For local college student Katherine Zamora, cast as part of the ensemble in The Old Globe’s “Odyssey,” even getting to rehearsals has been a foreign experience:
I haven’t been in Balboa Park, here, since I was ten and that was for a book fair, I think. I don’t remember. And so I got here, and I called one of my friends and I was like, ‘I’m here and I don’t know where to go. I’m lost.’
I just remember thinking, this is really sad. I haven’t been to the zoo since I was five and just thinking about it, I realize that I probably should revisit all of those places. My parents were really good, when my mom was still a stay-at-home mom we went to Sea World as a family, that was before my little sister. We went to the zoo, a lot of places as a family, because she wanted us to have that experience. And then she started working and she couldn’t anymore. And my dad started working more and he couldn’t anymore. So, my sister was kind of deprived of all that and that’s kind of bad for her. But, yeah, I think I should know San Diego more than I do.
For other members of the cast, Balboa Park couldn’t be less foreign; Kim Duclo, playing Penelope’s chief suitor, is a park ranger there.
And Darlene Davies, whose Eurynome role gives her six lines to recite, is a fixture at The Old Globe. The theater where the play will be performed is named for her late husband, Lowell Davies.
As she readied her things to leave rehearsal on Saturday afternoon, Davies reminisced.
As a kid in Junior Theatre, which used to be a spinoff community program run by The Old Globe, Davies acted in several production in the 1950s. The last time she appeared onstage in a Globe production was a Shakespeare play in 1961, Davies said.
“I’ve been running up and down those stairs since I was 11,” she told me.
But that 11-year-old girl, who grew up to become an accomplished speech pathologist and professor at San Diego State University, felt more at ease reciting lines and acting through words. Musical theater is not her forte.
“They’ve got me in there, singing and dancing,” she said, sounding a bit self-conscious. “Today, it’s beginning to click in a little bit.”
The production staff, like director Lear deBessonet and writer Todd Almond, are helpful and encouraging, she said.
They are also, she said, exacting.
“There’s no pity,” she said.
The outdoor stage named for her husband, a longtime Globe board president, has been built in the years since Davies, now 72, performed there as a kid. Other than its christening more than 20 years ago, this will be Davies’s first time onstage.
“For me, it is a kind of odyssey — it’s almost like an arc of my life,” she said.
“To be in Lowell’s theater…”
She trailed off.
“How often do we get a chance to revisit those things we do when we’re young?”
I’m Kelly Bennett, the arts editor for VOSD. You can reach me directly at kelly.bennett@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.325.0531.
And follow Behind the Scene on Facebook.