 |
Anne Heintz
IMDB Entry
Words can’t describe my love for Anne Heintz. Along with
her husband, Jim Driscoll MacEachron, Anne basically is the
epitome of who I want to be when I grow up. Plucky, resourceful,
kind of impossible to stop, Anne had just finished her freshman
year at Ganzaga, where she’s made her stage debut playing
Babe in Crimes of the Heart, when she showed up at the auditions
for The Oresteia, read the character descriptions and said,
“Cassandra sounds good. I’ll take her part.”
And I remember thinking, “We’re gonna put you in
the chorus, girly girl,” but ended up casting her as Electra,
who had twice as much stage time as Cassandra and earned Anne
her first critical nod when Gene Armstrong listed her as one
of the “exemplary” performers in the show. My strongest
image of her from that time is from the day when we put the
set together, and I remember seeing Anne, out of the corner
of my eye, climbing over the half-finished House of Atreus,
in her blue and gray silk tunic, wearing a crown of fake flowers
in her long blonde hair, carrying a powerdrill in one hand.
I remember thinking: this girl is cool. When I came up with
the idea of doing a series of original one acts to be staged
that winter, it made sense to ask Jasmine Koh, Werner James
and Chris McCaleb to be my fellow collaborators: all three were
writers and had already demonstrated a good deal of loyalty
and devotion to Quicksilver Productions. Asking Anne to complete
the quintet was a move partly made to rope her in for the future,
and mostly because I just had this feeling she was a playwright/director
type under the skin. When at our first meeting she suggested
making the whole show be about Werner wearing a giant sombrero
I knew my shot in the dark had hit the bullseye. Anne ended
up contributing three pieces to I Laughed, I Cried, I Shot The
Person Next To Me: two monologues, Ark Stowaway and Fish Outta
Water, and the two character mini-play Charcoal, which featured
Marissa Garcia in her first theatrical performance. Never one
to shy away from the stage, Anne performed Chris McCaleb’s
monologue piece, Rain, and one by Jasmine Koh, the charming
comedic soliloquy of a young country peach down on her luck,
titled Never Never Never Give Up Dating Service. Her crowning
moment, however, was as a dancing bunny in The Vampire Sorority
Babes vs. the Inter-Galactic Frat Zombies: A Ballet, in which
she was brutally killed by an evil Marissa Garcia, who in turned
was slain by a vengeful goat played by Jasmine Koh. Having transferred
to the University of Arizona, Anne had a brief stint playing
Perdita in what she’s always described to me as a “wacky”
version of The Winter’s Tale, shot the film Murmur with
Chirs McCaleb (in which she does an extremely unsettling trick
with her eyes), then spent the following summer in England,
missing my production of Faust but back for the winter of 2000
to originate the role of Susan in the world premiere of The
Exiled, a role which, I’ll be honest, no one thought she
would pull off. She did, totally stealing both the comedic and
emotional heart of the show, my personal favorite moment coming
at the end of Able’s party, when she would dance off to
Saint Etienne as the sat transitioned around her. Somehow, it
epitomizes to me Anne’s greatest strength, not just as
an actress, but as an artist: her unflagging commitment to something,
even in the moments when nobody is looking. So it wasn’t
surprising that when Quicksilver board member Jasmine Koh moved
back to her native Singapore, Anne Heintz was asked to step
into her place, and did. In the fall of 2000 Anne directed her
final project for school, a production of Hamlet staged in the
Flandrau Planetarium, featuring myself as Horatio, Marissa Garcia
as Ophelia, Wylie Herman as Guildenstern, Lorenzo Gonzalez as
Marcellus, Josh Galyen as Osric and four more actors who were
to become part of Horror Unspeakable: Sarah Calvert as Bernardo,
Nat Cassidy, who played Claudius, Matt Bailey, who understudied
Hamlet, and Robert Anthony Peters, who played Laertes. Working
in technical capacities on Hamlet were Cristina Ulloa, Tonja
Goetz, Lisa Fowle and Jim Driscoll-MacEachron, all of whom were
also to become indispensable at one point or another, or in
Jim’s case, for the duration of my time in Arizona. It
was a real crossroads, and looking back we realize that so much
I almost forget how good the show itself was- and it was pretty
darn neat. Utilizing the attributes of the planetarium as much
as possible, we had holograms for scenery, constellations wheeling
overhead, projections for the ghost, Ophelia’s mad scene,
and the stark, back lit walls of the dome’s structural
supports to really bring home “to be or not to be.”
Genuinely off-beat and slickly staged, the show is one of the
best I ever worked on in a purely acting capacity and Anne has
since been completely forgiven for cutting half my lines. In
the summer of 2001, following her graduation from the U of A
with a a bachelor in Theater and a bachelor in English, and
another brief acting stint, this time in Cristina Ulloa’s
staging of The Original Last Wish Baby, Anne officially joined
the ranks of Horror Unspeakable, playing Rimat-Ninsun/Siduri/Ziusudra’s
Wife in the revival of Vincent of Gilgamesh, and then Imogen
in the revival of The Exiled. She followed this with her first
directing foray outside of college, doing nothing less challenging
than Macbeth, re-cut to accommodate a smaller cast and dripping
with gothic design and shadows, opening on Halloween night and
played to packed houses for its entire run. Having thus taken
over the company helm, in January of 2002, Anne moved in the
opposite direction and staged the domestic drama, Mounted and
Pinned, which was as delicate as Macbeth was in-your-face, and
made for a quiet, subtle, uplifting evening. In the spring of
that year I was happy to have her return to the role of actress,
this time playing Penelope opposite Jim MacEachron in The Odyssey.
A real step away from Anne’s previous roles, she rose
to the occasion of playing the devoted but overwhelmed mother
and wife, acting beyond her years, often to excellent results,
excelling particularly in the moments after Odysseus’
massacre of the suitors. She even sang a little bit, something
we’d never seen before, and probably won’t be seeing
again any time soon. Shortly after the close of The Odyssey
it became apparent that Anne would be leaving for Australia
to pursue graduate studies in theater and writing, and for me,
that was the whistle being blown on Horror Unspeakable, for
Anne had become my partner in the company and beyond that, a
major reason for me to stay in Tucson. We were, however, to
come together for two more productions. The first was a double
feature of my play, Attack of the Killer Space Zombies, her
new piece, Snapshot, which is the closest I’ve ever seen
Anne come to being scathing in her work and a play I myself
would like to direct someday. The second collaboration was,
however, the one that takes the cake: always a fan, of both
me and the play, Anne mounted, directed and starred (as Celeste)
in my first international production, bringing Vincent of Gilgamesh
to the stage in Melbourne, Australia. I don’t know that
I can ever say how much this meant to me, because it’s
one thing when your friends tell you they like your writing,
its another when they actually find ways to get your stuff out
there, when they push it like it’s their own, and when
they place on it the success of their academic career to boot.
She even forwarded me some fan mail- and friends don’t
get any better than that. The best part has always been knowing
that she got as much out of it as she gave to me- the show was
a success, and Anne even got her picture in the Melbourne Star,
looking oddly like a Stepford Wife hiding behind a very large
houseplant. With Gilgamesh under her belt and another degree,
Anne returned to America, where she moved to New York City,
and currently lives with her husband, Jim Driscoll-MacEachron,
and works in the non-profit art world. Apparently they’re
pretty happy, and didn’t regret letting me hold the rings
at the wedding, so I couldn’t be happier as well. Anne’s
been keeping her toes in the realm of theater, writing and directing
a piece in a socially conscious one-act festival that played
the Big Apple in 2004, but since then she’s been mostly
concentrating on picking the right graduate writing program.
Where she’ll go or what she’ll do next is anybody’s
guess, but it’s certain to be, like most everything else
in her life, pretty spectacular in execution. I know I’m
looking forward to it.
Back to characters
|
|
|
