If one is in the theater long enough they will be afforded the opportunity to assay texts, and sometimes roles, more than once. This often affords one the opportunity to fix mistakes made before. I first played in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost in the mid-90’s with Frank Farrell’s Shakespeare’s Herd, as “Holofernes” the pedant, and as a recent theater program graduate I confess I found much of the role over-my-head.

Fast forward to 2016 and got to play the lead, “Berowne,” in a black-box production in hollywood with the boundary-pushing Couerage Theater Company in a beautiful production directed by my good friend Ted Barton. It remains a highlight of my participation in Hollywood theater. Soon after, I learned it was added to the 2017 season at Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival, where Holofernes descended upon me again. It made so much more sense to me this time, and the play-within-the-play was particularly fun.