The Magic 25 - 2008, Where are they now?
From 1982 to 1990, the IFCC was a home-away-from-home to over a hundred talented young artists. The Student Production Company at the IFCC was a theatre company staffed and operated by children and adolescents from ages nine to eighteen. Under the guidance of an adult director, company members tried out the many roles involved in creating theatre. A student might star in one production, and build the set for the next. He or she could write a play, perform in a jazz dance, and manage a crew of ushers, all in the course of a season. The members even voted on a student board and a company director, who would then program the following season. Through classes, workshops, recitals and productions, the SPC gave its students an opportunity to learn the joys and responsibilities of the creative arts. Each young person that came through the doors of the IFCC was shaped in some way by the values they learned SPC.
The members of the company have gone on to do exciting things both inside and outside the performing arts. IFCC takes this week’s installment of the Magic 25 to recognize the achievements of a few of the SPC‘s alumni.
ADRIENNE FLAGG is now the Creative Director of the IFCC. She is the former Artistic Director of The Portland Theatre Brigade and Toad City Productions. Adrienne trained in New York at the New Actors Workshop with Gene Hackman, Paul Sills, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. In addition to directing many young people’s plays throughout the Northwest, Adrienne has directed for TCP, Stark Raving Theatre and Integrity Productions. One of Adrienne’s most memorable performances was in The Waiting Room, for which she was awarded a Drammy for best actress in a lead role.
HEIDI DURROW is a writer, podcaster and lawyer. A graduate of Stanford University, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School, she is a Los Angeles writer who is African-American and Danish. A former litigator at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Heidi is now focused on a career as a fiction writer. She has won several awards for her writing-which focuses on issues of biracial and bicultural identity. Her novel manuscript, Light-skinned-ed Girl, won Barbara Kingsolver’s 2008 Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change. Her book will be in bookstores Fall 2009 published by Algonquin Books.
THOMAS LAUDERDALE is the Artistic Director of Pink Martini, Portland’s beloved vintage music orchestra. He has appeared with the Oregon Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, Chamber Music Northwest and the Oregon Ballet and has given recitals in Boston and New York. Thomas graduated cum laude from Harvard with a degree in literature and history.
DAN TRUJILLO is a playwright living in New York City with his wife and two daughters. He is an alumni of NYU‘s Graduate Dramatic Writing Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, and a 2006–07 Dramatists Guild Fellow. The production of his play Jingle Spree won Portland’s Drammy Award for Outstanding Original Script. He has also won awards from the American College Theatre Festival and the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. His new play, The Honest to God True Story of the Atheist, opened this June, and will be revived in 2009.
ANDREA WHITE acts all around the west coast. She recently appeared in Box Americana at Portland Center Stage’s JAW West Festival, and won the Drammy award for Best Supporting Actor in Two Sisters and a piano at ART. She has appeared on television in NYPD Blue, Family Matters and Living Single. Film credits include ASL and the lead in Drinking Game. Andrea is also a director, most recently staging Step on a Crack at Portland Actor’s Conservatory and a piece for Vancouver School of Arts and Academics. She has taught theatre for the last fifteen years.
DION DOULIS (born UK, 1971) is an artist working in the performing arts. He also works professionally as an actor, director, and consultant for theater and film projects, as well as leading workshops in performance technique. He is an associate member of the French troupe Begat Theater Compagnie and a founding member of the New York based performance company WaxFactory which he led as artistic co-director from 1997 until he stepped down in 2006. From 2005–2007, Dion has held a fellowship in the performing arts from Akademie Schloss Solitude, where he initiated his current performance/research project and began working in short-form solo performances.
MELISSA LOWERY spent ten years in southern California before moving back to Oregon. She is currently a student at Pacific University, majoring in General Media with a minor in Sociology. She has two children, Jayla and Che, and her husband is Pacific University’s Men’s Basketball Head Coach.
By Dan Trujillo
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