Kate Eifrig I have done 6 shows with Ten Thousand Things Theater. My first 10,000 Things experience was as a musician in The Most Happy Fella. Music director (and actor/singer) Peter Vitale had contacted me and said he was really interested in adding a cello to fill out the score and be the second instrument of the "pit." He said he'd just need some help in hearing what the cello would sound like in conjunction with the arrangements he'd already made. When we met and talked over things I thought it all sounded really cool and then asked, "Wow, this is awesome. So...Who are you going to get to play cello for this?" I was dead serious. Had no idea. So, it all started there. I'd never experienced anything like Ten Thousand Things. In rehearsal and in performance, there was an openness and collaborative nature, but also a decided focus on story. Something that I think has really become a key theme in everything I do. Tell the story. After doing a few more TTT shows I realized there were a million (10,000?) different analogies to make to try to describe the experience of watching and/or doing a show like this, but there was no single one to sum it up. But here are some attempts anyway...(Directors always tell you to make a choice, right?!) TTT is theater without a whole lot of padding. There aren't many things to hide behind or rely on when doing one of these shows. You don't get to sneak behind curtains, dim lights, big costumes, giant set pieces and the like. I tend to feel that this forces all of us to be more interesting, honest and truthful actors. Because there is nothing to distract an audience from the story (except really great upstaging moments from other actors, and what would theater be without those?). And the hard truth of performing in front of "non-traditional" theater audiences, though that name doesn't serve TTT audiences completely, is that the moment you, as an actor stop caring and investing, is the moment they'll stop, too. TTT is theater without amenities, but with all the benefits. Folks can tell you a lot of stories of improvised dressing rooms, surprisingly creative playing space sizing (one day a conference room, the next - an enormous auditorium/gymnasium), lost props, heavy sets to be loaded and unloaded, security checks, tricky to find locations, irregular schedules, etc etc etc. But the stories you'll most likely hear are the ones that remind us that this is worth doing. The women who came up to me after I played Antigone and said it really meant a lot to them because one of them was trying to find out just that week if she'd be released from prison long enough to go to her brother's funeral. A woman who, after I delivered a tricky bit of Shakespeare as Paulina to Leontes, didn't miss a beat and said, "Ooh, she puh-layed him!" The eager help from folks helping us to set up and take down each show, and the anticipatory remarks or excited reviews: "I remember when you guys came last time. Ya'll were great. What's this one about?!" or "Man, that was so good. I was crying and laughing. And we really needed that here." Being a theater artist has a lot of challenges, especially the business end. So when the performing is so rich and immediate and effective - it becomes a gift not only for the audience but also for the performer. When theater works it does more than create a lazy, spoon-fed escape. It does what Ten Thousand Things can do: it helps all of us transcend. Kate has been working in the Twin Cities professional theater scene for over a decade. When folks ask her what her favorite kind of roles are, she'll usually respond, "The ones I get cast in." The crazy theatrical business has allowed her to walk on the stages of The Guthrie, The Jungle, The Ordway, Park Square and others. And she's performed with tons of cool theater companies like Ten Thousand Things Theater, Eye of the Storm, Actor's Theater, Fifty Foot Penguin and Outward Spiral. She's played ravens, Scottish hunchbacks, Greek tragic heroines, tigers, Victorian hysterics, saints, a pope, a Cretan snake priestess, a sweet musical ingénue, ghosts, villains, a cop addicted to chapstick, and Janis Joplin - to name just a few. City Pages named Kate the Best Actress of 2005. She's also really happy to do a good bit of voice over work for the commercial and industrial world of Minneapolis/Saint Paul. Sometimes people put her in front of a camera, too. Kate'll probably keep doing all this until someone says she can't. (And if that happens, she might invoke the Cretan snake priestess and hex someone.)