"There's a mysterious thing called talent," says Professor Sonja Moser. "[People] don't know whether they have it or they don't; what's important [when embarking on an acting career] is perseverance...and showing up and trying" again and again to get work.
Sonja Moser, Bowdoin's newest theater professor, has worked in theater since the age of three, when she began performing for her family during holidays. She admits that these shows must have been "a trial for them to sit through," but her passion for the theater was undeniable.
While in high school, Professor Moser was known as, "the drama person," a title she appreciated immensely. "I was shy," she says. "Acting was a way to escape into different worlds and be other people."
Although Professor Moser was almost certain that she wanted to pursue a career in the theater, she didn't want to compromise her study of other subjects, such as philosophy. For this reason, she chose to obtain her undergraduate degree at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.
In the summer between school years, however, Moser continued to act at a British-American performing arts program at Oxford University. Later, she studied in Paris at the Jacques Lecoq School. This experience, she says, was unique because Parisian theater pedagogy is very different from that of the United States. While the French concentrate more on the physical world and the imagination, American methods bring psychology and memory to the acting process. Moser understood what she calls the "wisdom, artistry and necessity" of Lecoq's teaching, but still found it intense and disorienting.
The watershed experience in France led Moser to change her degree concentration from acting to directing, and her first directing project at college was an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat. After graduating and moving to New York City, however, Moser continued to act because she didn't know how to penetrate the directing field.
She finally received an opportunity to use her directing skills when a friend from college asked her to direct a play he had written, Closet Drama, in a small, downtown theater. She went on to direct the play Angel Face and an adaptation of a play by Flannery O'Connor.
These projects led Moser to apply to the small directing program at Columbia University, where she was accepted. She did not "go to the school for the degree." Rather, she went because she had been enraptured by a theater performance at Columbia that had been directed by Robert Woodruff, who, she later learned, taught at Columbia's program.
Of the seven students in the program, Moser professed that she "loved the program more than anyone," but she left after one year because she was offered a directing position at the University of Iowa.
Moser's "big break" did not come, though, until she returned to New York the following year. One of the actresses Moser had previously directed invited playwright Maria Irene Fornes to a Columbia theater production. Fornes was so impressed with Moser's work that she remembered her name when a New York theater chose to produce a series of Fornes' plays.
At first, the theater "refused to entertain" the idea of a graduate student directing a $22,000 show. But, once the show's original director backed out of the job, Moser was eager to take her position. Moser says this particular opportunity was "surreal," and that she had to make a conscious effort not to get overwhelmed by the magnitude of her new role.
New York City leaves little room for artists to stay true to, as Moser says, their "original impulses." Although Moser had befriended renowned actors, directors and playwrights, and had received a glowing review from the New York Times, she felt that she had lost touch with her original aspiration to direct what she calls "humanistic theater." In New York, Moser feels, people become consumed by the need to move from job to job, and the profound message that theater can convey becomes obscured.
As a result, when Moser's boyfriend, a filmmaker, began a project that entailed traveling across the U.S., (she describes it as a "sort-of Travels with Charlie for the twenty-first century"), she joined him. While filming in Maine, they fell in love with the state and bought a house on Cranberry Island.
Although the New York theater scene had been overwhelming, Moser did not lose her passion for directing. "Magically" Moser says, "I heard about an opening at Bowdoin." She found it appealing because she was eager to work with college students. Moser is impressed with Bowdoin's theater department and believes that it allows for a lot of creativity and the pursuit of individual interests.
As Moser can attest, it can be difficult to find work in the theater, and for many, it becomes impossible to do so. Whether her talent or her perseverance allowed Professor Moser to break past this barrier, her resume is impressive and Bowdoin's theater department will greatly appreciate her experience and enthusiasm.