2007.10.07: October 7, 2007: Headlines: COS - Sierra Leone: Acting: The Idaho Statesman: Sierra Leone RPCV Tracy Sunderland directs her sixth play at Boise Contemporary Theater

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Sierra Leone: Peace Corps Sierra Leone : Peace Corps Sierra Leone: Newest Stories: 2007.10.07: October 7, 2007: Headlines: COS - Sierra Leone: Acting: The Idaho Statesman: Sierra Leone RPCV Tracy Sunderland directs her sixth play at Boise Contemporary Theater

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Sierra Leone RPCV Tracy Sunderland directs her sixth play at Boise Contemporary Theater

Sierra Leone RPCV Tracy Sunderland directs her sixth play at Boise Contemporary Theater

Sunderland landed in Sierra Leone and spent two years working on clean water issues and digging the occasional latrine. "Very glamorous stuff," she said. She took another few years and became a "citizen of the world," she said, and traveled through Europe. "When I came back, I'm not sure why, but I felt sort of at clean-slate state. In the best sense, I was starting at zero," she said. She had developed a tendency to create theater in her daily life. "I would tell elaborate lies to people I met on a ski lift about who I was. I would adopt languages — I'm sure the accents were terrible," she said. "I was longing for a witness. I was wanting to be someone else. I knew I would never just go to L.A. and be an actor, so I decided to go to graduate school." With no training, she auditioned for the theater master's program at University of Texas. "I was shockingly bad," she said. Even so, they accepted her on the contingency that she catch up academically, a challenge she accepted. Then one day, she got the wind knocked out of her. "We were in class, working on an assignment and it hit me like a tidal wave: ‘Holy cow, I'm so out of my element. I have no idea what's going on," she said. "That was a shock to the system." She spent the next semester in the corner until a teacher nudged her out. "It was a do-or-die moment. I knew I had to take that leap, so I decided to go for it," she said. "I was like a sponge. I found myself reading all the time, I wanted to study for tests. I knew I was in the right place."

Sierra Leone RPCV Tracy Sunderland directs her sixth play at Boise Contemporary Theater

Tracy Sunderland: '...a Geiger counter for the truthful moment.'
‘Failure junkie' is willing to risk everything for a chance at something brilliant
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* Boise Contemporary Theater

By Dana Oland - doland@idahostatesman.com
Edition Date: 10/07/07

You can always tell when Tracy Sunderland is in the house.

It's her laugh.

It explodes from her, echoes down corridors and reverberates off the back of theater walls. It draws attention at a party. It's also infectious, and if she's in the audience you can't help but join her.

"It's percussive," said her friend and colleague Gordon Reinhart. "It marks the exact thing that just happened on stage, and you know she gets it. She's a Geiger counter for the truthful moment."

That moment of truth is where Sunderland lives as an actor and what she seeks as a director. As an actor, she's willing to bleach her hair until it breaks or hack it off, which she did in "Fuddy Meers" and "Waiting for Godot," respectively. As a director, she'll immerse herself in the play and often lie awake pondering a dramatic problem.

Sunderland approaches her work in an intellectual, incisive manner, but she is emotional in performance and driven, some might say obsessive, in her approach to theater.

The ‘O' word is one her friends hesitate to use because of its negative connotation, but one Sunderland doesn't mind embracing. "That seems apt to me," she said, thoughtfully.

She constantly pushes herself into new territories personally and professionally. She thrives outside her comfort zone.

"I'm a big failure junkie. More important, I'm willing to risk failure in a colossal way for the potential of doing something great. Does that make sense?" she asks. It's her catch phrase.

Well, it does. Sunderland is in the middle of another opportunity for failure and whatever the payoff will be. She is directing her sixth play at Boise Contemporary Theater, this year's season-opening play, "Brilliant Traces," by Cindy Lou Johnson.

Sunderland is throwing her usual way of working out the window and is pushing her cast — Matthew Cameron Clark and Sara M. Bruner — to play with this piece in a new way.

In the story, a runaway bride flees on a cross-country trek until she finds herself at the end of the world, in a cabin in the wilds of Alaska. There she meets a young man who, it turns out, is running from something, too.

"The play is sort of this lovely, tender, poetic piece," she said. "It really lent itself to something different. We're throwing out our usual way of working to see what unbinds the everyday."

It's your basic play with two people in a room trying to escape, she said. But what if the room suddenly became a snow globe and you could shake it up? That's what this process is like, she said.

"What if normal rules of pedestrian behavior are being unbound? Then this room becomes a more magical place," she said.

To find that magic, Sunderland decided to pursue a less naturalist and more theatrical style for the piece using a theater technique called "Viewpoints," which grew out of 1970s post-modern dance movement.

It doesn't involve choreography, but it's not basic staging — the pick-up-the-cup-of-coffee-and-say-the-line approach.

Rehearsals become more like workouts as the actors attack the boundaries of time, space and rhythm set up in the play, often using strong, repetitive movement that is unrelated to the dialogue.

Sunderland, Clark and Bruner began working together in the mid 1990s and know one another well. Their connection created a safety net within which they can tackle the play this way.

"I was frank with them, and I said, ‘I really don't know where this will take us.' They looked at me and said, ‘Great, let's go,' " she said.

Clark, who hired Sunderland to direct this production, said he would only take this kind of risk under her direction.

"I might take more convincing from someone else. The level of style she's creating is something I would be nervous about with anyone else. I know I can trust her, and there's nothing more valuable than that in making good theater," he said. "We're really excited to see how it turns out."

The goal is to shift the play's tempo and create something eminently theatrical, Sunderland said. "I'm tired of plays that look like something I would see on TV. For good or bad, fall on my face or succeed, I wanted to try something different," she said.

That mantra has in many ways been a hallmark of her life.

a life redefined

Sunderland grew up in Colorado Springs, dabbling in theater in high school and planning for a pretty typical career track.

But things didn't go as planned.

With a degree in political science from Duke University in North Carolina and the idea that she would eventually go to law school, she headed to San Francisco for her first job as a paralegal in a corporate law firm.

"The only way for me to distill down what I want to do is to do it, and working for the big bad guys made the difference. It was an assault on my soul," she said.

So she joined the Peace Corps.

Sunderland landed in Sierra Leone and spent two years working on clean water issues and digging the occasional latrine. "Very glamorous stuff," she said.

She took another few years and became a "citizen of the world," she said, and traveled through Europe.

"When I came back, I'm not sure why, but I felt sort of at clean-slate state. In the best sense, I was starting at zero," she said.

She had developed a tendency to create theater in her daily life.

"I would tell elaborate lies to people I met on a ski lift about who I was. I would adopt languages — I'm sure the accents were terrible," she said. "I was longing for a witness. I was wanting to be someone else. I knew I would never just go to L.A. and be an actor, so I decided to go to graduate school."

With no training, she auditioned for the theater master's program at University of Texas. "I was shockingly bad," she said.

Even so, they accepted her on the contingency that she catch up academically, a challenge she accepted. Then one day, she got the wind knocked out of her. "We were in class, working on an assignment and it hit me like a tidal wave: ‘Holy cow, I'm so out of my element. I have no idea what's going on," she said. "That was a shock to the system."

She spent the next semester in the corner until a teacher nudged her out. "It was a do-or-die moment. I knew I had to take that leap, so I decided to go for it," she said. "I was like a sponge. I found myself reading all the time, I wanted to study for tests. I knew I was in the right place."

Timing is everything

She found herself in the right place again after graduation, when she auditioned for Idaho Theater for Youth's production of "Appleseed John."

That's how she came to Boise.

"People just kept hiring me, so why go anywhere else?" she said.

Since moving to Boise, she's worked with both Idaho Shakespeare Festival and Boise Contemporary Theater, made local television commercials and has taught theater at Boise State University as an adjunct professor for the past eight years.

That first show brought her together with Clark and Michael Baltzell, who designed the set for "Brilliant Traces," and Kris Martin, who is stage manager for this play.

For Clark, meeting Sunderland became a turning point in his career.

"I was just back from college and a year in Seattle, trying to figure out what to do with my life, and here she had moved to Idaho to act and has built an amazing career. It blew me away, and it was totally inspiring," he said.

In the next year, Clark decided to permanently move back to Boise and created BCT, which has grown over the past 10 years to become Boise's only professional contemporary theater company. He also created the Fulton Street Theater, now the Fulton Street Center for the Arts in the heart of the city's cultural district.

He also brought Sunderland in as an informal artistic associate, he said.

"She's an important part of what BCT has become. When I'm putting together a season, she's the first person I think of before myself. She brings so much from both sides: as a director and an actor," Clark said.

She's created many memorable performances, including Speed in ISF's "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," Lucky in BCT's "Waiting for Godot" and Varia in "The Cherry Orchard," in which she played opposite Reinhart's Lobakhin, the man who is supposed to marry her, but who walks away instead.

"There's a scene where I come on and I'm supposed to ask her to marry me, but I don't. It's one of my favorite moments. Tracy brings so much emotional depth on stage with her and it's unavoidable. She comes on with this commanding but shivering vulnerability," he said. "It made it very easy for me to play that scene."

Dana Oland: 377-6442




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Headlines: October, 2007; Peace Corps Sierra Leone; Directory of Sierra Leone RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Sierra Leone RPCVs; Acting; Idaho





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Story Source: The Idaho Statesman

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Sierra Leone; Acting

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