The Birth of an Idea

Guest Post from Shanna Sartori

The Birth of an Idea

The first time I read, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ in high school, I fell in love with it. In college I never got the chance to do a full production of the show, but I worked on it whenever I had the chance, in acting classes and theatre festivals. My dear friend, Kate Dickson, was my partner in crime and together we would take on the roles of Cecily Cardew and Gwendolen Fairfax.

  After graduation, Kate and I moved to New York City together. After living here for almost five years, I thought it was finally time to make our dream a reality. I approached another KSC alumnus, Loring Griggs, who had directed me before and asked him if he would be interested in taking on the project. He was more than happy to agree and by the middle of January we had a fully cast show. ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ will be opening the first week in April at The Producer’s club in NYC.

A Theatre Company

 Kate and I decided to take things one step farther and not just produce and act in a show, but also form a theatre company. Loring had the idea of bringing, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ to KSC and work shopping it with the students. We all realized there’s a lot to be learned in between graduating and becoming an actor in a big city and we thought that through our show and a talk back we could share some of what we have learned post graduation. This is what gave us the idea of becoming a not for profit with our goal being just that.

 We are starting entirely from scratch so we launched an indiegogo campaign to help us raise the funds to produce this show. Our goal is to raise $3,000 and not even two weeks into our campaign we have raised almost half of that.

Shanna Sartori is a founding member of The Night Owl Players. We are following their progress as they start their New York Theatre Company. They have already reached over half of their indiegogo goal. You can check it out, here.