Dream Role
Dream Role
ASHLAND -- A few hours before curtain, standing in a small, nondescript dressing room backstage, Nicole Strykowski has almost completed her transformation.
Gone are the big, silver hoop earrings and low-rise jeans. The lotus tattoo on her right hip hides under the green scales of her body suit. She tucks her white-blond hair under a black stocking cap, all but erasing her Hollywood starlet looks.
Gone also is any vestige of the teenage misfit who cleaned motel rooms for money.
Tonight, the 27-year-old intern at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a devil. A cardinal. A friar and a duchess.
Tonight, the 2005 cast and crew of Christopher Marlowe's 16th-century play "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus" face their first public test, performing a preview in front of a live audience.
For Strykowski, it's an even bigger test, the best glimpse she's had yet to see if the life she's crafted from a bumpy childhood, a self-funded college education and a litany of other jobs will actually become the professional dream she's held so long. To be an actor. To be in theater.
Getting out of a rut
Like most people, Strykowski didn't start out with a dream life.
After her parents divorced when she was 5 years old, she bounced between the two homes until she was 13. Her father didn't pay child support, and her mom worked two jobs to support her and her sister. By the time she was 12, Strykowski already was working full time as a paid-under-the-table waitress and a nanny. At 15, she dropped out of school to travel.
In her working life, she's been a secretary, a maid, a ski-lift instructor, a nanny and a bartender.
Several years ago, Strykowski found herself feeling unfulfilled.
Four years earlier, the striking 5-foot-8-inch blonde had moved to Ashland, a picturesque college town she loved for its laid-back lifestyle and the renowned Shakespeare festival.
Now she felt stuck in her restaurant manager job but reluctant to let go of the stability.
I hate my life, she complained to a friend and her mother, who lives in Medford.
What do you want to do, they asked?
The answer came quickly. The only thing Strykowski, who acted in her first play at age 5, ever wanted to do was theater.
But she had no formal training. A high school dropout who earned her GED at 16, college seemed inconceivable.
In fact, it turned out to be surprisingly easy, she says. Student loans and eight years of tending bar and waiting tables in Ashland paid her way through four years at Southern Oregon University. She sat in the front row in art history and loved every minute.
Tough but vulnerable
Early her freshman year, Strykowski caught the eye of festival veteran Jim Edmondson, who was holding auditions for an SOU production of "The Laramie Project."
"She was a standout because of her energy and a great intelligence that doesn't quite go with her appearance," says Edmondson, who also is directing her in "Faustus." "I've known other kids that beautiful that would have just coasted on physical beauty and charm."
Edmondson quickly learned Strykowski was different. She had been cast as the best friend of Matthew Shepard, who was killed in anti-gay violence in Laramie, Wyo.
During a monologue, the slender girl with the big, brown eyes and almost husky voice broke down.
"I was mortified," Strykowski remembers. The girl who did not cry at news of her parents' divorce does not like to cry in front of people.
But Edmondson was thankful. The play is emotionally taut and can easily scare actors, he says.
"She was the first to have a total meltdown in a scene," he remembers. "She could go there. And she took care of others when they went there."
A pivotal internship
Strykowski calls the "Laramie Project" her "favorite theater experience ever," thanks in part to Edmondson. She is thrilled she gets to work with him as a festival intern.
It's dreams like these that the 70-year-old Oregon festival hopes to nurture with a not-yet year-old program designed to bring young and emerging talent into the small, college town.
The program is called Fellowships, Assistantships, Internships and Residencies. Interns get hands-on experience in their theater specialty, whether it's directing, acting or set design, says Christine Menzies, who directs the program.
At other theaters, interns "may spend many hours at the photocopier or walking a guest artist's dog or fetching water," she says. "My role is to make sure they're here to learn and to interact."
Menzies, who taught at Portland State University for four years, says she is working with universities in Ohio, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Oregon to regularly bring undergraduate and graduate students into the festival. Southern Oregon University, where Strykowski just graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in performance, has long had a relationship with the festival.
For Strykowski landing the paid internship was a dream come true. To win the sought-after internship, she first won the approval of Southern Oregon faculty, who decide which students to recommend each year.
Then she auditioned before two of the festival's artistic staff who picked her and three other acting interns.
No longer just an audience member, as she had been for 14 years, Strykowski now has her own key backstage, where she places her name on a sign-in list and bids hello to everyone she sees.
The first time the company met this season, Strykowski momentarily forgot what roles she would play.
"When we did our first ("Faustus") read-through, I was terrified," she says. "You think, you're in a show reading with people you've admired for years and all of sudden you're right next to them."
"They're so good. I don't want to suck in front of them."
The first time she stood on the Elizabethan stage during tech rehearsal for "Faustus," she was stunned.
"Bats are flying around. The sunset's beautiful," she recalls. "You're thinking this is what was happening almost 500 years ago. It's just magic."
Autographs and uncertainty
On a recent night, the Shakespeare festival's biggest theater thrums with an audience of school kids, families and senior citizens amid the threat of rain. It is the first preview of "Faustus" open to the public.
At home before the show, Strykowski stretched, practicing yoga moves to loosen her muscles. Backstage, she worked on drawings for a costume-design class.
Strykowski spends much of "Faustus" onstage but her role as a devil has her crouched silently in the background. Her small speaking role as a duchess comes and goes as a minor plot point.
By the time the play is over, it is past 11:30 p.m. When she and other cast members emerge, they're surprised to find autograph seekers. A group of grade-schoolers have waited to get their signatures.
Could this be a sign of things to come in Strykowski's young acting career? She hopes so.
Strykowski's internship lasts through October. What happens after that depends on five minutes this week. That's when she auditions for a spot for the 2006 season. She won't hear back for a few months.
Like all actors, the waiting period leaves her nervous. So, sitting at a brewpub the day after the preview, she's eager to hear what her director, Edmondson, has said about her to this reporter.
"Tell me! Tell me!" she says, her eyes lighting up. She smiles at his description of her discipline and her "blend of vulnerability and ability to go deep."
She calls him her "fairy godmother" then, suddenly, realizes how late she is. Rehearsal starts in five minutes. Snatching up her bag, she takes off running.
"Anything could happen," she says of her future. "It's crazy."
Su-jin Yim: 503-294-7611; suyim@news.oregonian.com
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