Hey everyone! My name is Caroline Hertz, and I'm a proud member of the recently graduated Princeton class of 2015. As this is my first summer as company member, it's been a wonderfully insane few weeks getting acclimated to the way things work here at PST. A little bit about me: Originally, I hail from a little semi-rural town in Virginia, and I've spent every summer for as long as I can remember doing theater in some capacity. At Princeton, I studied English and Theater - my acting thesis was Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive - and I plan to pursue a career in acting. In addition to my identity as an actor, I'm also an avid horseback rider and a poet. Back in Virginian horse country, I spend a lot of my time training horses and writing embarrassing Facebook poetry.
Now that we've closed our first show of the season - Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses - our company is eager to fully immerse ourselves in the equally splashy, ridiculous, and prim world of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. I have the absolute pleasure of playing both Mrs. Pierce (Henry Higgins's housekeeper) and Clara Eynsford-Hill. Early on in the process, I made the choice to vocally differentiate my characters by giving Mrs. Pierce a Scottish brogue. As a result, a huge part of my character work for both roles has been dialect-related. It's been an incredibly exacting and challenging process, but a very rewarding one as well!
When this summer comes to a close, I plan to take the next year or so for myself to prepare for MFA program auditions. It looks like I'll be working in theater administration in Philadelphia and using the weekends to audition for regional theater companies in the area. PST has been a fantastic transition between the world of college theater and the world of professional theater. Here within the walls of the Hamilton-Murray Theater, I'm learning all about how to be a member of a company of actors, how to budget myself on an actor's salary, and how to take care of my voice and body so that I can successfully carry out performances every weekend. And when, in a few short weeks, I officially enter the world of professional theater, I'll wear my experiences here at PST as a badge of honor.
Here's hoping that all of you are having a lovely, relaxing summer! See you at the theater,
-Caroline