Quick start: Brianna has been in the Bay area only about two and a half years, but she’s already making a mark — most prominently with the success of 4X6 Fest, a 24-hour play festival she recreated this June (with the help of a $500 Jeff Norton Dream Grant from Theatre Tampa Bay) after being part of a similar festival at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts, where she got her BFA in Theatre. Next month she brings a new project to life, Theatre Exceptional, dedicated to doing plays with and about people with disabilities.
Tampa Bay made it easy: “I walked into a Theatre Tampa Bay meeting and said, ‘I have all these ideas’ and they said, ‘Great, let’s do it.’ It was not nearly as difficult as it is in a place like New York.”
And she knows from New York: Born in Florida, raised in St. Louis, she set her sights on NYC from a young age, applying to NY colleges and traveling there by herself to audition. “This 18-year-old from the Midwest just went up there and figured it out.”
But it wasn’t for her: NYU was “a blast,” but “I was so busy working at jobs I hated, to pay my rent which was outrageous, on an apartment that was an hour outside the city… I had this degree, these skills, but I’m a barista in a coffee shop. So I decided to move back down here.”
The spirit of Helen: She got the acting bug when she played Helen Keller in a high school production of The Miracle Worker, and saw the impact of “theater for a cause.” “Theater can often feel self-serving, but if you can use it as a tool to make the world a better place…”
Her family set the example: Her mother ran a community theater, her father crafts furniture, her sister’s a musician, and her brother Tyler is “a total ham” who has been in several plays. He also has Down Syndrome.
Exceptional people: “There’s a whole population that we as theater artists aren’t using. People with disabilities that have just as much creativity and just as much talent, but there isn’t a place for them. So the goal of Theatre Exceptional is to do plays [that] eradicate the stigma that is so often placed on them.” The company’s inaugural production (Largo Cultural Center, Sept. 10-13) is The Boys Next Door about four mentally challenged men in a group home; Johnny Garde is in the cast. Brianna’s mother, Michelle Larson, directs.
Exceptional characters: She’s written plays about Hunter Thompson and the iconic women of rock ‘n' roll. “I do a killer
Janis Joplin impression.”
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2015.
