Marcia Gambrell Hovick is Artistic Director for the Children's Experimental Theatre and The Staff Players Repertory Company. She is a teacher, director, actor, monologist, and writer. She recently presented a one-woman show of her own monologues, THE CELTIC WORLD, for the Carmel Performing Arts Festival.

Marcia comes from Austin, Texas. Her mother played the piano and had a beautiful singing voice. Her father was a very bright, intellectual man who was a wonderful storyteller, newspaperman, and was in the oil business. Marcia was in ballet at the age of 3, children's theatre at 4, and began piano lessons at 5. She was a ballet dancer until she was 15 when she became too tall for a ballerina. She was in and out of theatre during her early years including doing "dreadful programs for women's groups and state fairs." She did no theatre, but debated all the way through high school with great energy and excitement.

Marcia got a scholarship to Mills College in Oakland. She entered Mills planning to be a lawyer or doctor, but changed her major to Theatre after taking a class with a very powerful woman who was the head of the theatre department and who "made it the most interesting thing you could possibly do." Marcia describes her experience at Mills: "Mills was a remarkable place in those days. For my senior thesis I produced, I mean I produced costumes, lights, set, scenery, casting and directing the one-act I had written. And it was marvelous. You were expected to take technical courses, but you couldn't limit yourself to just acting or directing or tech. The terrible thing, if you're interested in theatre, is that you need to know everything. You have to know history, languages, literature, and a lot of psychology and philosophy. If you don't know these things, at least have an initial experience of them, then you are crippled; you are always trying to catch up."

While at Mills, Marcia got married. Since her chemist husband became a medical student, they moved to Baltimore, Maryland, so he could attend John Hopkins University. Her husband was very busy with his medical studies, so Marcia started doing theatre -- performing for the Hopkins Playshop and what was then called the Actor's Workshop. Then, Marcia, her husband, and by then their three children, moved to Birmingham, Alabama where her husband had taken a good paid residency in obstetrics. Again she did theatre; she remembers wearing wonderful costumes and an uncomfortable red fright wig for ELIZABETH, THE QUEEN. Next the whole family moved for two years to Bakersfield, California. Her husband was busy delivering babies and Marcia continued acting -- among the plays were FAMILY PORTRAIT and WUTHERING HEIGHTS.

Once her husband had finished his medical training, they looked for a place to live by the ocean, eventually settling on the Monterey Peninsula and buying a house in Monterey. The year was 1956. A few doors up from the Hovicks was an eccentric English woman -- a funny, tiny, rather snobbish woman. One evening she invited Marcia and her husband over for dinner. Another couple at that meal were Gay and Ted Kuster. Ted's daughter was playing the young girl in THE CHALK GARDEN at the Golden Bough Circle Theatre, and the woman playing Mrs. St. Maugham in that production just wasn't learning her lines. When Ted learned Marcia had done some acting, he suggested she talk to Fred Rider, the director of the play, about replacing this disappointing actress. Marcia did and after that did one show after another at the Circle Theatre (this was downstairs; the upstairs was a movie theatre).

At that time, the Circle Theatre was being taken over by a community theatre group. Since Marcia had worked with some children's theatre in Baltimore, Birmingham, and Bakersfield, she was asked to chair a committee to set up a children's theatre -- to organize it and to find someone to teach the classes. The prospective teacher declined at the last minute. Since they had already signed up some students, Marcia was asked to teach for a few weeks, until they found someone else. As Marcia says, "And that was 39 years ago and if I learned anything it is that you never do anything for two weeks because you may end up doing it for the rest of your life."

Although it was part of the community theatre they called it The Children's Experimental Theatre. By 1968 or '69, there were too many kids running around the Circle Theatre so they moved up to their present location at the Indoor Forest Theatre. By that time, Loel Shuler had joined the staff of C.E.T. as well as Bill Lewis who joined the staff to build sets.

The C.E.T. Traveling Troupe had already started while still at the Circle Theatre, replacing the Junior League who had been performing with rather unwieldly productions of children's plays. And then, a year after moving to the Indoor Forest Theatre, Staff Players Repertory Company formed because the staff needed to keep their hands in performing. What Staff Players has evolved into is a classical theatre, as Marcia says, "Older plays are not classics because they're old but because they're good."

Children's Experimental Theatre and Traveling Troupe continue in much the same form to this day. Marcia talks about the value for the student: "Children's theatre, particularly with the children who stick with it for a while, is a truly awesome, transformational experience. It gives to children a kind of confidence, a location of themselves in the world, an ability to really notice each other, a feeling of mutual dependence and satisfaction. At our theatre, every child acts, not as a part of a chorus of little twinkies or trees or what-not, but as a separate character. And every child over the years, if they work with us, plays a different kind of character every time. Whenever possible we encourage youngsters to play against their own physical type. Because walking in someone else's shoes is what playing a part is."

Marcia Gambrell Hovick in BRIT WIT Staff Players Repertory Company

Marcia writes the majority of the plays used for the children's productions. She explains: "Running children's theatre, I find most of the scripts written for children are impossible -- they're patronizing, simple-minded, phony, a lot of them. It was always easier for me to look at who I had in a class and write a play with a part for everybody that was good for them. It turned out that even with another group of youngsters, a different configuration, we could use them again. And all of the Traveling Troupe scripts are mine, because we had to have shows that were about 30 minutes long, did not require lights or much of anything except costumes, a little background scenery and with no more than 6 characters in a play.

Marcia's writing is not just for children. Marcia has always enjoyed doing monologues, beginning with her experiences while at Mills College doing Robert Browning's monologues for the ladies of the Browning Society of San Francisco. She has continued doing one-woman shows of one kind or another. And she began writing her own monologues because "I have certain bees in my bonnett like the fact that there are wonderful women who lived but never got to say anything, and the monologues I'm using in THE CELTIC WORLD will be a retelling of the powerful old myths and legends about the women of the Celts and will also bring to life four women from the story of Parzival and the Grail who are just cardboard there and who deserve better."

Marcia concludes by saying, "The work I've been privileged to earn a living at is nourishing to me and to other people. It can be very tragic and it can be lighthearted. But it always deals with reality. And that's where we would all like to be. And by reality I don't just mean objects and whatever we can measure that is valuable, but inner reality as well as outer reality. What children are interested in I believe firmly is truth. We can't always provide the truth, but at least we can give them a stab at it. To give them a chance to explore it. It's about the best you can do. And theatre is very good at that."