Opening act

For one wayward winter five years ago, Alexandra Tavares found herself in Jackson Hole, WY -- an inauspicious place to spark an artistic career. The season was part of an excursion away from academia.

"I floated around for a few years after I graduated," said the UC-Davis alumna. Tavares had considered majoring in drama, but went with English because her parents wanted something more concrete from their tuition fees.

Twenty-two years old at the time, Tavares was no more defined by theater than by any of her other interests: sports, literature and leading an aimless life. But recently she's become defined by the enthusiastic reviews she's received for her portrayal of Irina Prozorov in Intiman Theatre's production of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters.

Although Tavares said she was "still floating around" when she came to Seattle, she found kinship with the city through the UW's Professional Actors Training Program (PATP). She finished the three-year program, considered one of the best in the nation for aspiring actors, in May and is one of four of eleven classmates currently testing the waters via local theater.

When she came to Seattle to visit her brother at the UW, she learned about two of Seattle's biggest theatrical venues, Intiman Theatre and Seattle Repertory Theatre. Her professional career may be taking flight at Intiman, but it was next door at Seattle Rep that Tavares began as a box office clerk. While sitting behind glass and a voice-scrambling speaker, Tavares was further guided toward the theater passion that had detoured at UC-Davis and Jackson Hole.

Three Sisters opened June 10, making rehearsals for her graduation from PATP and first professional production overlapping thrills. The production is now in its final week of a month-long run, the longest running production Tavares has ever been in.

"It was the second day of rehearsals that I walked in and I just [gasped]," Tavares said. "My heart was just up in my throat. I was so nervous and I stayed nervous for the first two weeks."

As Tavares tried to think back of a life before giving two shows per day and working with Tony-award-winning peers, she acknowledged the difficulties of pursuing an unlikely passion.

"You think you can't survive [acting]. It's just so hard, you know."

The new adaptation of Three Sisters by Intiman's Craig Lucas opened to rave reviews from Seattle critics. Tavares's Irina is a slight girl with tendencies toward both quiet spells and fits of excitement.

Opening with Irina's 20th birthday, the play goes through four acts and six years, transforming the sisters into reverse catastrophists who thoroughly expect their lack of progression to be the grandest events of their lives.

The role is anything but Tavares in her natural state. As she twirls her nutmeg-hued hair away from her face during an interview between a matinee and evening performance, her elaborate and enthusiastic reactions come off innocently joyful. Her demeanor shows a lack of the tension many young professionals would feel working with a cast where actors with decades of experience play even the smallest roles.

"What I was struck with was how rehearsal was rehearsal," Tavares said of training with the Three Sisters cast. "It was a place where you could try out ideas and fail and keep questioning. That's what we're learning at the [UW], but it is great to see it in practice here, how unattached to ego it is. [Rehearsal] wasn't about how good you were, it was just about figuring it out."

Throughout Three Sisters the leading women -- Judy Kuhn (as Olga) and Julie Dretzin (as Masha) in addition to Tavares -- perfect their characterizations through minute facial expressions and subtle interpretations.

"All my roles come from me," Tavares said. "They're my take on something. I can't tell whether it's me already and I am highlighting certain aspects of myself, [or if I'm simply developing myself -- but either way I am at the center of the role.]"

"What brings it all together for me is variety," said Tavares. "I am not interested in doing one particular thing. No one particular theater dominates my passion."

Mark Jenkins, head of the PATP's acting and directing programs, is never at a loss to describe Tavares, but he's hesitant to pigeonhole her with any term beyond "diverse." In her first production with PATP, Jenkins recalled, Tavares performed in Nikolai Erdman's politically satirical and dark The Suicide. Her final performance for the UW was in the play adaptation of Salman Rushdie's children's story Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The two performances were starkly different, and Jenkins remembered all of Tavares' roles to be different from what she'd done before.

"After this I am interested in doing something lighter," Tavares said of future after Three Sisters closes on July 9.

Although she's yet to map out her next steps, Tavares plans to take some time away from both theater and academia to celebrate her graduation and visit family. Her graduating-class showcase (a series of solo productions done for casting directors in Seattle, Los Angeles and New York) had its final showing on the first day of rehearsals for Three Sisters. As hard as it was to miss her first day of professional theater, the showcase left Tavares with a slew of contacts around the country eager to speak with her.

Although she's been remarkably successful after so many detours from theater, Tavares is a still apprehensive about continuing on a path with the assumption that she has a leg up on the competition.

"Ultimately you can see 12,000 girls with long brown hair and brown eyes but what is it about me that makes me hirable? If I fit into where you see this character that's great, if not, that's fine too," Tavares said. "But, [with PATP] I met some people on the waiting list who I thought were the best people in the program. So much of it is luck."