India Choquette: You Can Find Her on the Playgrounds!

I love everything about acting! It is beyond challenging: you have to use your body, mind, and soul to transform into an imagined version of yourself. I say this because I believe that every character I play is simply me in the circumstances of the script. It’s a way of exploring the “what if” and gives me the opportunity to experience hundreds of different adventures. 

I started acting when I was very young and have known that it is what I want to do for most of my life. My first role, incidentally, was self created: I asked my teacher if I could play a stubborn turnip in our staged version of an animal fable. My execution was flawless: I simply curled up in a ball in the middle of the stage with my eyes clamped shut for the entire show. 

 

I play Justine, a young woman trying to rebuild her life after rehab. When her distant cousin offers her a job as a nanny, it’s the second chance she needs to get back on her feet. But she discovers pretty quickly that there’s a lot more to the job than she expected.

The most exciting part of this rehearsal process was the team. Theater is all about collaboration, and it’s absolutely wonderful (and pretty rare) when you get to work with people who push you and lift you up. My cast mates (Majorie Shrimpton, Carly Ginsburg, and Alex Taylor) are fantastic actors who inspire me to be better every time I go onstage. For example, last night during tech, Marjie and I were working on a very challenging scene, and I was having a huge amount of trouble getting into it. Marjie sat with me on the picnic table (our set) and talked it out with me. Lilla Goettler and Emily Sorenson have also MADE this show. They both are so perceptive, and I’m never nervous about anything in the show because I know for certain that if something’s missing, they will pick up on it. And that’s really important–as an actor, you have a lot of anxiety because at the end of the day, you are the one onstage, and if something looks wrong or isn’t clear, it’s you who has to deal with it. So you put a lot of trust in the people whose job it is to worry about the overall coherence of the piece. Both Emily and Lilla are so talented that I’ve been at ease for the entire process.

I don’t know why this is, but I’ve always really wanted to play Romeo. I know that it’s not the obvious choice–me being a woman and all–but there’s something that I love about him. He’s young, naive, and passionate–and he truly believes he can create a perfect world for himself and Juliet. I’m also a pretty standard actor in that I have a deep affinity for Hamlet, and I actually will be playing a role based on Hamlet for my thesis this spring in the department’s production of BLOWN YOUTH. This role is beyond exciting for me–it’s a complete dream come true. Hamlet is this complex combination of both the human, raw, and carnal (revenge and murder) and the intellectual (his philosophical debates that almost tear him apart). This kind of push/pull in a character is the kind of thing actors live for.

In November, BAM is running a play called, WATER that I’m really want to see. La Mama also has something called PUPPET SLAM going up in November, which looks like it’s going to be really funny. SLEEP NO MORE is the show you HAVE to see (if you happen to casually have an extra chunk of money lying around) as it is probably most biggest “splash” in NYC theater since I moved here.

I intend to make it my career, actually. That and writing. There’s never been anything else I ever wanted to do, and I love it too much to stop.

I haven’t decided yet. I usually like to be something weird and random (like a toaster) but I haven’t had time to work on a costume yet.

Diana Center cafe, hands down. I love the salad bad and all the weird trendy snacks they have (like wasabi seaweed? What IS that?)