CO-OP Q&A:

Louise Smith ’77 Associate Professor of Theatre

interviewed by Samantha (Williams) Eckenrode ’83

• My very first co-op was performing Wendy and the Little Lost Boys in Peter Pan six days a week, four times a day for three months, at Nicolo Marionettes in New York City. My job title was ‘Puppeteer.’ Because it was a marionette show, I talked to myself a lot. That job was great for my vocal skills (I quit smoking). But I realized that I did not want to be a “jobbed in” kind of actor. Acting had to have more meaning, a more transformative purpose.
• I took my first year at Antioch to explore my other passions. I was partly raised by my aunt who is Filipino and speaks Spanish. When I was little she took me to the Philippines and to Puerto Rico, so I was interested in travel and Latin American studies. I also was interested in visual art and ceramics. So for my second co-op I went to Mexico and worked as a potter’s apprentice in Juchitan, Oaxaca, and for my third co-op I went to San Francisco to work as a boycott organizer for the United Farmworkers Union. (I was interested in politics, too).
• For my fourth co-op, I was a production assistant and all around office person at an organization called Theatre Workshop Boston. That was my worst co-op, only because for the first few weeks I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing and neither did anybody else. It was a very flaky operation, with wacky artists running it. There was a woman who was into Sufism doing something called OmTheatre, and then an offshoot called Reality Theatre, which was doing a play called CLASS about public education. I ended up working for both parts of the organization, doing all kinds of things. I started going to rehearsals and volunteering to get props or coffee or whatever they wanted.
• My best job was working with Otrabanda Company. Otrabanda was a group formed here at Antioch that did raft tours down the Mississippi River performing in a circus tent. They had lived in Asia for awhile and came to Antioch to teach workshops in Asian Theatre. I worked for them as an actor in their play Louisiana Legong. The job was also my senior project. We performed in 21 towns including two prisons along the river, giving free shows. We floated for eight weeks. I got paid $25 a week plus room and board but they went on to ask me to be in their company and I worked with them for a long time. We are all still very good friends. We were based in New Orleans and it was there that I met John Fleming, my partner of 26 years.
• Before I got the job with Otrabanda I had had another job in NYC as a stage manager for a children’s theatre, but my boss there was a lunatic and so I quit. That was my sixth co-op; it was the only time I ever left a job that I had committed to. With all the rest of the jobs, I felt it was character building to stick out the hard times…and it was. Even when the jobs sometimes sucked, I was glad I stayed, every time.
• In 1979, a year after I moved to NYC with Otrabanda, I had coffee with a theatre director named Ping Chong. He was looking for an actress to replace someone who had dropped out of his show, Nuit Blanche. We had a cup of coffee and talked for almost three hours. He hired me the next day and I worked for him for eleven years in his company.