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Hi Sabrina,

Thanks for being part of this. Kitsap Creative is a zine-style publication for and about the people making things happen creatively in this county, artists, makers, directors, musicians, builders of all kinds.

These questions are yours. Take as much or as little space as you need. There are no wrong answers, just your story in your words.

We'll share a draft with you before anything goes live.

Your name

Your email address

1. You spent years inside the Los Angeles television machine, production management at E! and Style Networks, unscripted shows like After Lately and True Tori, the person behind the scenes who makes the whole apparatus actually run. Now you co-found a new-play lab, serve on a theatre board, direct, and act. The person who kept the machine running became the person making the work. When did you know you wanted to be the one making the thing, and not just the one making it possible?

2. California was home for a long time before Bainbridge. What finally pulled you north, and what did all those years in the LA production world teach you that you carry into the work you make now?

3. You came up as a producer and production manager, the one who makes it happen rather than the one in the spotlight. In television that is an enormous, unglamorous, deeply logistical job. How does that producer's brain change the way you direct a play, or help build a theatre company from scratch?

4. Island Theatre has been making plays on Bainbridge since 1994, often script-in-hand at the Bainbridge Public Library, no set to hide behind, and free to anyone who walks in. You have directed for it, acted for it, and now serve on its board. What is it about that stripped-down, words-first way of making theatre that earned your devotion?

5. At Island Theatre's Ten-Minute Play Festival you directed Even Butterflies Aren't Perfect by Karen Polinsky. Ten minutes is a tight, unforgiving form, no room for a slow build or a second chance. What do you look for in a short script, and how do you direct actors when there is no time to waste?

6. This spring you directed Lia Romeo's Still at Rolling Bay Hall, Mark and Helen, former lovers reunited after thirty years on opposite sides of a political divide. When we interviewed Jeffrey Brown in these pages, he credited your empathy with the actor and your note to take the beats, even to elongate them, with making the performances deeper and more genuine. After the compression of the Ten-Minute Play Festival, Still asked for the opposite: patience, silence, room. What drew you to that play at this moment, and where did you learn to trust a pause that much?

7. You co-founded Bainbridge Island Theater Lab with Catherine Rush, Dinah Manoff, Pete Benson, and Rachel Noll James, a collective built to discover and develop brand-new work by Bainbridge and Northwest playwrights. What was the gap on the island that made you want to build bitLAB, and what does a new-play lab give a community that a season of familiar titles cannot?

8. bitLAB came out of the gate fast: MagPie and Fishbowl, both Catherine Rush premieres in the Cynthia Sears Studio, and this summer a staged reading of Rachel Noll James's new musical All of Us, Quietly. What is it like to be in the room while a play is still finding itself, and what have you learned about developing work that is not finished yet?

9. You and Pete Benson are married, co-founders of bitLAB, and you keep turning up in each other's productions. He directed you in Island Theatre's reading of Craig Lucas's Reckless. What is it like being directed by your husband, and does the theatre ever stop following the two of you home?

10. Producer, director, actor, board member, photographer. You shot the production stills for All of Us, Quietly. Do all those roles feed a single appetite, or are they separate ones? Does the photographer's eye change how you frame a scene as a director?

11. In television your audience was millions of strangers on the far side of a screen. At the library, at Rolling Bay Hall, or in the Sears Studio it is a few dozen neighbors sitting close enough to hear them breathe, people you will run into at the market next week. What does that closeness change about the work itself, and about who you make it for?

12. Is there anything we have not asked that you would like to talk about? The floor is yours.