Rob Foster is part of Unicorn Theatre and he is part of what provides the specialness of Unicorn. He joined them originally as a graphic artist with the hope of eventually learning more about the world of theatre and he has -- as an actor, playwright and graphic artist, and with assorted stage tasks.

Rob spent his first 28 years in the small town of Orosi near Visalia in the agricultural flatland called the San Joaquin Valley. He attended The College of the Sequoias in Visalia where he peripherally got involved with theatre without being enrolled in class. He majored in English and Journalism and did editorial cartooning on the school newspaper. Drawing cartoons came naturally to him; as a child he had always drawn, doodled, and cartooned. Next he went for a short while (until his money ran out) to Fresno State College. He didn't care for it and met a lot of "undeservedly arrogant" people. He primarily lived at the college newspaper, doing editorial cartoons, movie reviews, opinion pieces, and "not a lick of theatre."

After leaving Fresno State College he found a job, doing magazine graphics for a computer firm in Fresno. He stayed four years, quit, was unemployed and doing odd jobs for two and a half years, and then landed his first legitimate newspaper job at the Merced Sun-Star designing advertising. He stayed two years, grew to loathe the place, and so, to get out of Merced, he took a job that he really didn't want (since it was similar to his last job) at a Marin County newspaper. This turned out to be part-time with very low wages, so he "painfully repacked and drove back to Orosi to live again in my mother's house." He felt he had failed miserably in the outside world. But immediately he found a graphics job at The Visalia Times-Delta as a typesetter. He stayed there two years, then in 1992 he read about a job at the Monterey Peninsula Herald. Six months after he was hired Scripps Howard bought the Herald. He was one of the employees who was fired in the transition. He returned as a temporary employee and eventually ended up working full time again. The latest transition of the Herald is to new owners Knight-Ridder, as Rob describes them "notorious union-busters."

After he was at the Herald for a while, Rob started the "Over The Edge" comic strip. He took his idea for a one-panel strip to Fred Hernandez who was then the editor of the Herald magazine "Alta Vista." They were in the middle of redesigning the section and looking for fresh material. He pitched it as a sort of home-grown localized "Far Side." Fred commented "I've got a hole on the bottom left of page two. If you can fill it every week, it's yours." When "Alta Vista" became "The Gallery," and Fred was put in charge of the Leisure Section he took "Over The Edge" to the Sunday Leisure section and it has stayed there ever since.

Rob worked for newspapers to make a living, but he has always had a simmering interest in theatre, primarily comedy. As he describes it, "Orosi was a small town in the sticks with few TV stations, and we didn't have regular Saturday morning cartoons. One station we got well was an NBC affiliate which had a huge library of old black and white comedies -- Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chase, Abbott and Costello, The Marx Brothers. So throughout my childhood I avidly watched them and fantasied about becoming a movie comedian. I would mimic the old-time comedians and developed a sense of comic timing." For a short time Rob tried doing some stand-up comedy -- in clubs and hotels. He describes it, "It was the result of my paring down my dreams into something obtainable. I was never very good, because my tendency was to overanalyze it, to try to discover some kind of formula."

Then one day he started talking to Jill Jackson. She was working at the Herald and one afternoon, as they sat side-by-side at computers, theatre came up in the conversation. Rob told her about his several failed attempts. Jill had just finished HUNTING COCKROACHES for Unicorn Theatre. She suggested he contact Carey Crockett who was in need of some graphics work. They met and Carey put him to work designing a Unicorn season brochure. He also gave him a part (Sganerelle) in SCHOOL FOR FIANCEES by John Bierman, sort of a patchwork of Moliere plays. As Rob says, "I was very self-critical, thought I didn't do a very good job." He did a few more shows for Unicorn - "I was just an extra body. I still pursued it, with the intent of getting better. I started feeling better when they did THE RIVALS. Then Carey cast me as Lennie in OF MICE AND MEN and for some reason that role really clicked for me. Because I really started to approach it as an actor doing a role, trying to put my own mark on it."

Thomas Burks & Rob Foster in OF MICE AND MEN

Rob's theatre interests have also turned to play-writing. In 1996 he wrote and produced his own version of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- a radio broadcast starring all local actors and letting San Francisco and Santa Cruz stand in for New York and Trenton. It was broadcast on KAZU on Halloween. He also wrote a full-length play, GUY THINGS. As he says, "I finished up with an epic-length monster that needed a lot of chopping. Unicorn presented it in September of 1997 and overall it was well-received. It was a surprise hit with the male audience. It's now in rewrite mode and hopefully will return this summer edited, leaner, more polished, and just as funny."

Of course Rob continues to act for Unicorn Theatre, most recently as the title character in WINNIE THE POOH and currently The Ghosts of Christmas Present and Future in A CHRISTMAS CAROL. He says he views acting as "the art of becoming another person for the purpose of telling a story." He gives an example, "In the movie ED WOOD, Martin Landau plays Bela Lugosi, and there are scenes where you'd think they brought Bela back from the dead and had him play himself because the transformation is so complete. In this one instance he captured what acting is all about and I think anyone who wants to study what acting is rudimentally should see that movie."