For a tight-knit community like Greenbelt, it’s always important to celebrate the accomplishments of neighborhood talent. Residents Ian Rogers, 49, and Zach Brewster-Geisz, 48, are actors working in the metro D.C. area. Both have known from early in their lives that they wanted to be actors.
Rogers started acting in his community theater as a youth and continued in college with student theater. He remarked, “I’ve always really liked Shakespeare. My college career was bookended by Hamlet in my first semester and by Romeo and Juliet in the final semester of my senior year.”
Brewster-Geisz started acting during his middle school years and then attended Colby College in Maine where he earned a performing arts degree. Later, he started working backstage in lights and sound until he started acting again at the Greenbelt Arts Center in a production of Henry IV, Part 1. He teaches at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts.
Brewster-Geisz said, “One of the first things I did out of my conservatory where I got my certificate in acting was working with Baltimore Shakespeare Factory on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And, the whole original practices thing was just a huge revelation to me. I’ve brought it into every production of Shakespeare I’ve done since, whether it’s been required or not.”
Rogers and Brewster-Geisz are actors in the Brave Spirits Theatre (BST) which is based in the Lab at Convergence in Alexandria, Va. BST professes to be built on the “backbone of verse and violence” and the “contrast of the elegance of poetry with the baseness of humanity.”
BST stages intimate productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries with a focus on feminist perspectives and female artists. It will become the first professional American theater company to do a full production of Shakespeare’s tetralogies (eight historical plays comprising two sets of four plays each) over the next two years.
In 2020, the theater will be presenting Shakespeare’s Histories: The King’s Shadow. With this they will be showcasing Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V.
Rogers will be playing John Falstaff in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. Brewster-Geisz has yet to make his BST debut.
“The thing that you don’t see when you go see the show is that all of these companies make the production team and the actors do a lot of text analysis. So, they work really hard on the verse and the words of the play and analyzing it and making sure we understand it and the meters of it,” said Rogers.
One of the many challenges of actors is not knowing your next show. Luckily, the pair say there are great motivators that keep them going.
“One of the reasons that I’ve pursued theater more than film or TV is just getting up in front of an audience and having that immediate connection. You don’t make the same connection with a camera. And so being in front of an audience, hearing them laugh, seeing them cry is always the hugest motivator, for me,” said Brewster-Geisz.
Though that isn’t where they perform, the Greenbelt Art Center (GAC) is one of the reasons that Rogers and his family moved to Greenbelt. “…The arts drew us to Greenbelt. And that’s why we’re here.” said Melissa Sites, Rogers’ wife, who has been on the Brave Spirits board for the past 3 years.
Rogers said that, like everyone else, the coronavirus has affected their productions. He said that they “deliberated and agonized… about what to do.” They had opened three out of the four plays they are doing this year, and were in dress rehearsals for the fourth, Henry V. They finally opted, after much group discussion, to go ahead and perform Henry V on opening night, March 14, with some press in attendance, but to cancel all the other shows and shut down with no decision yet on what will happen next. The pair said they were “thankful that we did manage to have public performances of all four plays (Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V). By July, they hope the four plays they did this year will return in marathon weekend performances. Rogers declared, “So it’s not over! We’re not done!”
In the meantime, they have been doing virtual rehearsals over Zoom, getting together via split screens to read through the plays. He said, “We have not yet figured out a way to bring something to the public virtually, but we’d like to!”