photo by Nick Hovick

"My mother used to say, ‘I don’t know where it all came from,’" says actress Deborah Curtis. Meaning an acting talent that has led to major roles for Deborah at local theatres in the past three years but which began to show itself a lot earlier than that. "From childhood, I just seemed to take on the role of family story-teller and family entertainer around the dinner table.

"My mom knew where my sister got her painting talent. That was from my grandfather on my mother’s side. He was a well-known photographer and artist in the Philippines where she was born and brought up. But I seem to be the first known stage performer on either side of my family.

"Theatre became really important to me when I was at Olympic High in Bremerton, Washington, where my father was stationed in the Navy. My high school English teacher figured that having us perform scenes would keep us from being bored with our assigned English lit books. So we did parts of things like JULIUS CAESAR and OF MICE AND MEN in class. If you brought your own costume or props you earned extra credit."

From classroom literature scenes it was a short but important step to the Olympic High theatre stage, first as a backstage trainee, then out front in a play called JEREMY JACK. "It was about a turtle," Deborah explained when we talked at a corner table at Starbucks in Sand City. "I was Witch Hazel. Not really a baddy. Just a nice witch but very confused. We toured local elementary schools with the show and they seemed to like it. We figured if you could keep that elementary audience’s attention, you could do it with any audience anywhere."

A possibly bigger step was moving from daffy Witch Hazel in a fairy tale play to the Brit posturing and badinage of PRESENT LAUGHTER. Still in high school, Deborah took on the role of the worldly-wise secretary, Monica, in PRESENT LAUGHTER. "I love doing Noel Coward. I later played Sorel in HAY FEVER at a theatre in Burien near Seattle. It gives you a nice workout getting the timing and doing the British dialect.

"I’ve done a lot more comedy than drama. Serious drama, in fact, is my current challenge. When I was doing my theatre arts degree, I was assigned some heavy dramatic scenes. But the profs always seemed to rack their heads trying to figure out the unusual slant I put on tragic scenes and characters. It wasn’t done on purpose, but I guess the difference may have had something to do with all my work in comedy."

BUS STOP - Unicorn Theatre

The theatre arts degree was at the University of Washington, near the family home in Bremerton where Deborah‘s father, a Naval officer, was stationed. "I started out a pre-med major with a minor in theatre. But after two years of hating every minute of med school, I surprised my parents by switching that minor to a major. They just had to get used to saying, ‘My daughter the actress’ when they might have been happier saying, ‘My daughter the doctor.’

"I worked at a lot of theatres around Washington. There was summer stock at a place called Kingston. We did THE MISER, which introduced me to Moliere, then a play called SQUABBLES. That show gave me a chance to work with older actors from the area. The lead character was my father, a retired New York taxi driver who comes to live with me and my husband. The man who played the part was a former New York City taxi driver, which I guess is what you’d call type casting."

SQUABBLES also marked a change from what Deborah characterizes as "girl-friend" to "wife" roles. Her mother had to do some adjusting. "The night she and Dad came to the show, she said, ‘Why did you keep kissing that man?’. . . ‘Because we were supposed to be married, Mom.’ I guess she was still having trouble not seeing me as her little girl!"

I HATE HAMLET - Magic Circle Theatre

Deborah took on a real-life wife role when she married a fellow actor, Cade Curtis, in Los Angeles in 2002. When Cade was transferred that same year to the Defense Language Institute, he and Deborah moved to Pacific Grove, and Cade became too busy for theatre or anything besides learning to read and speak Mandarin. While he studied at DLI, Deborah auditioned, beginning with the Western Stage, where she was cast in A CHRISTMAS CAROL and more recently in TARTUFFE. Her gift for comedy led to work at Magic Circle, first in DON’T DRESS FOR DINNER and then I HATE HAMLET, both in 2002.

Her upcoming assignment at the Western Stage will be the October production of THE WAITING ROOM. "It’s a dark comedy that takes up the issues of women’s health and how women have been treated through history - by their husbands and by society in general. It looks at ways that stereotyping of women has affected the way they live." Six different roles will extend the work with dialects that began in high school with PRESENT LAUGHTER. In THE WAITING ROOM she’ll be, among others, a Jamaican nurse, an Irish Victorian housemaid, and a Chinese servant - with some home dialect coaching from Cade.

While THE WAITING ROOM is still up, she'll have her first crack at Chekhov, when she starts rehearsals for Dunyasha in THE CHERRY ORCHARD. "She struts around a lot, boasting how high class she is, but there's really not much upstairs."

Deborah’s forays into serious drama reached a turning point recently when she was cast in THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES at the Carl Cherry Center. "Each year in February the author allows theatre companies to do two nights only of the play without paying royalties, but only on the condition that all proceeds go to some charity that’s related to women’s health or welfare. We were a benefit for the Monterey Rape Center. One of the monologues I was assigned to do was an Eastern European woman who had been raped in Sarajevo. When the director gave it to me, I said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this. Where do I go to relate this to my own experience, when I’ve never had to face that kind of violence and horror?’ She helped me through, and doing it opened me up to new ways of thinking about my theatre work.

TARTUFFE - The Western Stage photo by Richard Green

"The way I prepare a role has evolved, really. When you’re just starting you just keep asking the director to show you what he or she wants. But as you gain experience, you realize you also have to do a lot of it on your own. I try to go internal - ask what there is in my own life that connects with this event or emotion in a way that will then connect for an audience. If it’s something I can’t relate to from my own experience, I try to look for it in other people.

"In a play I did in Southern California called THE NERD, for instance, I used my mother in creating the character I played. I didn’t tell her that till much, much later!. . . But you don’t study people for a character so you can mock or make fun of them. It’s a kind of compliment, I think, that you want to watch them and learn what moves them. . . A director once said, ‘Actors steal from everyone’ and I think that’s true.

"Working the counter here at Starbucks or in my other job at Garden Road Fitness Center means some people open up to you, tell you their stories. You piece together different elements that help you prepare a role. A big part of acting is learning to be a good listener.

"And of course there is study and research, especially in a period play. In TARTUFFE at the Western Stage, Jeff Heyer brought things about seventeenth century etiquette into rehearsals, especially the language of the fan. Learning that, you realize you could signal messages in public places without saying a word - talk to a lover while you were standing beside your husband and he’d never suspect what was going on. Using the language of the fan became fun for the cast and, even though the audience had no idea what it was all about, we did it in performance. It gave us something to play with and made the action of the play seem more authentic.

TEMPTATION - Staff Player's Repertory Theatre

"To me, one really important thing is to help an audience to connect. I did TEMPTATION at the Indoor Forest recently. A lot of the political background was really foreign to local people. But in the final scene, my character comes on as Ophelia in HAMLET. And the twelve-year-old son of one of the volunteers popped up excitedly and said, 'She ought to play the girl from LORD OF THE RINGS 2.' It’s a movie I’ve never seen, but I was really happy to think that there had been a way that kid could connect to the action on stage, if only at a pop-culture level . And so much so, in that case, that he brought some friends back with him and saw the play a second time."

One unrealized ambition for Deborah Curtis is to be on on stage with her husband Cade. "We’ve done practice scenes, but that’s all. I can’t wait for us to do a show together, but I guess that has to wait. He wants to get out of the military, but then he wants to realize a lifelong dream of learning Japanese. When he’s done that, he’ll either go into teaching or business. Maybe we’ll end up in Japan. . . ‘Lost in Translation’ is about Americans in Tokyo, isn’t it? But that’s another movie I have yet to see."