Playground Meeting Hatches Hudson Stage

BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y. -- Actors may not think of a children's playground as a hotspot for career networking, but that's where the connections that created Hudson Stage Company were made 10 years ago. It's a classic example of theatre artists making their own opportunities.

Hudson Stage's founders -- director Dan Foster and actors Olivia Sklar and Denise Bessette -- knew each other professionally, and all wanted to be able to work near home, which is Westchester County, just north of New York City. One day Sklar met actor Liz Callaway, Foster's wife, at a playground where their kids were playing. After discovering their common denominator, "we decided we should do [theatre] up here," Sklar says.

So Foster, Sklar, and Bessette toiled, schmoozed, and sweated until, in the fall of 2000, they produced the New York premiere of Suzanne Bradbeer's Full Bloom at the Clearview School's Julie Harris Theatre in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. Foster directed, Bessette performed, and Sklar did a yeoman's job of producing. The company offered one full production in each of its first five seasons, plus countless staged readings held to raise money, improve visibility, and get new plays on their feet.

"We're mainly interested in producing new works," says Bessette, who serves as the company's literary manager and publicist. "We think this theatre is a good opportunity for local playwrights as well as actors. Many of the plays we've produced or presented in readings have gone on to regional theatre productions." The current production, Gina Barnett's After All, directed by Foster, runs through May 13.

The company has also traded on its connections to talent. The list of well-known actors who have appeared on its stage is already long -- Jill Clayburgh, Blythe Danner, Peter Jay Fernandez, Dana Ivey, Jeff McCarthy, Audra McDonald, Cass Morgan, Josh Mostel, Austin Pendleton, Linda Powell, John Rubinstein -- but the company also offers opportunities to actors just starting out.

"We cast Aaron Wilton, a young actor who originally came to us via an ad in Back Stage, for a non-Equity role in Kimberly Akimbo last fall," says Bessette, who adds that Hudson Stage operates under an Equity Small Professional Theatre Contract. "We were able to offer him Equity membership candidate points. He was so terrific that we cast him in our next show and we're giving him his Equity card." He joins two Broadway veterans -- Walter Charles and Susan Pellegrino -- in After All, which follows survivors in a post-apocalyptic New York City struggling to keep culture alive.

Last year, Hudson Stage took two very significant steps: It offered two mainstage productions for the first time and, more important, it relocated to the Woodward Hall Theatre on the Briarcliff campus