Patrick Quinlan, Kathleen M. Darcy, and Amir Abdullah in “Brendan.” Photo by Moses Umbeke.
Like most theatrical multi-hyphenates, McKerrin Kelly juggles a daily myriad of priorities while trying to strike that elusive balance between personal and professional selves. Lately she admits she’d settle for “balance-adjacent.”
“There are times I wake up and really wish I wanted to be an accountant,” laughs the actor/director/fitness trainer. “Just to have one thing to focus on and that’s it. You come home. You have nights and weekends free. But there’s no way I could do that. I would chew my foot off and be a complete nasty bitch.”
McKerrin Kelly
Luckily for her feet, Kelly is enjoying a string of directing successes for Burbank’s Theatre Banshee that includes Power, The Hostage, Dolly West’s Kitchen and its current production of Ronan Noone’s Brendan, her fourth for the award-winning Irish-centric company of which she is a longtime member. As an actress she has also been on the Banshee boards in numerous shows including Pub Plays, Macbeth, Loyal Women and What the Butler Saw.
Other LA stage roles include her Ovation-nominated turn in A Picture of Dorian Gray for Theatre @ Boston Court, Better Angels at Colony Theatre, Yellow/Flesh/Alabaster/Rose at Theatre of NOTE and Love’s Old Sweet Song for Syzygy Theatre Group at GTC Burbank, among others.
Beyond Banshee, Kelly has branched out to directing at other intimate theaters. Last fall she helmed the premiere of The Snow Queen, a musical in the British panto style for Blame the Clown Productions at South Pasadena’s Fremont Centre Theatre. Previous assignments include Dress Black at Theatre of NOTE as well as workshop productions for Syzygy Theatre’s New Alignments program. She is currently in rehearsals for the West Coast premiere of Samantha Macher’s The Arctic Circle, presented by Klepto Theatre Workshop and the New Works Initiative at the Playwright’s Lab at Hollins University, which opens August 29 at Studio/Stage.
Keeping all those plates spinning in air while also running a successful fitness business in Atwater Village can at times take its toll.
“I found myself driving to the theater the other morning when I was supposed to be driving to the gym,” she explains over lunch at Veggie Grill in Hollywood. “I have four businesses to run, which are all self-generated [including voice-overs], so I constantly have to initiate my own work. I’m lucky that I really enjoy the physical training part of it. That really fascinates me, too, but I also need to keep the artistic part of me fed.”
Bi-coastal and Back
McKerrin Kelly and Steve Coombs in the 2006 Theatre @ Boston Court production of “A Picture of Dorian Gray.” Photo by Ed Krieger.
Born in San Diego, Kelly left for New York immediately after high school but returned at 18 to put herself through San Diego State University, where she graduated with a theater degree. She auditioned for and got callbacks from the major theaters in San Diego, only to witness LA and New York actors get consistently hired over local talent. Kelly honed her craft in intimate theaters for those first post-grad years until deciding she needed to “get out.”
“I didn’t want to go to LA,” she states. “I was terrified of LA,” which she acknowledges “is weird” because many people who are from other parts of California assume they would be able to manage LA more easily than New York. “But I never felt like I fit in, in Southern California, because I’m not a beach person. I always kind of felt like I was dropped here or something.”
Kelly also didn’t think she had what she believed the industry in LA wanted or needed. “I’m not tall and blonde and gorgeous, and I didn’t see me on TV or in films. So I could not imagine being able to handle LA, just because I thought they’d laugh, you know? So I went to New York thinking that could be easier for theater.”
She headed back east and immediately felt at home again. People looked like her, the city’s energy matched her own, and Kelly got work in non-Equity shows at theaters like the Judith Anderson and the Beckett. Ironically, she also started getting phone calls from theaters she’d worked with or auditioned for in San Diego.
She returned to San Diego, got her Equity card doing The Importance of Being Earnest at Blackfriars Theatre and flew back to New York wondering then what she was doing. “I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, which was now I was no longer a ‘local’ so some people are willing to hire me.” She flew back to San Diego in time to join Blackfriars’ trip to Vladivostok, Russia where they performed at the invitation of Maxim Gorky Theatre. Once back, she stayed in San Diego for time before deciding to finally tackle the dreaded LA. Getting her initial theatrical bearings here was harder than she thought.
“I had ideas of LA from when I was younger and then also now being from New York,” Kelly admits with a smile. “And it’s big! So it took a while to find where the theater was and where theater people were. It’s all over the town obviously, and now when people say, ‘Oh, there’s nothing happening here,’ I want to punch them because you can drown in theater.”
Banshee and Brendan
James Read and McKerrin Kelly in the 2009 Colony Theatre Company production of “Better Angels.”
Becoming a director was never something Kelly actively sought as a professional goal. She had helmed small projects in school and other occasional venues, thoroughly enjoying both the research and problem-solving aspects of directing. But it wasn’t until Theatre Banshee co-founders Leslie Baldwin and Sean Branney asked her to pitch ideas for the company’s 2007 production of Power that a substantive opportunity presented itself. She nearly passed.
“It was probably the first time Sean wasn’t going to direct a show,” explains Kelly. “I had assistant directed for him once because he had to finish a film, so I stepped in for a couple of weeks. They announced that they were going to have a different director come in and if anyone was interested to let them know. I didn’t, because I’m not a director and someone else was submitting. So I just assumed they were going to get it. Then Sean and Leslie asked me to pitch. I said I’d think about it. Then they asked me again. I finally thought, ‘I don’t really have to worry about anything because this other person is going to get it.’ Sometimes you give your best audition when you think you don’t really have a chance. So I just pitched. Then they called me and said they wanted me to direct.”
When asked why they chose Kelly and what they saw in her as a potential director, Baldwin and Branney replied via email: “We selected McKerrin to direct Power by Nick Dear as she possessed an excellent sensibility for the play’s language, aesthetics, and themes…We also knew we could trust McKerrin to create an atmosphere where actors would feel supported, appreciated, and safe — values that Banshee holds dear. She’s gone on to do a great job in handling diverse and challenging productions for us such as Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Frank McGuinness’ Dolly West’s Kitchen and our current production of Ronan Noone’s Brendan, proving that she is as creative and versatile a director as she is an actress.”
Patrick Quinlan and Devereau Chumrau in “Brendan.”
“I came very, very close to turning it down,” laughs Kelly. “I had this really long conversation with a friend of mine because I knew this other person had also submitted and I was so afraid I was going to hurt their feelings. Luckily my friend was like, ‘Okay, how much of an idiot are you going to be?’ [Doing Power] was nice because Sean and Leslie are this tight producing team. They’ve worked together for so long and have this machine that runs so smoothly. The show had a small cast, it was an interesting subject for me and it turned out to be a really good experience.”
Brendan came to her via playwright Jami Brandli who had seen it performed in late September 2012 at New York’s annual 1st Irish Theatre Festival. The piece is a modern-day take on the coming-to-America tale with the title character being a young 20-something Irish immigrant finding his way in contemporary New York City. What complicates his assimilation is that he is literally and figuratively being haunted by loved ones he left behind.
Kelly created a single-location set and used a multi-racial cast, including some non-Banshee actors who each play a variety of characters. The actors retreat to opposite sides of the stage for costume changes while also helping move furniture to ensure seamless scene changes. Cast members include Amir Abdullah, Devereau Chumrau, Kathleen M. Darcy, Catia Ojeda, Patrick Quinlan and Eamon Sheehan.
“I’m always interested in opening up things a bit,” she admits. “Alternate sexuality, different colors on stage and that sort of stuff. I hate this term ‘color blind.’ One of the things that made me really sad in the audition process for Brendan happened when one of the women was leaving. She stopped, turned around and came back to say, ‘I just want to thank you guys for having this role be African American because it doesn’t happen’ and then walked out. I almost wanted to cry because that shouldn’t be something that has to be said, you know what I mean? And yet it is the absolute truth.”
That decision opened a new opportunity for actress Chumrau, who plays Brendan’s potential new love interest. Kelly explains. “In working with Dev on the role, we were talking and she said, ‘You know this is weird for me because I’ve never played an ingénue,’ And she is perfectly ingénue, but she was just saying that for her, that’s not what she gets offered. That’s not the roles that are out there.”
Directing in Companies
Working with non-company members in a Banshee production gave Kelly an opportunity to stretch as a director.
McKerrin Kelly in the 2012 Blame the Clown Productions’ mounting of “The Snow Queen” at Fremont Theatre Centre.
“It’s been wonderful to work with a whole new group of people this time because even though it’s at Banshee, we have only one Banshee person in the show,” she offers. “So everybody is from outside, which was great because you have different people’s energies. One of the things about working in a company is you start to get to know each other’s toolbox, right? We all have our tools that we bring out. It’s both the good thing and the bad thing about having a company. You can put people in roles and know, ‘Oh, they can do that. They can do that.’ But very often as an actor, you don’t get stretched.”
Kelly is a theater company devotee and a former member of West Coast Ensemble, Theatre of Note, Syzygy Theatre Group and Neo Ensemble Theatre. While Theatre Banshee is her current home, she believes participating in more than one at a time.
“I understand the membership company idea and how it works,” she explains. “There’s something really great about belonging to a company, but there’s also crazy things. It’s like a family so you get the function and the dysfunction. I think it’s healthier to have more than one, so that you don’t ever get completely mono-focused and reliant on a single group of people, because that’s when the crazy starts, I’ve found. You wind up depending too much on one organization to fulfill your artistic life and that’s not fair. I’m interested in a lot of different things, and not every company is going to be able to do all that. We all work in different ways and that’s okay.”
To Kelly, the most fascinating part about directing is figuring out how to communicate with the actors individually so they get what they need. “Putting theater out there is hard enough, and I don’t think as artists we do the work when we are being abused, berated, overly controlled, left on our own, abandoned, having to deal with crazy narcissism…whatever it is. I feel my job is to provide a safe sandbox so that each person in the show can relax enough to start to do things that they may not have been able to bring out if they are in a defensive mode.”
McKerrin Kelly and Andrew Lehman in the 2009 Theatre Banshee production of “Macbeth.” Photo by Ralph Nelson.
But that also means the other production issues she’s dealing with must remain removed from the rehearsal room. “The ‘Oh, the set isn’t done’ or ‘we don’t have a space to rehearse’ or ‘so and so just screamed at so and so’ needs to stay outside. Sometimes that’s hard because you want to be able to share, and I’ve had to realize that directing is a very isolating position. You have to be willing to lead, which means you have to allow that separation and it can be tricky.”
What helped Kelly with a heavy tech-laden show like Brendan was working with an assistant director for the first time, Cameron J. Oro. She admits it was disconcerting at first because she was accustomed to doing everything herself. Oro showed up at their first meeting with a well-organized binder that threw her for a loop.
“I was like holy cow! What do I do?” she laughs. “That was our joke throughout the process. ‘Okay, I guess you can make that decision because your binder is prettier than mine!’ It was really great to be able to collaborate with somebody and let go of stuff. ‘Here, you take this chunk and work on this aspect.’ Like he did all the work in the cars for example. Letting someone else make a creative decision allowed me the space to be more creative in other areas. That and knowing it’s going to come back in a different and better way.”
Despite all the great directing gigs, and opportunities to explore works with new writers, Kelly says she wants to keep her own actor side nourished as well.
“I’ve never felt like when I’m directing a piece, ‘Oh, I want to do that role.’ That’s not something that occurs to me. But I do sometimes think, ‘Oh god. Nobody is going to think I’m an actor anymore. There’s a part of me that really needs that expression, too. It’s also much harder to get nowadays. I go back and forth. I love directing and it fulfills a very specific side of me, but it’s not all of me.”
As for future goals, she offers, “I just want to keep working on stuff that’s interesting and that I keep growing. I came to the conclusion years ago that I have to keep learning or someone’s going to pay!” She laughs. “Usually me. I always have to have something for my brain to keep sorting out.”
Brendan, Theatre Banshee, 3435 W. Magnolia Avenue Blvd., Burbank 91505. Fri-Sat 8 pm Sun 2 pm. Through Aug 18. Tickets: $20. www.theatrebanshee.org. 818-846-5323.
All Brendan production photos by Moses Umbeke.