With his open face and searching eyes, Pawel Szajda (pronounced PAH-vel SHY-dah) made an indelible impression on moviegoers in 2003's Under the Tuscan Sun. He played a young Polish contractor hired by an American woman (Diane Lane) to help restore a dilapidated house she'd acquired in Italy. Though he grew up in Farmington, Conn., Szajda is himself of Polish heritage—his parents moved to this country about 10 months before he was born—and Polish is his first language; he learned English in school and by watching television.
Szajda got involved in theatre in high school and at Massachusetts' Bridgewater State College, eventually transferring to Fordham University so he could pick up New York acting gigs between classes. Mostly he worked in commercials until landing the Tuscan Sun role. The three-and-a-half-month shoot in Italy was the equivalent of a semester of study abroad, he says, and he credits the film's director, Audrey Wells, with making his performance a success: "She was very good at focusing my excitement for the whole project into my role, and for that I am extremely grateful." Following Tuscan Sun, Szajda acted in two other features: the horror pic Venom, which was shot in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, and the unreleased indie Death Without Consent.
Now in the Fringe, Szajda will be taking his first New York theatrical bows in the drama The Infliction of Cruelty by Andrew Unterberg and Sean McManus. He plays Benjamin, the youngest son of a celebrated power couple, who has been excluded from a "cabal" formed by three older siblings guarding a smoldering family secret. Joel Froomkin directs.
During rehearsals for the play, Szajda faced the challenge of ratcheting his acting up from the level he uses for film work. "You can't be flailing around, indicating all your emotions to the audience," he says. "But you can't keep everything in your head, waiting for your close-up." Compared to his prior stage work in school, he says, rehearsals for Cruelty have been far more focused: "People don't come to rehearsals in their pajamas."
The Infliction of Cruelty will be performed Fri., Aug. 18, 4:45 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 20, 7:15 p.m.; Mon., Aug. 21, 7:15 p.m.; Fri., Aug. 25, 5 p.m.; and Sat., Aug. 26, 9:30 p.m., at the Players Theatre, 115 Macdougal St. Tickets: (212) 279-4488 or www.fringenyc.org. For more information, visit www.theinflictionofcruelty.com.
Julia Barnett has been acting since she was a kid back in Indianapolis. In New York she has worked on stage (Around the World in a Bad Mood), on prime-time television (Law & Order: Trial by Jury, Queens Supreme), and in daytime drama. But in the Fringe Festival's Modern Missionary, which she also wrote, she shares with the world a whole other part of her life—far from Manhattan casting offices and rehearsal studios.
In the mid-1990s, Barnett spent two years in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and southern Sudan, helping to train young singers in the African Children's Choir. Children accepted into the group—whose members are orphaned or otherwise disadvantaged—tour Europe and the United States giving concerts, after which they receive full scholarships for their education through college, with the understanding that they'll eventually return to aid their impoverished homelands.
"I think I learned more from Africa than I ever did in college," says Barnett. "Maybe more than I've learned in this crazy business that we're in. It's kind of set my mind in a lot of ways."
Not all the moments brimmed with uplift, however. AIDS had ravaged the lives of many families she met. And while she found her African hosts (especially the women) incredibly generous, Barnett also encountered widespread, unchecked corruption, including extortion and money-skimming. Her life was once threatened when she tried to blow the whistle on a particularly blatant offender.
Modern Missionary is a multimedia work that aims to bring photographs from Barnett's African sojourn to life. Andrew Garman directs, and Diane Neal (who plays the assistant district attorney on Law & Order: SVU) is producing. Barnett, part of a mixed-race cast of five that includes Gbenga Akinnagbe of HBO's The Wire, originally considered making Modern Missionary a solo show, but she quickly rejected that notion. "I'm a white girl. I can't tell the story of Africa," she says. "Some of the people I worked with are so interesting. They really needed to have [individual actors] playing them."
Barnett also undertook the project knowing she would give birth to her first child six weeks before opening night. This has proved challenging, but her newborn son, Zander, is already busy with his own career: At the age of 3 days, he appeared in his first commercial—for a babywear product.
The remaining performances of Modern Missionary are Fri., Aug. 18, 8 p.m.; Sat., Aug. 19, 4:30 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 20, 7 p.m.; and Tue., Aug. 20, 6:30 p.m., at Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St. Tickets: (212) 279-4488 or www.fringenyc.org. For more information, visit www.modernmissionary.net.
Before he started acting, Dave Toomey was a musician in bands that, according to his biography, "went nowhere beyond a dingy bar, severe hangovers, and jail time." When asked about his bad-boy past, Toomey concedes there's some tongue-in-cheek hyperbole there. Yes, he was arrested, but he didn't exactly shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die: Toomey and his bandmates had entered the back door of a condemned house to retrieve their instruments, and a neighbor, thinking they were burglars, called the cops.
But whether he's hard-boiled or over easy, in the Fringe production of The Devil and Billy Markham, Toomey gets to unleash a raunchy tale of hard livin' that might be heard in a rowdy roadhouse somewhere near a sulfurous swamp. The musical play is based on a six-part poem originally published in Playboy by Shel Silverstein—yes, the same author who wrote Where the Sidewalk Ends and other children's classics. Though many people aren't aware of the late writer's work for adults, he had a decidedly bawdy streak. "It's a pretty dirty story, when it comes down to it," says Toomey. "There's a lot of foul stuff going on."
Toomey hails from Lansing, Mich., where he saw a nonmusical version of Billy Markham at the BoarsHead Theatre and was struck by the simplicity of the staging and the potency of the storytelling. "My imagination went wild," he says. "I could see the different characters, the places. Everything was so distinct. I thought, 'That's really good theatre.' "
For his version, which is directed by Paul Urcioli, Toomey has set parts of the poem to his own bluesy score. He sings, plays guitar, narrates, and portrays all the characters, including both title roles. Toomey's natural speaking voice is a resounding baritone that one can easily imagine taking on diabolical shadings.
A 2004 graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Toomey formed Front Desk Productions with Jonathan Rossetti, whom he met when both were working the front desk of the Atlantic Theater. Billy Markham is the company's first major undertaking. "Ultimately it's just about giving ourselves work to do," Toomey says modestly, no hint of the devil in sight.
The remaining performances of The Devil and Billy Markham are Fri., Aug. 18, 5 p.m., and Sun., Aug. 20, 12:45 p.m., at the Henry Street Settlement's Recital Hall, 466 Grand St. Tickets: (212) 279-4488 or www.fringenyc.org. For more information, visit www.frontdeskproductions.org.