If acting is a gift, then some people are born to it, some achieve it - and some, like Jill Jackson, have it thrust upon them. As one of the most acclaimed performers on the Monterey Peninsula, Jill discovered her amazing gift almost against her will.

Young Jill

Her childhood passion was to become a folk rock recording star, an ambition that grew after she commandeered and taught herself to play her brother’s abandoned guitar. "I discovered I also had a voice. So I went to New York. I went to Nashville. But no record deals. It didn’t happen.

"I’d moved on - to Connecticut to work on a sheep ranch - yes, there are sheep ranches in Connecticut. Playing and singing with bands in little local clubs didn’t loom very high on my priority list.

"My brother Bucky and his new wife were on their honeymoon in the Adirondacks, and almost the minute I met her, she launched into this whole story about once being big into theatre and wanting to get back into it and how she would produce some play by Jane Martin with a part just written for me to do. Well, blah-blah-blah. She kept it up every time we met. . I didn’t even like theatre. Never really cared for it. . . So I’d just say, ‘Yeah, right, call me when you’re ready,’ meaning, basically, ‘Shut up.’

"Ten years later she came down to Sedona, Arizona, where I was then living, took me out to dinner and said she was now going to produce this play and would I do the part. As I was forming the word, ‘No,’ it was like the answer came down from above - and it came out, ‘Yes’ - and I thought, what have I done?"

The sister-in-law was - is - Elsa Con. The play was TALKING WITH at the Carl Cherry Center. And the role for Tennessee-born Jill was of a handler from a Southern religious snake handling sect.

One drawback emerged right away. A very successful computer graphics business was going to keep Jill in Arizona until a week before opening night. Yet almost from the beginning, she was aware of being taken over, of becoming what she now describes as "less of an actor than a channel."

To prepare for TALKING WITH, Jill went out into the desert and learned her lines. As she did so, she would be guided how to say them. There was a gift there inside, and her job, increasingly, seemed to be to learn how to get out of the way and let that gift operate. It’s a continuing process, marked by a sense of what she unhesitatingly labels "the God thing."

"I finally got to California, did the monologue for Elsa, and she said it was just what she wanted and, ‘Now I just have to block you into the show and get you a snake.’ She’d made a deal with that pet store in Northridge Mall. The first thing they showed me was this boa constrictor - huge! Lifted up its face and stuck out its fangs, and I said right away, ‘Have you got anything else?’ The girl then pulled out this three-foot-long ball python. They’re called that because their defense is to ball up. Well, it was this beautiful, beautiful creature, and we immediately connected - and I ended up buying it and taking it back with me to Arizona."

Jill as Julia Morgan

TALKING WITH consists of monologues by eleven women. The next hurdle was facing a company of major local actresses who’d had weeks of shared rehearsal. "There was Marlie Avant, there was Sandy Sidener and Jani Davis, there was Jennifer Forbes and Rosemary Luke and Nancy Kocher, and I don’t know who-all, but they were all thinking, ‘Well, she’s given one of the best monologues to this unknown who just happens to be her sister-in-law.’ Let’s say they were less than enthusiastic when I was told to stand up and do my piece for all of them. . . Well, within a few sentences they were laughing and totally accepting me."

Opening night of TALKING WITH produced in Jill an experience so profound that it has colored and determined the theatre work she has done since that moment. "At the end of this monologue I pull out the snake and I say these gorgeous lines, ‘If you’re empty, you’re gonna get bit.’ The lights went out and there was this dead silence - only it wasn’t. It was a live silence - that just thrilled me - and when the lights came up the applause just roared.

"That moment when the audience and the actor become one - share something that is common ground within all of us - when we go there together even for a moment, well, for me, that is a state of grace, and it is a divine experience, and that’s why I do theatre. "I knew right then I wanted to do this; I had to do this. I went back to Arizona and took four months closing my business and came back to California to pursue theatre."

After working with Carey Crockett in a play called CHASING COCKROACHES, Jill went the to Western Stage for WOODIE GUTHRIE’S AMERICAN SONG, where they gave her two or three solo songs and several roles - "and taught me theatre etiquette. Back in TALKING WITH, I hid Sandy Sidener’s boots - tee hee! She didn’t think that was one bit funny - and the Western Stage taught me you didn’t do things like that - or argue with the director. The basic do’s and don’ts of theatre. They were so good to me.

THE SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE

"I’ve been blessed in that most of the parts I’ve had I’ve been called and asked to do rather than having to audition. I really don’t know how to audition." One such role was the demanding olio of personalities - female and male - in Magic Circle’s production of Jane Wagner’s THE SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE.

"People I worked with in various shows like John Newkirk and Susan Keenan began asking, ‘When are you going to do your own one-woman show?’" The result was A LONG DRINK OF SILENCE - about Jill Jackson’s life but most of all about that moment when the audience and the actor become one - the God thing.

"I did it several times - at Sedona, here for the Carmel Performing Arts and then in San Francisco. What a glorious experience having Marlie Avant directing and editing. Early on, when I told her I was just going to do everything without any script, and in response to the kind of audience there was out there, she said, ‘Just how is the lighting person, for instance, going to work with that? Go downstairs and write me a script!’ I did - and then she rewrote and I found myself learning lines."

It was an important event for Jill and, apparently, for almost everyone who experienced the show. Two local reviewers both commented on the fact that, autobiographical as it all was, A LONG DRINK OF SILENCE is not ego driven. Writing in the Herald, Mary Barker called it "an almost two-hour look not so much at this brave, talented woman but at yourself." Coast Weekly described the evening as "less an attempt to explain herself than a generous invitation to let us in, to break down the self protective barriers which separate us."

ONE-EYED CHARLEY

Jill is emphatic about the importance for any show, but particularly a one-person event, to have a strong director preparing and crafting the material. "You need someone like Marlie - someone who’ll watch it and tell you what works and what doesn’t work. That’s been true of the stuff I am now doing in schools and clubs about Julia Morgan. It was important in the ONE-EYED CHARLEY show I’ve just finished with Kathy Jacobs. It’s important because I’ve never taken an acting lesson. People still have to give me theatre terms. With me it’s all gut and instinctual. . .

"Like that first day we did the read-through of LETTICE AND LOVAGE for Rosemary Luke, I hadn’t practiced the voice. I’d played with the lines and tried an accent, but that energy only kicked in when we were all there exploring the script together."

With the Magic Circle production of THE SHADOW BOX it didn’t happen till opening night. "The voice, the posture of that woman in the wheelchair, the arthritic hands - they all just were suddenly there. Three days earlier, Robin McKee had said, ‘Well, as soon as Jill gets her character, maybe we’ll have a show.’ When we were having notes after the first night final curtain, she said, ‘I’ve never seen any of that before. It looks like we do have a show.’"

"So - you learn your lines. You learn your blocking. You wait for it to happen - and you learn to depend on your body memory to carry you through the times it doesn’t happen."

But having it happen is what keeps the remarkable Jill Jackson working and waiting.

SYLVIA - Magic Circle Center for the Arts