Inside the ever-hip Caffé Vita in lower Queen Anne, actor/director Jenny Cross sat at one of the more exclusive tables leafing through the script "Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming," where she plays the pregnant wife of pastor.
The Missouri native had a welcoming presence about her, of one who takes her work seriously but not so much that it tilts her life out of balance. And to give readers an idea of her keen sensibilities to life and her work therein (the Queen Anne resident is a full-time actor/director at the Taproot Theatre in Greenwood), when age comes into the conversation, she's as good as a carnie weight guesser.
Somehow the various ages of the seven-person cast of the musical came up in conversation, which led to this reporter asking how old she thought I was. Instead of examining my face for clues, she looked down at my hands resting on the coffee shop table knowing that, as with rings on a tree trunk, the hands would tell her the real story.
"Forty-three?"
She was off by mere months.
Cross employs kind of observational talent on stage, too. When playing and older woman, she imagines the mannerisms of her grandmother, her speaking pattern, her posture and gait, and gradually becomes her.
"You can either act from the outside in or the inside out," she said. "With an old man, you would start with posture then work your way in."
As June Oglethorpe in "Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming," she is pregnant and faced with leaving the backwoods of Mt. Pleasant, N.C. in the years just after World War II, to find a new life with her husband in the hard-scrabble plains of Texas. Though not pregnant, she thinks about her parents in Missouri and the geographical distance between them to help conjure the emotion her character likely feels.
Cross' character also uses sign language to communicate to a deaf member of the congregation the message of the church music and the sermon from the pastor, her husband. To help Cross get the signing down, Taproot has brought on Lisa Holmberg to teach her some of the basics and all required of her character. She gets to sign the lyrics to the June Carter and Johnny Cash song, "Far side banks of Jordan," and when she does it there's a dreamy Hawaiian feel to it.
"I started meeting with her a month before rehearsals," Cross said of Holmberg. "She says I'm doing well, so I'm encouraged."
Cross may very well be an anomaly among thespians in that she supports herself doing it. Her husband, and fellow actor, Jay, works at a car dealership by day, but Cross is full time acting and teaching acting. She teaches acting at summer programs through Taproot, where she is the associate director of education. She also teaches acting at the YMCA in West Seattle and oversees drama therapy classes at Fairfax Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Kirkland.
She spends most of her time teaching acting and performs, on average, two times a year. It's a good balance, one that makes it possible to have a home life too, where she likes to cook and lead a relatively quiet life. In fact, acting came at her sideways.
At Southeast Missouri State College, where she studied music, she was more of a technical, back-stage person in the theatrical sphere. But at an audition she attended, she noticed participants missing the mark by a long shot. She was recalled telling Jay, then her platonic friend, "why aren't they doing this? Why aren't they doing that?" To which Jay, replied, "Why don't you go up there?"
So she did. And, as any Hollywood script would have it, she nailed it and got the lead role. It was her zeitgeist moment that heralded her into acting, and she's been doing it ever since.
"Stories to me aren't things you just hear, they're things you see," she said. "In theatre it starts out with people reading lines but then hopefully it opens up."
The pursuit of acting first brought her out to Montana, then further west, settling in Seattle's Capitol Hill in 1998 and eventually Queen Anne, where she said, "I instantly liked Seattle better."
She wrote and produced a couple of shows for the city's Fringe Festival and has acted in several plays of varying content, from Shakespeare to comedy to modern dramas. At Taproot, Cross seems to have found a home. She loves the comedic timing of Scott Nolte, the longtime Taproot co-founder and the producing artistic director. That combined with teaching as part of the theatre's summer program is as fulfilling as it can get.
"I think that all art is about overcoming the fall," she said referring, in a figurative sense, the ouster of Adam and Eve from Eden. "I feel all of art is an expression of that, to overcome it and that Heaven is where you won't make anymore mistakes."
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