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Felicia Benefield
Beautiful, funny and very, very talented, Felicia has a rare combination of gifts: excellent comedic timing, powerful stage presence, and just enough flare for drama to keep you interested. We met working on a show at the New College of San Francisco, a piece written and directed by Jayde Rabin called 14 Times in 2 Weeks. Felicia played the head doctor at a sex clinic and about twelve other roles, basically because she can do anything and make it work. At the end of the production I snagged her for my own, casting her as Jenny in the No Nude Men rendering of The Exiled. Felicia was the first person to ever play this part as more or less evil, and to her credit she really made it work. When I was younger I tended to find Jenny kind of lovable, if shallow, but time and experience has made me more sympathetic to characters like Lisa, Jenny's ex-girlfriend, and the scenes in which Jenny avoids talking to her now strike me as amazingly insensitive on Jenny's part, especially since Renete Mitchell, who played Lisa in the same show, gave her a much more sane and sad bent than actresses past. Felicia quickly understood how Jenny could be both charming and unapologetically bitchy at the same time (a trait which, for some reason, as a culture, we tend to find charming), and she added a touch of brassy sex appeal that made you easily understand Able's attraction to her. What was more remarkable is that she was still able to pull of the emotional reality of the scene where Jenny confesses her one-stand with Able to Regina, and it slyly made Jenny a bit more likable while still revealing the selfish nature of her honesty. For the first time in a production of The Exiled, the final scene where Regina and Enrique meet didn't feel funny, so much as totally appropriate- two somewhat twisted and disgusting people, finally hooking up with someone who utterly deserves them. Not that this is a statement on Felicia beyond her acting ability, since she happens to be a great person as well as a great actress, and when she gets drunk she gives you the nicest, warmest, friendliest hugs. As such, bringing her on to play Emily in the No Nude Men revival of Speak To Me was only natural and Felicia turned in her best performance yet despite a whole period early in rehearsal when she kept telling me she wasn't the right girl for the part. Thank goodness we both, deep down, knew better, because she ultimately proved not only perfect in the role but absolutely luminous, taking Emily in a whole new direction that was at once sweeter and stronger than the role had previously been played and quite accurately portraying what the girl next door would be like if she was also an ambitious genius with a bit of a chip on her shoulder. Gracefully sauntering through the role night after night, Felicia's transformation into Emily was followed by a long hiatus from No Nude Men during which she worked with several other companies, including a stint with Cutting Ball in their production of The Death Of The Last Black Man In The Whole Entire World, but often joined us for our cast parties. She finally returned full force for my gender-bending production of Hamlet, playing the role of Horatio opposite Kendra Arimoto as Hamlet and acquitting herself with grace and the kind of melancholy softness the role demands, sometimes saying as much with a look as everyone else was saying with a monologue, and only with the occasional smile betraying the karaoke queen we all know and have grown to love.
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