It had been a while since Staff Players Repertory Company had Janice O'Brien as a performer in their production, and they're pleased that she recently returned to play May Davenport, one of the retired actresses in the Noel Coward play WAITING IN THE WINGS.

Janice grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. Her father was a big developer of large apartment buildings and homes. Her mother stayed home, raising a family of two girls and three boys. Janice describes her early years, "I had an absolutely marvelous childhood, so secure. I lived in a wonderful home with lots of beauty around us, lots of nature. We had marvelous big, old trees and our home was surrounded by lilac bushes. In the spring, when it would rain, you would walk out the door and just be absolutely knocked out by the lilac scent." Her brothers and sisters would tease her, saying she was outdoors "communing with nature."

Janice would sing a lot when she was young - and would put on shows for family and friends. She knew all the songs from Broadway shows. She would go with her family to see the musicals that came through Kansas City. She would come out singing and her father would come out whistling all the songs. Her first actual formal acting came in high school; her English class would put on one play a year and Janice would usually play the lead, probably because she was the most motivated and enthusiastic in the class. She describes her English teacher, "Her name was Mrs. Drake and she was marvelous. She was very melodramatic and would act out all the parts for us. When I took theatre in college I had to adopt a more realistic approach to acting because they thought I was unbearably corny with my mid-Western histrionics."

After high school Janice attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, majoring in drama. One teacher had been a stage manager for Lunt and Fontaine on Broadway. Janice explains, "She had tons of stories and tons of contacts and the thrill of my life in my college years was to have Maynard Morris from the Leland Hayward Office come out and ask me to come in to see him." She left Sarah Lawrence after getting an Associate of Arts in Drama and looked up Mr. Morris. He sent her to read for an understudy part for the role of the Hollywood star in THE MAN TO CAME TO DINNER. The casting director felt she was probably fifteen years too young for the part and was surprised she had been sent for the audition. And that was the closest she ever came to Broadway. On looking back, probably the most beneficial thing she could have done after leaving college would have been to join a training group like the Neighborhood Playhouse or the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Instead she decided to become a nightclub singer -- for a short time and not very successfully. Someone had suggested that she do this because she had a good singing voice. She even had a few nightclub gigs in Florida. Then she went to visit her sister who was living in California. Janice describes what happened, "While visiting my sister, I met my future husband. We got married and proceeded to have seven children and my profession went out the window. I became a mother, big time."

Janice and her husband, Jimmy, and their seven children lived in Southern California, primarily in Santa Monica, for about 20 years. But they loved the Monterey Peninsula and would come up on vacation every year. Eventually they bought a lot in Pebble Beach. In 1972 they decided to move up here and build a house on the lot. It's a wonderful house and Janice tells about its creation, "While in Southern California we had become involved with a Benedictine monastary in the upper desert. At that point I was very active with a very avant garde Catholic group and we sort of adopted this wonderful man, Father Vincent, from the monastary. I worked with him almost like an auxiliary, and the monks would put on a Fall art festival. One of the contributing artists was a woman named Louisa Jenkins who it turned out had a very talented son-in-law, Mark Mills, who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright and lived on the Monterey Peninsula. Twelve years later, when we decided to build the house, we called Mark and he came over and looked at the site. Then, as we were driving back to Santa Monica, we stopped for lunch at Pismo Beach. I got out of the car and looked up at the big, ugly, yellow sign at a Shell service station. And I said 'Jimmy, that's it - our house should be a fan shell.' So we called Mark, and he said it sounded wonderful to him. And he sent us a perfectly beautiful lecture by Frank Lloyd Wright. As part of the lecture he brought into his class all these seashells and lined them up on the table and he said a seashell is the perfect house because the inhabitant creates it."

Janice O'Brien & Michael Robbins in THE MISER

By the time Janice and Jimmy moved to the Peninsula, only the three youngest children moved up with them. Pete, the youngest, entered Carmel High School as a freshman. He later became a professional baseball player for the Texas Rangers, the Cleveland Indians, and eventually the Seattle Mariners. The daughter entered as a senior at Carmel High School and the next son entered Monterey Peninsula College. In 1976, Janice read in the newspaper that a young director named Fred Weiss, who had been a dancer in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF on Broadway and had done some work at MPC, would be casting for A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC. She auditioned and was given the part of Madame Armfeld which she describes as the "most fun part I ever had." It was produced at the Wharf Theater by Morgan Stock and Sam Karas. Right after that Fred cast her as Fraulein Schneider in CABARET which was put on at MPC. After that Janice continued doing a lot of shows at the Wharf Theater including playing Aunt Alicia in two different productions of GIGI, most recently about a year and a half ago. Janice also did a lot of plays for Staff Players Repertory Company including THE MISER, THE CHALK GARDEN, OUTWARD BOUND and just recently WAITING IN THE WINGS.

When Janice explains why she likes doing theatre, she says, "Probably it’s the challenge of portraying a person other than myself, understanding that person, getting inside of her. It also gives you the opportunity to be people that you wouldn't have a chance to be in the real world. That's why I loved Aunt Alicia in GIGI, because she was imperious, she was naughty, she was crass, and totally outrageous, and I loved her. She was the old courtesan who was teaching Gigi how to be one." Also Janice firmly believes that actors shouldn't take license with a character away from something that is evident in the script.

Janice has another preoccupation -- the environment. She joined The League of Women Voters when she first came to the Peninsula in 1972, becoming their president a few years later. But her main role as been as chairperson for their Natural Resources Committee, focusing for many years on trying to prevent the desecration of the Del Monte Forest. She thinks this preoccupation in part goes back to her early childhood and her love of nature. In addition to loving the outdoors she loved reading poetry, loved the nature writers, and loved the Transcendentalists. She says she got this strong love of poetry from her father and remembers getting into some "highbrow reading" when she was about 9 1/12 years old. As a young student she always loved English, and she also loved foreign languages. While in school she took four years of Latin, four of French, and five of German.

So Janice's childhood interests continue in her current life -- on stage and as an environmental activist. And the two are sometimes interrelated. Janice explains, "I do a lot of testifying and appearing for the League on environmental issues. And my dramatic background gives me ease doing that. It comes in handy for me in certain ways."