like the biggest laugh in the whole show. So it was like the dreamiest job you could ever imagine.

Matt: 16:45

Go out, deliver your line, get the laugh, head off.

Sarah: 16:47

Right. Exactly. And curtain call.

Matt: 16:50

What was the role? What was the laugh about?

Sarah: 16:52

Oh, my main role was the countess who was Einstein's girlfriend, who kind of just sat with him and talked to him and hung out with him. The other role was a female admirer who came running in and sees Picasso but calls him something else. She's like, Oh my God, oh my God, it's you, it's you, it's you. And but, she's mistaken. Very goofy.

Matt: 17:16

Classic. Yeah.

Sarah: 17:17

Classic Steve Martin, right?

Matt: 17:19

Sounds about right. Yeah.

Sarah: 17:20

Sets you up and then yeah, jumps right off the edge. Yeah. And that was really a great experience for me.

Matt: 17:26

And then you became best buds with Steve Martin. No.

Sarah: 17:30

No. But he was very generous and very kind. He sent us beautiful flowers when we opened and gave us all these great cards. And there was a moment when we figured out the program, they didn't put my actual name as the second role. They made like an anagram of my name.

Matt: 17:51

Interesting.

Sarah: 17:52

Yeah. Shawna Huerose, which are the same letters as Sarah Newhouse. And a lot of people didn't know it was me because I was completely disguised. I had like a redheaded curly wig and I had a high voice and I looked completely different.

Matt: 18:05

So now that's your real life alter ego that you go around using?

Sarah: 18:09

No, I haven't met Shawna in a while. But when Steve Martin gave us the opening night cards, he wrote, Don't tell Shawna, but I think you're doing a great job.

Matt: 18:20

Nice.

Sarah: 18:21

Yeah, that was great. And then after that, with school, we had a showcase, you know, where you're supposed to get agents and blah, blah, blah. They all come and I got some response, but not overwhelming. And I'm not sure why. I'm kind of character-y, you know, I've been playing character actors since I was much younger. I wasn't quite leading lady until I was older. It was kind of interesting. You know, I was like the kooky neighbor or the funny girlfriend or the second lead. Until I was in my 30s, and then all of a sudden I started kind of doing more lead roles.

Matt: 18:58

Was there a role that led to your first lead that you remember?

Sarah: 19:01

Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, I played a lead when I was 16, so it's hard to understand the whys and wherefores of casting and who gets what why when. Things are completely different now. Like anybody can play anything. But even when I was in my early 20s, I was considered too ethnic looking compared to what Madison Avenue types look like, or who knows. So there was some kind of just inherent bias in the way people cast things. Until the business itself started to change, and doors were open to all sorts of types, sizes, colors, genders. That took a long time though. I think once I started working with Actors’ Shakespeare Project, there was a finite group of us, and that's when I kind of did more weightier roles. And some, you know, in other theaters around town. I was just starting to get more notice.

Matt: 20:04

Yeah.

Sarah: 20:05

Yeah.

Matt: 20:05

Is there anything between that time period and Actors’ Shakespeare that was particularly impactful?

Sarah: 20:11

One of the first jobs I got after graduating from ART was Shear Madness, which ran for, I don't know, 35 years, 40 years, something like that. That was my first equity job out of school. And I had no idea what I was getting into. But it taught me a tremendous amount about being in a long-running show, being put into a long-running show. It was kind of like being put into a machine that was already well oiled and working, but I had to fit into it. 

Matt: 20:45

Right. You had to catch up to pace with everyone else. 

Sarah: 20:46

Exactly. And just the kind of schedule. It was a really hard schedule. It was eight shows a week. And then in the summer, they would add shows in the mornings for camps. It was nuts. It was a great paycheck. It was one of the best paychecks in town after the two big theaters, ART and the Huntington. And I did that off and on for a number of years. More recently, they liked people to be in it for, you know, nine months at a time. I think the most I ever did was maybe three months because I was getting other work also. So I would do it for a few months and then I would leave and do another show and then I would come back and do it again. And that was a great stabilizing force for several years.

Matt: 21:24

So how do you get into that machine? If they're doing eight shows a week, you're not starting from scratch with them. How do you get up to snuff with them? Because I imagine they're not doing as many rehearsals, you know, so how do you do that?

Sarah: 21:34

Well, when they hired me, they hired another cast member also, and it's a small cast. I think it's only six people. They rehearsed us during the day, and then we would watch the show at night. I think we rehearsed for two weeks. That's it. So we got the script, we rehearsed, and then it's called a put-in, where you rehearse with the cast that's already there. And then you're off and running. Then you're in, then you go. It was comforting to have somebody else to do that with, though, another cast member. I wasn't just by myself. That would have been a little scarier. And it was definitely trial by fire. It was kind of an old boys' network at that point. And they, you know, made fun of us and harassed us on stage and tried to make us laugh and all that stuff. But it made me tough. It was really important in terms of learning what comedy is, though, and how comedy works and how hard it is. And also working directly with an audience. There's a lot of, I don't know if you ever saw it, but there's a lot of direct interaction with an audience and pretend improv. You know, there were a few moments in the script where it seems like they've made a mistake, but it's not, you know, it's all scripted and there's only so many ways it can fall out. So it taught me a lot about that kind of expectation on stage and being able to really look at somebody in the audience in the eye and talk to them, which I still hate doing. I hate direct address, unless the people are really far away.

Matt: 23:08

Right. You're addressing a group rather than a single person. It's easier.

Sarah: 23:11

Yeah, much easier. I don't know why I don't like it. I feel like part of being on stage is being in your like own little world. And when you break that, it's kind of fascinating, but it's also really scary because anything can happen. You don't know how that person's going to react.

Matt: 23:27

So, what is the best part of acting for you?

Sarah: 23:31

I just remember when I went to talk to an agent in LA in my early 20s when I was in that film that shot in LA. And this guy was probably in his early 20s and he didn't know who Tennessee Williams was. And he asked me that question. And I said really obnoxiously, I like it best when they clap at the end. When I left, I was like, that was the most idiotic thing you could have said. And whatever. What do I like most? I think really what fascinates me the most is creating this world out of nothing. From day one, you have no idea what this world is going to be. And you create this world with a bunch of other people who you may never see again. And then you have this relationship with them for six weeks, eight weeks, two or three months. And it's so amazing because you never think it's going to happen. It's always a struggle to get it to birth, but it happens. And it feels miraculous to me every single time that we've created this world and we believe so fully and deeply in this world. And of course, some worlds work better than others, or you feel more aligned with some worlds more than others. But to me, that's my favorite part, I think.

Matt: 24:47

Well, the rewards, I feel like you have to have that uncertainty for the reward to be worth it, right?

Sarah: 24:52

Yeah. Yeah. You put yourself out there, but you're with a group of people that all have the same goal.

Matt: 24:59

Cool. Anything else in terms of, well, I guess maybe the Actors’ Shakespeare would be, gonna ask about the biggest shift for you. It sounds like that was a big shift for you. Anything else before we get to Actors’ Shakespeare worth noting?

Sarah: 25:13

No, I mean I was finally finding my way here. You know, when I first moved here, I was like, I don't know how to get an audition at the Lyric Stage Company. How do you do that? You know, in New York City, there was Backstage magazine, newspaper that came out every week, and you would go get it and you would read it and you would go to the auditions. But here there was the Phoenix newspaper when I first moved here, which had some auditions in the back pages. But I was really kind of mystified. It felt like a very closed circle here to me. And either you had to know somebody who would recommend you for something, or there was just no system, or I didn't know what that was. And over time that changed. There was Stage Source that was this organization that has since closed, but that was a great resource for actors, directors, designers to kind of have one place to go. After Shear Madness, I finally started to get some footing in town.

Matt: 26:12

You were getting regular work.

Sarah: 26:13

Yeah. Irregular.

Matt: 26:14

Well, regular irregular.

Sarah: 26:17

Yeah, I finally started to kind of figure it out. You know, I went to some auditions and the big spring auditions that happened where this group audition thing. Started to get some work in other places, Gloucester Stage and the Lyric, places like that, the mid-size theaters in town. So I felt like I was gaining some momentum, which was great.

Matt: 26:38

Yeah. Moving up to the next level. 

Sarah: 26:40

Yes. 

Matt: 26:41

So then let's dive into Actors’ Shakespeare now. So you are a founding member. So you want to talk about how that all came about?

Sarah: 26:49

Sure. I had met Ben Evett at ART. He was in the company, and we had gone on tour together to Taiwan and Russia in The King Stag and Six Characters in Search of an Author. And we were colleagues, friends. And in the, I think it was fall 2003, he invited me and 15 other of his closest friends to his house for a dinner. And he wanted to talk about starting a company. And he was really excited about it. And he had some backing. It was going to be Shakespeare focused. And I was like, I am all in.

Matt: 27:31

Because at this point, were you still doing a lot of just new stuff, not the classics, but you still had that desire for the classics?

Sarah: 27:37

Yeah. And I had studied in school and I always loved Shakespeare. I took an English class. I'm trying to remember what grade I was in. I remember my teacher. I must have been in seventh or eighth. And she had us read Hamlet out loud. We sat in a little circle. There were maybe 10 of us, and that was our class. And I had always just loved it. You know, I hadn't seen that much Shakespeare. Maybe in my 20s, I saw a little bit. You know, I went to the Delacorte, the public theater in Central Park, the famous summer theater there, a few times. It was just something that really intrigued me and excited me. And yeah, there wasn't that much opportunity here. The Huntington did Shakespeare sometimes. There was the public theater, which was outside in Brighton. So that was really exciting. And then the hard work began.

Matt: 28:29

The dream always comes and you get the energy and then the work kicks in, right?

Sarah: 28:32

Gosh, we kind of did like everything. We licked stamps and we made costumes. We had a benefit in spring of 2004, I think it was, to raise money. And it was just like an evening of scenes. We did it at the Brattle Theater and we got some traction from that. And then we had our first production that fall, Richard III, at the old South Meeting House. His idea was to be site-specific and itinerant. Mostly because there was no one place we could call a home. And we couldn't afford a home at that point. But the itinerancy became actually really important and an exciting element of the company. I was the venue person for a while and had to search for venues all over this town. And most people were like, What are you crazy? Yeah, you can have it for two days or you can have it for this month, but we need every Thursday night for this disco that we're having. It was like nearly impossible, but we found some great spaces.

Matt: 29:35

What was your favorite space?

Sarah: 29:36

Oh, I loved Midway Studios down by Fort Point Channel. It's still there, but it became a gym after a while. It was supposed to be for mixed use in the building, like a subsidized building for artists. And it was in the basement. I won't say it's my favorite. We had a lot of great spaces.

Matt: 29:57

But what was, why did you like that space? What was unique about it?

Sarah: 30:00

It was kind of like this just big box that had possibility. And I loved where it was. It was off inits own special place. I don't know. It was unique. It had huge ceilings, but really it was just like a big box with a balcony around the top.

Matt: 30:18

So maybe it's more that you finally had a space that you could make your own a little bit.

Sarah: 30:22

Yeah. But there were other great spaces. There was a place called Villa Victoria, which was a church in the south end that was also really beautiful and kind of cool and spooky. Lots of wacky spaces. So over time, the company, we moved around to a lot of different places, and we worked at The Strand and we worked in Somerville. And it got progressively more difficult to find actual non-theatrical spaces, non-performance spaces. So we did do some shows in theaters, like the Jimmy Tingle space. It's now, I can't remember what it's called, but it's like downstairs. They would have comedy shows and things like that. And Hibernian Hall. So many, my God. Cambridge Multicultural Art Center was also a really big hit. Not great acoustically, but just a beautiful room. BU. BU had that wild space that we did King Lear in that is now like a student union.

Matt: 31:24

Yeah, you stick around long enough in any art scene in the Boston area. And like that space that I used to perform at is now like a coffee shop. The art space is an interesting, whole other separate, interesting conversation.

Sarah: 31:36

It is, and it's important because we need rehearsal space. I mean, that became just so expensive over time to rent these spaces, to rent rehearsal spaces. Which is kind of why we can just breathe being in this space, because we have both. We have an office space, a rehearsal space, and a performance space all at once. And that happened over at the Armory in Somerville, where we were for a good 10 years. I think we only did one show there because it was just too booked all the time. But the rehearsal space and the office space were great for us to have that kind of like home base. We were in the YMCA in Central Square for a while. We've been like all over the place.

Matt: 32:17

Yeah.

Sarah: 32:17

Yeah. But hey, I'm happy to be in Watertown.

Matt: 32:20

Yeah. So you guys are, I mean, pretty much around the same year, age as the Mosesian here. So yeah. Any key shows or just key moments along the path of those 20 years where something would take a step up and you guys growing, want to go along those milestones?

Sarah: 32:36

Well, the first show, obviously, our kickoff show. Everybody was in it because it was a huge cast. And then King Lear was, I think, our first just giant sellout hit. Because Alvin Epstein, who had been my professor at the institute, was Lear and he was just magnificent. And the whole design element, the space that we were in, it just kind of like came together, was a fantastic production. And it sold out and there were waiting lists and it was huge. And that was our second season. And that kind of put us on the map, I think that show. And at some point, Ben realized that we were gonna run out of Shakespeare. You know, he didn't write that many plays. And if you're doing three or four a year, you're gonna run out pretty quickly. And we did start to incorporate some other playwrights pretty early on, just one or two here and there sprinkled throughout. But there were some, I mean, we always had hits and misses, you know, we always had some shows that were just amazing and came together beautifully, and then other shows that were okay or that people didn't really get because of the play itself or the vision of that play. But King Lear really kind of catapulted us into, I would say, almost a national level, because that's when it got reviewed and it was in the New York Times, and that was a big deal.

Matt: 34:02

Yeah. You're mentioning adding in other playwrights, picking between Shakespeare's plays is one thing, but then how do you pick what matches with Shakespeare? What was the theory behind that?

Sarah: 34:12

I think always there was an idea that playwrights who used language as robustly as Shakespeare was the goal, to find plays that matched his gift. Which is now why we're doing some August Wilson cycle. There was a play we did called God's Ear that was incredible. We did School for Scandal, which was wonderful, Sheridan, which is Restoration Comedy. There's a lot out there. We've done a little bit of Jacobean, like Duchess of Malfi is non-Shakespeare. There's a lot out there that I would say scholars of early English theater would know about, but not our regular average audience member. Right now, in the current climate, we really have to pick titles that are accessible to people. I think doing a brand new play would be really difficult right now, unfortunately. But there are other theaters in town that do that. Boston Playwrights only does new plays. We really need to capture the audience right now. Because the times are hard. I'm not gonna lie. A lot of small theaters have really suffered. A, with the pandemic, and B with the current administration being so vehemently opposed to any artistic creation.

Matt: 35:35

So what have you learned from keeping an organization, an art organization around for 20 years? Are there any primary principles that you all think about when you're making decisions that help, you know, keep that vision alive?

Sarah: 35:52

Yeah, I think we all really have a passion for what we do, this group of people. And that never goes away. I think the work is what's important to us, and sharing that work with different communities is what's important to us. And it's something that's just in you as an artist. It's a need to create and to reflect humanity and to constantly be looking for a right way to tell a story or another way of telling a story. And whose story? Whose story are you telling? I think it just takes a lot of dedication. You can't give up. And nobody has. I mean, we've had people come and go. We have new members come in every few years or so. We have some members that leave. Generally, our group is about 20 to 25 people. We make decisions as a group most of the time. I mean, we do have an artistic director who has the final say, but we suggest plays, we talk about the seasons, we talk about venues together, we talk about directors together. So we have kind of this shared input, which also feels, you know, we have responsibility and ownership, which is amazing, which is unusual.

Matt: 37:12

And that might be one of the reasons for its success of staying around for this long, right? Give people ownership, they want to stick around.

Sarah: 37:19

Yeah, I think so. I think that has a lot to do with it for sure.

Matt: 37:23

Yeah. So the structure of, you know, what is Actors’ Shakespeare Project? Because you have the actors, you have the shows, you have the education, you want to talk about all the different aspects of it?

Sarah: 37:33

Sure. We have a board. The board also always has one of the company members as an active member of the board. We have an artistic director. But as I said, it's a very collaborative organization. We kind of all have input. Our input may not be, you know, the final product, but we all have input. We have meetings a couple times a year, more like three or four times a year for season selection, for new membership selection. We have a whole education department that is very important to our longevity also. We usually have residencies in different schools, middle schools, sometimes high schools, where we go in and teach a particular play. Usually it's connected to the season, but not always. We have classes for younger kids during school breaks and during the summer. We have a DYS relationship, Department of Youth Services, with juveniles in the system where we go in and do workshops with them. So there's a lot of branches. And then we have the shows. There's a lot of different things happening all the time, which I don't always see. I have been a part of it at certain periods of my life, but right now I'm not doing any teaching or any of those residencies. But I have in the past. That's really important for this company's longevity, I think, also.

Matt: 39:00

Why is that?

Sarah: 39:02

I think people, if they get to see what we do in those projects, because you can usually come to a sharing at the end of a certain high school residency or whatever, you realize how important it is to educate the next generation about theater. Not necessarily Shakespeare, although a lot of it is about Shakespeare. But in this country, there's less, there seems to be less and less emphasis on education and learning. I mean, we should all be lifelong learners. And Shakespeare, I think, scares a lot of people, or they saw a show once and they felt stupid because they didn't understand what the heck was going on. Part of our purpose is to kind of like dispel that and make it accessible and make it for everybody. This 12 year old kid, why wouldn't they love Midsummer Night's Dream? We're gonna do it for them and they'll hopefully see themselves somewhere in there. Or Romeo and Juliet. We do workshops with these kids to give them ownership of this kind of language. And it's just to me, it's so important. Like I feel like I was so privileged and so lucky to have that kind of education when I was a kid, to see theater and to hear it and to have somebody explain it to me. And poetry and other literature. You know, it's what differentiates us from animals. We have language, and language is incredible.

Matt: 40:25

Yeah. So for people who might want to come out to a show, can you describe that? Why would people want to come out? Because you have a show coming up. Do you want to tell us about the show coming up, what that experience is going to be like and why people might be interested?

Sarah: 40:38

Okay. Why people would come is if you've never seen a play, a title before, why not? Why not come and take a chance? Bring your mom, bring your boyfriend, bring your kid. Theater is vital. Theater is important. Theater's everywhere. I mean, people don't realize that there's theater happening in towns all across the United States on different levels. There's professional theater, there's community theater, there's let's put a play on in our basement theater. We can't forget about it. We can't forget about it, especially with the advent of so much TV and streaming and people don't need to leave their houses anymore. Yeah, leave your house and be in a group of people who are all experiencing the same thing and feel something together in a room. Breathe together in a room, we say. Part of what makes Actors’ Shakespeare Project different, I think, is our closeness to the audience and the intimate kind of relationship we hope to build with an audience. Some of our shows in the past were very small, very tiny spaces where people are right there. This in the Mosesian, it's a little bit more traditional. It's a traditional kind of like stadium seating theater. It's a beautiful space, but it's still relatively intimate. You're not in a 1200-seat theater. The production that I just started rehearsing, we've only had half a week of rehearsal, is Little Women, although it's an adaptation by Kate Hamill, who has done a number of classical adaptations, Sense and Sensibility, The Odyssey, Pride and Prejudice, The Crucible. And she has taken Little Women and kind of, I won't say turned it inside out, but we talked about it the other day as being kind of a riff on Little Women. It has the same basic skeletal story, but she's kind of focused on other things. So you're not gonna miss Meg and Joe and Beth and Amy, but it's a little bit different. It's a little bit of a different approach, through a different lens. I love it. I think it's great. We open February 5th and run through March 1st. So basically the month of February. We have a pretty basic schedule, I think Thursday through Sunday, some student matinees and some weekday matinees, I think one weekday matinee. Little Women has a huge cult following. There have been so many adaptations and so many film versions. I think there's something like six, six or seven. And the most recent, the Greta Gerwig, 2019, I think that was, with Timothy Chalamet and Florence Pugh and Saoirse Ronan, was also a little bit her vision. So it's not that far off from that kind of approach.

Matt: 43:22

What is your role in this?

Sarah: 43:24

I play Marmee and Aunt March. The way Kate Hamill has divided up the roles. Marmee isn't in it that much, and Aunt March only has one scene, but she's talked about kind of a lot. So I play both parts.

Matt: 43:38

Back to your old days. You're gonna bring back Shawna, right?

Sarah: 43:41

Yes. Shawna Huerose. I can do two at once. And that is one of the challenges is to make them really different from each other. But that's what I love. I love being kind of a transformational actor that way. Being a little bit unrecognizable, hopefully. I mean, you're gonna know it's me. It says in the program that I'm doing both roles. But that's the funnest part about being an actor.

Matt: 44:04

Yeah. Yeah. What are the behind the scenes? I know you said you’re just starting on that, but what other behind the scenes might people find enjoyable to listen about you preparing for this show that, you know, people who aren't an actor or don't know anything about the acting world might find interesting.

Sarah: 44:18

Well, really, learning lines is primary. I don't have a huge amount, but it's interesting that the smaller the role, the later I wait to start learning lines. I was in a two-hander, which means a two-person play, last year, and I started like three months ahead of time to learn my lines because the rehearsal process was only like two weeks for a two-person play, which is a little crazy. But this one I just kind of trust that I know myself well enough at this point to know how long it's gonna take me to learn my dialogue. So that's what I'm doing now. But I've also started reading Little Women again. And I watched two different versions. I saw the Greta Gerwig one when it came out. I didn't really need to see that one again, but I watched the 1994 version with Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder and all these great actresses. Kirsten Dunst is in it. That was kind of fun. And then I watched a BBC version that was also maybe seven or eight years ago with Maya Hawke, Ethan Hawke's daughter, and Emily Watson played Marmee. So it depends on the project. I don't always go back to a different source material. Sometimes it's good to not watch those things because you don't want to get it in your brain when you're trying to figure out a role for yourself. But for some reason, I wanted to see what their focus, like what parts of the story they chose to tell. And because the book is big. I mean, the book is kind of enormous. And then there's books after that that Alcott wrote, like Joe's Boys, and I mean, there's tons of them. I would like to, I haven't done this yet, but I would like to go to her house in Concord. Because all of this happened right down the road. I'm amazed Umbrella in Concord hasn't done this show yet, but I guess we beat them to it.

Matt: 46:05

Well, I'll put links for the show coming up, but also you guys are now residents at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. So there'll be more shows to come. So keep an eye out for even the next ones, the next Shakespeare one. Any other closing thoughts here before we say bye to the listeners?

Sarah: 46:21

No, I'm just happy to be here and happy to represent Watertown.

Matt: 46:26

Well, thank you for sitting down and sharing your thoughts and stories.

Sarah: 46:29

Thank you, Matt.

Matt: 46:30

So that's it for my conversation with Sarah. I'll put links in the show notes so you can find out more information about Actors’ Shakespeare Project and their upcoming show, Little Women, which again is running from February 5th through March 1st at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. And if you like this episode, you can find more interviews over at Little Local Conversations.com. You can sign up for my weekly newsletter, find upcoming events, and help support the podcast by clicking on the support local conversation button in the menu. Again, all that is over at LittleLocalConversations.com. 

Matt: 47:00 

All right, and I want to give a few shout-outs here to wrap things up. First one goes to podcast sponsor, Arsenal Financial. They're our financial planning business here in Watertown that's owned by Doug Orifice, who's a very committed community member. And his business helps busy families, small businesses, and people close to retirement. So if you need help in any of those areas, reach out to Doug and his team at arsenalfinancial.com. I also want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council, who have given me a grant this year to help support the podcast. So I want to give them the appropriate credit, which is, this program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. You can find out more about them at WatertownCulturalCouncil.org and MassCulturalCouncil.org. And a couple more shout-outs to promotional partners. First one goes to the Watertown Business Coalition, which is a nonprofit organization here in Watertown, and their motto is Community Is Our Business. Find out more about them at WatertownBusinessCoalition.com. And lastly, Watertown News, which is a Watertown focused online newspaper. It's a great place to keep up to date with everything going on in the city. Check that out at WatertownMANews.com. So that's it. Until next time, take care.