Who says actors can't make a living outside of L.A. or New York? True, there's often more money to be made in these industry hubs, especially if your career goal involves being at the center of the media universe. But actors are virtually everywhere. If you're talented, flexible, and dogged enough in your pursuit of opportunities, you can live in any of the nation's top 20 markets and probably enjoy the kind of career that performers on the coasts can only dream of.
Back Stage caught up with seven actors working outside New York and L.A. — specifically Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Milwaukee; Ashland, Ore.; San Francisco; Atlanta; and Nashville, Tenn. — to learn about how they make lives and careers for themselves. Now and then some must supplement their acting income with more-traditional work, but in the main they're living, working, and thriving well beyond the coastal orbits. Not only are they content to be big fish in more-modest ponds, but at times they work even more than the rest of us. It certainly beats swimming endlessly upstream.
Home Is Where the Work Is
What Naomi Jacobson loves about her life in the Washington, D.C., theatre community is coming home to her husband, actor John Lescault, at the end of the day. "We aren't separated for six to eight months a year like theatre couples we know in New York," she says, noting that she also cherishes their comfortable three-bedroom house, built on a hill near Sligo Creek Park in Silver Spring, Md. "Our mortgage is $1,000 a month, and we have the tax advantages that come with ownership."
Jacobson spoke to Back Stage during a break in rehearsals for an Arthur Miller festival at Arena Stage, where Jacobson is an affiliated artist. The two-play repertory of Death of a Salesman and A View From the Bridge runs through May 18, and her stature in the community is revealed by her casting as Beatrice in View. According to Molly Smith, Arena's artistic director, Jacobson was the natural choice: "Naomi is an actress with a great range and depth." As testament to Smith's assessment, when the nominations for this year's Helen Hayes Awards were announced in February, Jacobson's name was called twice, the seventh and eighth nominations of her career — four for supporting actress and four for lead. She also knows what it's like to win: In 1995 she took the honor for best supporting actress in a resident play for her performance as Pola in Heather McDonald's Dream of a Common Language at Theater of the First Amendment, the professional company at George Mason University in nearby Fairfax, Va.
Of course, all reputations are earned, and Jacobson has paid her dues. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Santa Barbara, Calif., she earned an MFA from Temple University in 1982 and spent most of the next five years in Los Angeles, acting in plays, films, and television before accepting an offer from Peter Frisch, then artistic director of D.C.'s New Playwrights' Theater. Her one-year contract obligated her to work as casting director, literary manager, and educational director, but it also introduced her to the stage manager — Lescault — who'd relocated 10 years earlier from Massachusetts to study theatre at Catholic University.
The relationship that developed between them derailed Jacobson's plans to try her luck in New York. And although she auditioned regularly in those early D.C. days, she had trouble getting cast, partly due to competition from more-established area performers. As a professional, Jacobson has always been, she says, "a character actress — never a Juliet, never an ingénue." Her breakthrough, she says, came in 1991, when Howard Shalwitz, artistic director of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, saw her perform in Arthur Schnitzler's Anatol at the Washington Stage Guild. After just two productions with Woolly Mammoth, Shalwitz invited her to join the company. "The women who were my competition were the same ones who threw my bridal shower," Jacobson says. "I believe that the roles I was meant to have will find me. If I don't get cast, others will, and it opens up time for me for other opportunities."
With more than 60 productions on her résumé, Jacobson did indeed find those opportunities, performing in New York, Chicago, and beyond, often at the invitation of directors she first met in D.C. Although registered with local casting offices, she continues to network and doesn't have representation. She supplements her theatre income with occasional film and TV work, voiceovers, teaching, and coaching of actors and corporate clients. For his part, Lescault moonlights as a narrator for the Talking Books program of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped at the Library of Congress and narrates audio books for commercial clients, working out of a soundproof booth in their basement. Jacobson and Lescault have also recorded a book together and have occasionally shared a stage.
Supplementing her acting with teaching, Jacobson tells students, "If you're seeking fame and glamour, go to L.A. or New York. But you can have a meaningful life and work steadily in secondary cities."
— Barbara Gross
Where the Windy City Takes Him
"Is theatre my full-time job? Heavens, no!" exclaims Chicago-based actor Anthony Fleming III. "I can't imagine an actor in Chicago who makes a living at it." But Fleming comes about as close as any actor can in this theatre-rich city. With a 7-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son, however, Fleming, 29, has other concerns; he can't afford to just scrape by. In a way, his response reflects the old saw that actors don't become rich and famous in Chicago but can if they're from Chicago — especially if they amass enough credits at, say, Steppenwolf, Lookingglass, and Victory Gardens to open the doors of casting directors on the coasts.
In his 10 years as a professional actor, Fleming has amassed those credits, though he admits he hasn't knocked on the doors. After spending some time in L.A. following a West Coast tour of Lookingglass Theatre Company's Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession, he decided that L.A. was "just not for me," he says. "I'm a Chicago boy. I can work here, there are great stories to be told here, and I've been able to work with wonderful artists here."
Most recently he worked with director Loy Arcenas in Carlyle Brown's A Big Blue Nail, a play about Robert Peary and Matthew Henson's 1909 expedition to the North Pole, with Fleming as Henson. He started working as an actor, mostly in leads, after just a year of training at Columbia College Chicago, followed by studies at the Piven Theatre Workshop — whose alumni include John and Joan Cusack, Aidan Quinn, and Jeremy Piven — and the Actors Gymnasium, which offers training in physical theatre and circus arts. Fleming joined Actors' Equity seven years ago, SAG and AFTRA five years ago.
Against conventional wisdom, Fleming has had no classical training; he doesn't take classes, attend general auditions, or have prepared monologues. Yet he books enough weeks to qualify for Equity health insurance for himself and his son (his daughter's coverage comes through his ex-wife). And he often works above scale at companies operating under the Chicago Area Theatres Agreement.
But back to Fleming's opening comment, for he does, from time to time, have to supplement his income. "I've never been a waiter, but I've been a bike messenger for six or seven years," he admits. "I used to work 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. three or four days a week, but now I just work seasonally during the warm weather. They know I'm the messenger who's an actor." Even then Fleming's talent shines through: He got his first — and so far only — TV break delivering a message to a casting associate on Prison Break, then parlayed a nameless one-line role into a character named Trumpets, who appeared in seven episodes.
Like most Chicago actors, Fleming usually books his own theatre jobs and relies on his agent for film, TV, and commercial work — mainly voiceovers — though he admits he doesn't pursue such work as eagerly as he might: "Theatre is my focus; it's what I love to do. My agents hate me." But because of his children, he says, "I can't just drop everything and go out to L.A. for pilot season."
While Fleming's professional practices may be unorthodox and even self-limiting, you'll rarely meet an artist more content with his work or more practical about the roller coaster of professional acting. "Sometimes it's feast or famine," he says. "When it's a feast, you try to sock it away.... You gotta with kids."
Fleming shares a floor-through three-bedroom apartment with his longtime girlfriend and son in Chicago's Albany Park, a Northwest Side neighborhood considered stable and safe, for $900 a month. That's a few hundred dollars below market — his girlfriend's aunt and uncle own the building. And while the couple owns a car, Fleming often uses his trusty bicycle or public transportation to get around.
As for his immediate future, he has agreed to spend two weeks in Orlando, Fla., and Dallas doing a live industrial, followed by a likely summertime gig with Lookingglass, which is remounting its highly physical signature piece Lookingglass Alice. After that, he's considering joining a West Coast tour of adapter-director Mary Zimmerman's The Arabian Nights. All in all, it's Fleming's blue-collar approach to theatre that guides him: "You pick up your lunch pail, go to work, and tell the story."
— Jonathan Abarbanel
In Good Company
Getting ready to play Nell in Samuel Beckett's Endgame, Laura Gordon is spending a lot of time in a garbage can these days. That may explain the neatness of her bungalow home on the day we visited, but we suspect it's always this way. Old oak woodwork, cut flowers on a table, the sun streaming in on one of the first above-freezing days in a while — Gordon's home away from the stage radiates quiet suburban comfort.
It's the kind of comfort that comes from being a member of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's resident acting company for 15 years. "Jonathan and I have been very fortunate," Gordon says, referring to husband Jonathan Smoots, a company member at American Players Theatre, a classical company in Spring Green, Wis., about two and a half hours away. "We've been able as a couple to have someone working almost all the time," she says, "and we've been able to have this nice, comfortable, not extravagant, middle-class homeowner kind of existence that I really never thought was possible when I started out."
After studying speech as an undergraduate in Texas, Gordon earned an MFA in acting at the University of Iowa. From the start, she says, her focus was on the stage: Her dream was to act in regional theatre, ideally as part of a company, preferably doing the classics. "It's sort of amazing that it all actually happened," she says.
Not right away, of course. After a yearlong spot with a small Ohio company where the members did everything, Gordon worked around the Midwest, basing herself in Chicago. As a non-Equity actor, she found that jobs in Milwaukee paid far better than those in Chicago — $300 a week then versus $75 a week — allowing her to avoid a day job when enough acting work was available. So she began gravitating north regularly, returning during the summer to the Wisconsin Shakespeare Festival in Platteville, where she'd worked as a grad student. It was there she met Joe Hanreddy, who'd just been named artistic director of Madison Repertory Theatre. She did a few shows for Hanreddy, and a few years later read for a role in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, Hanreddy's first show as head of the Milwaukee Rep.
"I auditioned my ass off," Gordon recalls, and apparently it worked: In addition to Lughnasa, she was cast in four other Rep shows that season. While no formal agreement has ever been made, she's been considered a member of the resident company ever since. That means that in exchange for a guaranteed number of workweeks per season — typically 25 to 35 — Gordon and the other company actors make themselves available for all Rep shows. While not paid a salary — they are only paid for the weeks they work — they get their health insurance through Equity and can pursue additional work that doesn't conflict with the Rep's schedule. Gordon prefers to remain private about her salary but does say she is paid well above the Equity minimum assigned to the Rep's space (a LORT B theatre), which is $750 per week.
Over the years, Gordon has acted in such meaty classical roles as Elizabeth in Mary Stuart and Olivia in Twelfth Night and choice contemporary parts like Sister Aloysius in Doubt, Nancy in Frozen, and Margrethe in Copenhagen. She's also participated in the development of new work, including plays by Steven Dietz and Jeffrey Hatcher.
Company work is hard, to be sure, often involving performing a show at night while rehearsing another during the day. But, Gordon says, it's also rewarding — acting with people you know well and having input into the theatre's artistic direction. "The reason we've been able to get by in this business is due in large part to our living pretty frugally," she says. "We live within our means. We have a budget. We don't carry any credit card debt."
There was an early moment when Gordon contemplated moving to New York — mainly "for a boy," she admits — but she decided against it. And despite the occasional pang of "What if?," she says she has no regrets. "I had the perception that I wasn't pursuing an acting career unless I went to a coast. I wondered if I was trying to live this big-fish-in-a-small-pond existence.... [But] I never had a desire to be a star, the desire for fame or to make a ton of money. I just wanted to do the work, and I wanted to work on stage. The company has afforded me the luxury to do that."
— Paul Kosidowski
Contract Work
Vilma Silva, born in San Francisco, says she's a big-city girl, but she also loves her life in bucolic Ashland, Ore., in the isolated Rogue River Valley. She arrived in 1995 with her graphic-illustrator husband, having been offered a contract with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival after two auditions. Three years later, after Silva's husband stopped commuting back to the Bay Area and began working from home, they bought a new three-bedroom, two-bath house that's a short walk to OSF. Silva thinks they wouldn't be able to afford a home in Ashland now, with prices rising despite the national real estate slump. (A three-bedroom, two-bath house in Ashland was recently offered on Craigslist for $379,000; a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment goes for about $600 a month.)
At OSF, actors are offered annual contracts of various lengths. Rather than audition, they read the plays chosen for the following season and have a 15-minute interview with Artistic Director Bill Rauch to discuss their casting preferences. Silva has received a contract every year since her first one; this season she's been hired for mid-March through October and will play Emilia in Othello and Beatrice in A View From the Bridge.
OSF actors also pool their money and invite casting directors from elsewhere to see them perform. That's how Silva landed roles at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville and TheatreWorks in the Bay Area, among others. When CDs are unable to come to Ashland, Silva remains dogged: She won a role with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company by auditioning on tape.
The Ashland actors form a cohesive community. "You already know and trust" the other artists, Silva says. "You've been through certain experiences together, like particularly tough shows. You run the gamut from terror to despair together." Relationships like that deepen the acting.
Other advantages of living in Ashland include opportunities for artistic growth, such as performing everything from Shakespeare to Greek tragedy to new work in repertory; training in text, speech, and movement; and the chance to watch eight or nine shows a year.
Connecting to patrons is an added bonus. Ashland is a tourist destination centered on OSF, but local townspeople also attend the shows. "It's wonderful — except for when it's 11:30 at night and you've got half your makeup off, and all you want to do is buy a packet of Oreos and a quart of milk, and somebody wants to talk to you about the show," says Silva, adding that Ashland's only supermarket closes at midnight. "There are people who come back year after year and have seen your body of work and want to talk about what you're in now," she says. "Most of the time I really love that."
Of course, Ashland doesn't offer the kind of supplemental acting work that big cities do. Silva has shot one film in town and has no agent. But the cost of living is low enough that she can afford to live on a stage actor's salary — with no kids, a working husband, and two dogs. She's happy puttering in her garden and working on home improvement projects but relishes trips to Seattle and Portland, where she can see lots of films — Ashland has only one cinema.
— Jean Schiffman
Heart's in San Francisco
Danielle Levin, who moved to San Francisco on a whim in 1999 after graduate school at the University of Chicago, feels she's on the cusp of...something. She joined Equity last summer, has been making ends meet through acting alone for the past eight months, and has appeared in four plays at nonprofit theatres in the last nine months. The Bay Area is known for its new and experimental theatre, and Levin works in that genre as well as in classics and musicals. Over the years, she's appeared in plays as varied as the new musical Emma (at TheatreWorks in the Silicon Valley) and Lisa D'Amour's avant-garde Anna Bella Eema (at San Francisco's Crowded Fire Theater Company). Young-looking, she considers herself a perky, headstrong ingénue type and is just starting to get cast in the 30s age range.
The Greater Bay Area has about 400 theatres of various sizes, offering everything from Equity contracts to travel stipends to nothing at all, including several LORT theatres and the occasional commercial production. Industrials are fairly plentiful; films, commercials, and TV work not so much. While Levin thinks of herself mostly as a stage actor, she's had a local agent for a long time and has appeared in a few films. She has also toured schools and libraries with the literary troupe Word for Word, which she regards as one of her best acting experiences ever.
Levin tries to keep her face in front of industry decision-makers as much as possible, going to general calls as well as auditions for individual shows, keeping 10 to 20 monologues at the ready, and calling casting directors when she hears of a show she wants to audition for. "It doesn't always work, but it doesn't hurt to ask," she says. She attends opening nights to interact with the community and often joins an informal group of theatre folk — actors, directors, and casting directors — who meet monthly at a Berkeley pub to drink beer, shoot pool, and schmooze. She regularly checks the Equity hotline and the website of Theatre Bay Area, the local service organization, and she's careful to keep up her skills: Currently, for example, she's reading plays for high school kids as part of a young writers' workshop sponsored by the Magic Theatre.
For all of this industriousness, life in the Bay Area comes at a price: It's notoriously expensive, with gas at $3.69 a gallon and rising and rents sky-high. Levin shares an apartment in the trendy, funky Mission District with three nonactors. She pays $665 a month for her small room, plus $50-$60 for her share of utilities, all of which is a bargain: Studio apartments go for more than $1,000 a month. Some of her actor friends keep costs down by belonging to artists' collectives.
As for other expenses, Levin avoids restaurants, often brings her own lunch to rehearsals, and splurges on lattes only occasionally. "I know where to get a cheap sandwich," she boasts. She also lives near BART, the Bay Area underground transit system, and takes it as often as possible to avoid dealing with the lack of street parking near her home.
While waiting for her next gig to materialize, Levin plans her career. She's one of 30 actors accepted into Theatre Bay Area's ATLAS (Advanced Training Leading Actors to Success) program, which offers classes in finance, applying for grants, marketing, and networking as well as a career mentor, all for $200. She hopes to be one of five participants to receive a $2,500 award from the organization to implement the first stage of the career business plan she's currently writing. In return, Levin would promise to stay in the Bay Area until April 2009.
A passionate stage actor, Levin has considered moving to New York but thinks she'd be happier in a smaller market like Chicago. Still, while the work keeps coming, she's thrilled to be in San Francisco. "This community is so small, there are only about two degrees of separation between people," she says. "You don't get the cutthroat competition here. We're helping each other out. That's what I love about the Bay Area."
— Jean Schiffman
Eight Days a Week
At 8 o'clock almost any night in the Atlanta area, you'll find Chris Kayser on stage — one week playing the father in Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice at the Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre, the next appearing in the Goldoni farce The Servant of Two Masters at Georgia Shakespeare.
Kayser's credits in the past year include 12 shows at six theatres: Scrooge in two versions of A Christmas Carol; the title role in Will Eno's Thom Pain (based on nothing); Edgar Degas in Wesley Middleton's Degas' Little Dancer (opposite his daughter, Noelle); five Georgia Shakespeare shows, including Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses; the world premiere of Olivier Coyette's Voir un Ami Pleurer (To See a Friend Cry), an American-French-Belgian commission by the French-language Théâtre du Rêve; David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross; and Motti Lerner's Hard Love, with rehearsals and even performances often overlapping. Next, Kayser heads into the teeth of Georgia Shakespeare's summer repertory, appearing in As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice (as Shylock), and All's Well That Ends Well. He's kept this kind of schedule for more than two decades, he says, and because he's such a familiar face in Atlanta, he rarely has to audition anymore.
But this wasn't always his life. The lanky former tennis pro, now 58, was in his early 20s when the theatre grabbed him. His then girlfriend, also an actor, was working in dinner theatre, and when her leading man quit on the eve of rehearsals, the director — who was angry and desperate enough — drafted Kayser, hoping the couple's chemistry would read on stage. That was 1977. Today Kayser is still acting. The woman, he thinks, is in New York politics.
In 1982, Kayser was chosen for the Academy Theatre's resident company, which he considers his big break. That made him a full-time actor, doing an entire season of shows as well as writing, teaching, directing, and taking company workshops. The Academy's gruff artistic director, the late Frank Wittow, scoffed at actors with L.A. or New York on their minds, Kayser says, because he considered them sellouts. At the time, Kayser didn't agree. "Once you reached that tipping point," he says, "you got to spend all of your best hours, all of your best energy every day doing theatre."
Yet New York never called to him, nor did films. "It always seemed wonderful that I could pursue the theatre in my hometown," he says. "If I thought that I was shooting myself in the foot artistically and couldn't do excellent work here, I would feel like I had to leave. But I don't feel like that at all." He's been through Atlanta theatre's leaner times, including a span when the Alliance was the only Equity house in town and actors, to survive, would change their names to work elsewhere, a practice Kayser calls "soul-killing." He's also been a carpenter, a waiter in a Greek restaurant, an Ed Sullivan imitator, and once wore a foam tomahawk to an Atlanta Braves game for $100. But those kinds of jobs are pretty much old news. He still spends part of each Monday caring for an older neighbor — doing errands and yard work and walking her dog for pay — and says he and his wife, Terry, have managed a good life in Decatur, an Atlanta suburb, where she owns and operates a ballet school and runs a high school dance program. It's also where son Jacob, 19, is a college freshman, and Noelle, 17, is in high school and an aspiring ballerina.
Having paid off their small home in February, the Kaysers continue to live what he calls "a sort of lifelong austerity program" — modest cars, modest vacations. The exception came in 1991, when Kayser played Bonejacker #2 opposite Anthony Hopkins and Mick Jagger in the film Freejack. The shoot lasted 10 weeks and his one line was cut, but Kayser got a lot of face time "and made a ridiculous amount of money." He took the summer off and the family to Myrtle Beach, S.C.
For most of his career, Kayser's "season" has been bookended by Christmas Carols and the rep at Georgia Shakespeare. Usually, he says, he needs only three shows — one in the fall, one in the winter, one in the spring — to work 52 weeks a year (Equity once totaled his annual workweeks at 54). He's played the title character in Shakespeare's Richard II and Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, roles he considers milestones. Not bad for a guy who believed he'd have some sort of artistic life — without knowing what shape it would take — even when he was chasing tennis balls at the Atlanta Athletic Club in the late 1970s.
"I'm so not tired of it," Kayser says. "I want to keep going into my 70s — another 10, 12 years for sure, and maybe beyond."
— Kathy Janich
He's Driven
Brian Webb Russell is doing something rare: He's sitting still. It's not that he hates to sit for interviews. It's just that a vital component of his success in three decades as a regional actor is that he's usually on the move. "Some actors...tend to wait for work to come to them. I try to be as proactive as I can," Russell says. "I can't afford that mentality that says, 'I'll just wait to see what [they're] doing this season, go down to the general audition, and see if they want me for anything.' "
One way that Russell stays proactive is by driving to auditions as much as possible — whether at Kentucky Repertory Theatre, Indiana Repertory Theatre, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, or elsewhere. "It's always been an idea of mine to use Nashville as the center or hub of the wheel," he says. "I'm within five hours' driving time or less of at least eight regional theatres. Plus there's enough work for me here that justifies living in Nashville.
"I'm lucky in Nashville that I'm one of those actors that has the ability to work in the Equity venues," Russell adds. "This year I will have worked in all six venues that offer Equity contracts here" — Tennessee Repertory Theatre, Nashville Children's Theatre, Nashville Shakespeare Festival, Actors Bridge Ensemble, People's Branch Theatre, and Naked Stages. "So I feel fortunate that I've made the contacts in town that afford me a comfortable living. It's not grand. When you're working on an SPT [Small Professional Theatre] contract, for instance, you're not making a whole lot of money, but you are working."
What helps, he says, is Nashville's low cost of living compared to L.A. and New York, and the fact that he's single and frugal: "Every show I do, I try to lay back a certain amount of money to my savings."
His out-of-town trips — from the relatively nearby Arkansas Repertory Theatre to Germany's Theatre Magdeburg, whose Das Treffen: The Other Side, a 2005 co-production with Tennessee Rep, was performed by casts in the United States and Germany and broadcast to each theatre via satellite — only make his Nashville residency richer, he says: "I learn, and I come out of those experiences refreshed, recharged, and ready to dive back into the fray here."
The 50-year-old Elizabethtown, Ky., native graduated from Morehead State University with a degree in theatre in 1980. His acting there brought him to the attention of Michael Edwards, then artistic director of Nashville's Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre. "It was a decent living at the time because of the touring you'd do," Russell says. "You'd get about 10 months or so out of two shows with Chaffin's."
His first few summers as a professional actor, however, were spent at Indiana's Shawnee Summer Theatre. During his second summer there, he met director Karen Libman, who later gave Russell the chance to play Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and two roles in The Comedy of Errors at the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival on the campus of Michigan's Grand Valley State University, where Libman teaches.
All of which is to say that Russell networks exceptionally well. For example, he was cast in a 2007 production of Neil Simon's Chapter Two at American Stage Theatre Company in St. Petersburg, Fla., because Todd Olson, the company's producing artistic director, had worked with him at Tennessee Rep when Olson was its associate artistic director. "Brian is quick, smart, and the kind of ensemble-friendly collaborator every artistic director looks for," Olson says. "He is versatile, generous, hard-working, and the kind of out-of-town actor that local audiences remember and ask, 'When is Brian coming back?' "
Chapter Two's director was David Grapes, director of the University of Northern Colorado's School of Theatre Arts and Dance, who was Tennessee Rep's producing artistic director from 1999 to 2004. "As an artistic director, I found Brian not only to be a multitalented and highly versatile stage actor but also a consummate professional," Grapes says. "Brian always set a positive example for every cast with which he worked. He has a marvelous rapport with both his fellow actors and the audience."
Russell, for his part, plans to keep it going. "I've never really thought about doing anything else," he says. "It's never felt wrong. I've been extremely lucky. But along with that luck I've worked hard, and I'll continue to do so."
— Evans Donnell