Chris Carlone and I first met working on Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol at the Actor's Theater of San Francisco, where he played Scrooge and I played a whole lot of roles, including Bob Cratchit, which gave Chris an excuse to scowl at me for hours every night. We ended up having all sorts of strange things in common, including having both lived in Tucson for a time. Chris's acting career, however, began in New York City with the 13th Street Repertory Theater, where he appeared in productions of Line and Shyness Is Nice, before moving on to act in The Gift with Voice Theater. He made his film debut in the indy feature "Love, Hunger, Betrayal, Forgiveness", but eventually relocated back to the Bay Area with his wife Natasha and their newly born daughter, Milah. Already known locally for his involvement in the music scene (he's the drummer for the band Tofu Dildo, amongst other things), he made his San Francisco acting debut with Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol, following it up with another Actor's Theater of San Francisco show, Crimes of the Heart. After a hiatus, during which he designed sound for the play Blue Room, he happily returned to the stage with No Nude Men in the role of Theseus in Phaedra. Mild mannered and almost ridiculously sweet in real life, Chris tapped into some deep dark rage for the part and not a night passed he didn't tear the second act of the show apart with his blood-curdling screams of anguish and despair, always delivered with just enough restraint to properly invoke the production's Victorian setting and somber mood. Opposite Lee Marcotte as Hipploytus, the two created a powerful father-son dynamic that heightened the depths of the play's tragedy, with Chris's face, always on the edge of smiling or crying, reflecting the endless parade of inner turmoil between Theseus's love and rejection of his only son. Never one to be one note, Chris's greatest moment often came in the final seconds of the play, while holding Gina Seghi's Phaedra every night as she died from self-administered poison. There he would reveal the tenderness that made you understand why all these people, so afraid of him, would also have loved him enough to follow him to the cursed manor where their tragedy finally plays itself out, and every night, as he shuffled off stage for the last time, you would have really thought he'd just lost his wife- if the smile he would suddenly flash you (or in this case, me, standing in the wings) wasn't so bright. For his second venture with No Nude Men we decided to put that silly side to use, letting Chris grace the stage in Love's Labors Lost as the ridiculous Armado, revamped into a pretentious Euro-trash Casanova busy pursuing Alexis Perry's Jacquinetta with everything but a clue. Singled out by critics and adored by the audience, Chris would strut and dance his way through the show each night, a particularly vibrant thread of a very colorful production, upstaged only by the ludicrous mustache he grew for the part. When he wasn't onstage being a ham he was usually offstage taking pictures of everything and the cast and crew of LLL has him to thank for the hundreds of photos which chronicle every stage of the production. Sadly, Carlone himself is missing from most of them, having usually been on the wrong side of the lens, but when you look closely you can find him regardless in the obvious love endowed in each and every shot.