Alternative title: Stuff we do when we’re not ZOEing.
So I directed this play. If you’re in the greater Seattle area, there are still tickets left for Saturday and Sunday.
Honestly the plug is secondary to the purpose of this article. I have been thinking about how intertwined so much of our work is, even outside of our ZOE/DG projects, although certainly it’s as likely as not because of the ZOE/DG projects.
The play is called Proof. It has four actors, Trin Miller, Brian Lewis, Lisa LeVan, and Donn Christianson.
I’ll start with Donn because he’s the least connected. That isn’t a reflection on him, I’m just starting easy. I worked on a theatrical show called Obsidian with both Donn and Ben Dobyns that started in 2008. It was when I met Ben, which is why, more or less, I now work for him. I directed a play with Donn and his lovely wife Kerry Christianson in 2009. It started as a short and the writer expanded the ideas and it all just came together. Kerry herself is a director and choreographer, most recently directing Pageant Play at Theater Schmeater in Seattle, and choreographing a dance number for another of their shows.
Lisa LeVan has not exactly appeared in anything ZOE related…yet. She does, however, perform as the emo poet Keats in Joe’s Diner, the long-form improv comedy that also features Christian Doyle, Matt Vancil, Brian Lewis, Nathan Rice, and you get the idea. In addition to being an accomplished stage and screen actress, appearing in the award-winning shorts Connect To and Out of Darkness, she is also a film producer. On top of all that, she appeared in the short film Pretty Face and Green My Eyes with Kat Ogden, JourneyQuest Producer and 2nd AD on JQ Season 2. Kat also appears in, and was 2nd AD on, Camilla Dickenson, an adaptation of a Madeleine L’Engle novel written and directed by JourneyQuest producer Connie Moore. Ben Dobyns edited the film, which features a cameo or two from DG alums.
For context, I met Lisa, Scott C. Brown, Don Early, Andy Dopieralski, and others for the first time at a murder mystery birthday party for Ben Dobyns about 18 months ago. Donn and Kerry Christian were in attendance as well. And things have just kept happening since then.
I actually met Brian Lewis on the first day of shooting the ZOE weekly update. You can view it here, if you skip ahead to about 8:15. I expected not to like him when we met, and it wasn’t until I watched Dorkness again that I realized it’s because I expected him to be like his character Cass. He’s about as far away from that as possible. In the fall of 2011, Brian Lewis appeared in a production of The Hound of the Baskervilles with Christian Doyle and I. Brian, Scott C. Brown, and Doyle were all in a production of The Three Musketeers in Tacoma a while back. Brian, of course, was in Dorkness Rising with both actors, and with Doyle in JQ Season One (with Brown coming on in Season Two). Brian is also one of the Dirty Do Gooders, a web series that also features Trin Miller and Jesse Lee Keeter. Lewis will also appear in Glitch, a web series due this summer, with both Trin and Keeter again.
Keeter, of course, is the smart orc Rilk in JQ, who will reprise his role in Season Two due to fan demand, as well as one of the “lads” behind &@, a web series you can find on zombieorpheus.com. One of other &@ fellas, Ahren Buhmann, built the set for Proof and is the set designer and director for Balagan Theater here in Seattle. Keeter is also the lead in Glitch, which is actually shooting right now. Jesse also appears in a horror film that shot late last year called Reunion, which features several actors who are also in Glitch. Most notably, Bandersnatch Studios did the special makeup effects for Reunion, as well as for JQ Seasons One and Two. Here is an awesome video of them doing terrible things to Keeter.
Trin Miller, of course, appears weekly as Zoe herself on Rude Mechanical, with me, and folks like Scott C. Brown, Brian Lewis, and even occasionally Ben Dobyns and Matt Vancil, along with many other familiar faces. As noted above, she is also in Glitch, Dirty Do Gooders, and The Collectibles (also on zombieorpheus.com!), as part of her ongoing quest to appear in everything filmed in Seattle, ever. Due to that, she has appeared in a number of features as well, including Break, The Dead Men, and Sader Ridge, which crammed a feature shoot into just seven days! She is the lead, Catherine, in Proof and only gets to be off stage for 7 minutes of the entire 2 hour and 15 minute run time. She’s a workaholic.
So, as you can see, even when we’re not working together on something ZOE/DG related, many of us still see each other on a very regular basis. And many of us are just one degree of separation apart from each other.
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