Lucy Wang

Writer, Performance Artist/Comedian, Sensuous Gourmet
Los Angeles, California USA

Where do you look for inspiration?
Anywhere I can get it.  Truth is, inspiration often finds me, tickling my senses, knocking me off guard, daring me to go beyond what I know, or just learned, to discover what I want to know or experience next.

Is there anything you still dream of doing?
After years of being mistaken as a stand-up comic, I recently started doing stand-up comedy and performing my own work on stage.  It’s been thrilling, several people told me they laughed so hard they almost peed in their pants. A terrifying compliment like that has me dreaming of doing my own one-woman show and hanging out with Jerry Seinfeld.

What is your best escape?
My alter ego, The Sensuous Gourmet.  Food and me, we’re enablers.  Love to eat, eat to love, write to eat, eat to write.  It’s a luscious cycle.

Favorite Cocktail?
Mixology has become such an art, that I’m experimenting, especially since my garden often taxes me with an overabundance of produce. Just made a cantaloupe basil martini that my guests loved.  But when I just want to chill, nothing beats a spicy Bloody Mary with a leafy celery stalk and a jumbo shrimp.

I feel most like myself when I’m at the gym, facing all those weights and mirrors. Dig deeper, run faster, towards the “green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes us.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Lucy Wang: Former Wall Street bond trader & Deputy Chief of Staff NYC Mayor. Awards include Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, Best New Play from the Katherine and Lee Chilcote Foundation, Berrilla Kerr Foundation, James Thurber Fellowship, Annenberg Beach House Writer in Residence. Original Works Publishing, JAC Publishing, Amazon.

Laura Annawyn Shamas

Playwright, Educator
Los Angeles, California USA

“My First Big Role: Playing A Boy”
The first play that changed my life was Six Who Pass While The Lentils Boil by Stuart Walker, published by Samuel French. In the 1960’s, I was eight years old and lived in Ponca City, Oklahoma, with my parents and brother.

My mother’s close friend decided to direct Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil for the community theater there. One of the biggest roles in it calls for a dutiful young boy who does not betray the Queen, even though many tempt him to do so. A casting notice went around town, and all the boys interested in acting tried out for the role. My mother’s friend, the director, suggested that I audition, even though I was a girl. As an eight-year-old, I did not find this to be a strange idea. Sure, I could play a boy, I thought. Why not? I have a brother, so I know how boys act.

I auditioned; the competition was fierce in Ponca. But I was given the role. To look more convincing, I got a “pageboy” haircut and became “Sir Davey Little Boy.” My parents helped me to memorize my lines—well, “helped” is a euphemism. (Ask them about it sometime. They still remember it as an unpleasant ordeal.) What I remember most about being in the show is that I got to wear green tights and was dressed sort of like Robin Hood. My brother was envious!

Although my young parents were struggling financially at the time, my father gave me a huge bouquet of roses for the opening; I still have the card that came with them, addressed to “Sir Davey Little Boy.” In performance, we had no need of a prompter because I’d memorized the entire script by rote; the adult actors came to depend on me to help them with their lines if they “went up.”

To this day, I enjoy stirring lentils. And with this early experience, portraying a boy when I was a young girl, my love of theatre began.

Laura Annawyn Shamas is a writer, mythologist and educator. Her plays include: Up To Date, Lady-Like, Portrait of a Nude, and an adaptation of Picnic At Hanging Rock. Details about her new book Pop Mythology: Collected Essays are available at her website: laurashamas.com. Member: Chickasaw Nation.

Georganne Aldrich Heller

President of Irish Theatre & Film Production
New York, New York USA

In November will be celebrating her twenty years in producing new Irish Drama in New York and Los Angeles honored by The Consul General of Ireland at a special celebration party at The Odyssey theater Los Angeles. She has worked exclusively all these years on introducing new Irish plays and playwrights to the USA. As producer, Georganne is opening three Irish shows this month: two in Los Angeles: FORGOTTEN by Pat Kinevane, WHO’S YOUR DADDY? by Johnny O’ Callaghan; and one in Dublin: the award-winning THE PROPHET OF MONTO by JP Murphy which premiered in New York City at the 1st Irish Theater Festival at The Flea Theater, transferred to Dublin with original cast and director. She hopes to bring this to London next year.

Where do you look for inspiration? Observing people and meeting people when I travel.

What’s your favorite…
Book: At the moment- Alice Munro short stories
Movie: Casablanca
Line from a play: “I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places” Tennessee Williams/ The Glass Menagerie
Favorite guilty pleasure: A day of room service in a luxurious hotel
Cocktail: Cranberry juice with soda water!!!

What play or production changed your life? Ladies & Gents, an Irish play which I produced in the public toilets in Central Park! We had five hundred people on the waiting list when we closed!
Is there anything you still dream of doing? This all the time…
I feel most like myself when I ….am extremely busy!
What is your best escape? A day of room service in a luxury hotel!
What’s the one thing nobody knows about you? Well it’s a secret!

Georganne Aldrich Heller is the president of Irish Theatre & Film Production.  Most recently, her credits include the world premiere of The Prophet of Monto by John Paul Murphy for the 1^st Irish Festival at The Flea Theater and My Old Friends by Norman Sachs and Mel Mandel at The Victory Theatre, Los Angeles.