Cassie joined up with the cast of The Book of Genesis as a last minute replacement, learning her parts (she played Adam, Levi, Lot and Mary Magdalene, among others) two weeks before our show and happily bringing just the right flavor of brilliance that up until that moment we'd been a hair short of. Really an on-the-ball performer, Cassie picked up where the previous actress had left off and just ran with the material, turning in stellar performances left and right, no two characters alike. Her crowning moment, for me, came as a spelling bee contestant in a giant rainbow bow-tie who explained the stimulating narcotic properties of mandrakes to a highly appreciative audience, but most will probably best remember her and Stacy Malia as Mary Magdalene and Tamar, respectively, fighting over the microphone during the Jerry Springer moment we employed to discuss the wretched state of women in the Old Testament. A bit of a local star, Cassie has worked extensively around town with numerous theater companies (I saw her first in the 2005 BOA festival), her appearances including Temptation, Finding Serenity and Shove with Custom Made Theater Company, Lusty Booty and Serve By Expiration with the Thunderbird Theater Company, and her extensive film work including roles in the films, Planting Melvin, Sun After Darkness, Come Fly With Me Nude and The Mind is a Liar and a Whore. A fiery tempest of nothing but positive energy, she definitely helped make our show a wickedly funny success and is an incredible asset on any production or set lucky enough to nab her. Thus, I couldn't have been more pleased then when she returned to No Nude Men to play Rosaline in my rendering of Love's Labors Lost. Sort of a Shakespearean Parker Posey, she elegantly strutted through each performance with that kind of rich, smoldering sex appeal sourced in tremendous intelligence. Opposite Ryan Hayes as Biron, Cassie would help steal the show each night, particularly in the final act, where the Princess (Kendra Arimoto) and Rosaline switch identities. In Cassie's careful hands, you really felt the thrust of Rosaline's grief as she came to understand first the nature of her friendship with the Princess and then the limitations of her own self-imposed coldness. The final moment between her and Ryan each night was heartbreaking, the parting of two like-minded souls tempered only with the salve that both have learned to be better friends to others, if not each other, and no other actress I know of could have accomplished such a subtle turn with such skill, and also looked that good in a cocktail dress. Later that same year she would be equally as effective in a different vein, playing the role of Laertes in my gender-bending production of Hamlet. Gracefully navigating her character’s brief but crucial appearances, she brought both tenderness and despair in heaping doses to a frequently underappreciated role and she handled her pistol (despite a personal distaste for firearms) as deftly as her page-long speech to Lee Marcotte’s Opehlia. Trembling with pain and agony through the final murder of Kendra Arimoto’s Hamlet each night, Cassie would leave the stage and run to the stairwell of the Climate to gather herself again before her well-deserved curtain call and it was in these moments I was always struck once more by the level of commitment she brings to every show she works on, be it for a leading part or a supporting one, a comedy or a tragedy. She bares her soul on stage and it astounds you and then inspires you and then leaves you wanting more. So it really was good to have her on board to play the lead in Oasis, Alison Luterman’s complex, poetic one act that I directed as part of No Nude Men’s evening of one acts collectively titled Cerberus Barking. Taking on the role of Anna-Lucy, the play’s nominal heroine caught between her glamorous but manipulative family and her own desire to be a grown up, Cassie managed to walk a fine line of vulnerability without ever descending into helplessness, and her final moments of revelation and strength were inspiring even on nights when the rest of the show didn’t seem to be working. Her cameo as Samantha the Space Walrus in Polyxena In Orbit, the final piece that evening, only further cemented her as my favorite local talent, as she become insufferably charming and funny with only a page of dialogue, done to the hilt like everything else she gets involved with and impossible not to be won over by. 

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