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| by Jack Heifner |
Allison is no stranger to the stage. Indeed, she honed her skills in Regional and New York theatre. In fact, her proudest achievement to date is her portrayal of Heavenly Critchfield in Tennessee Williams’ lost play Spring Storm at the Marin Theatre Company in Marin, CA. Tennessee was 26 when he wrote the play and Heavenly is a character not unlike Blanch DuBois and Maggie: manipulative, seductive, and of course, tragic. Allison got rave reviews in all the San Francisco papers as well as Variety and other national Trades. Allison worked with the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Lanford Wilson (Burn This) on the debut of his play A Sense Of Place at American Stage in St.. Petersburg, Florida. Allison was voted “Best Actress of the Bay (Tampa Bay area)” by the local paper for her portrayal of Ann, the eccentric, self-absorbed dancer turned cook. Other Regional theater credits include To Kill A Mockingbird (Syracuse Stage), Brighton Beach Memoirs, and Night Must Fall (Bristol Valley). In New York City, Allison played Tribley, the seductive scam artist, in Hadley’s Mistake (Soho Rep) directed by Bartlett Sher, now the Artistic Director of The Intiman Theatre in Seattle. Allison was also in the zany comedy Poor Fellas written by Marc Palmeri, the screenwriter of She’s All That with Freddie Prinze Jr. She was in numerous other New York productions. Too many to list. As for film and TV, you might recognize Allison as Emily Maddux on the soap opera “Another World”. (Emily was the good-turned-bad nurse that started dating Nick and ended dating Tomas and lost her friend Sofia along the way). During her stint on the soap, Allison was voted best actress of the month on the internet, and was featured in several soap opera magazines. She also played several characters on the soap opera “Loving”. Allison can be seen in the independent films, The Twenty-Four Seven, The Family Web, and When starring Mackenzie Phillips. Allison just finished shooting the hilarious short, Fast Fiction, in which she plays a nymphomaniac Wendy (as in Wendy of the fast food chain), which should be in the festival circuit in 2002. Allison has a BA in Anthropology from Harvard College. She studied acting with Bill Esper and many others. What took her from Anthropology to the stage goes as follows. Allison was raised on the upper westside of Manhattan and began her acting career at age five doing industrials and print work. The jobs were the result of her big cheeks more than a sustained passion for the work as she was more interested in gymnastics. Her gymnastics team was lead by a Russian coach who was determined to get his girls to the Olympics. But at age ten, her mother assistant produced The Diary Of Anne Frank Off- Broadway starring Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, and Allison’s cat, -Jennifer. Allison saw the show almost every night on top of gymnastics practice and home work. Soon, she had a stint on the big stage in CUNY Purchase’s production of Dark Of The Moon. She quit gymnastics. (A couple teammates got on the Olympic team but she had other interests.) She was now hooked on dance and through high school and college choreographed, danced and directed a dance company. At Harvard Allison also taught Cambridge city kids dance and drama in a program called CITYSTEP. She also began doing musicals and suddenly her passion for the stage was re-ignited in full force . At Harvard, she finally found the courage to follow her dreams. Allison performs the role of Kathy in J. Cast Production’s national tour of the Off-Broadway Smash Hit Comedy Vanities performing throughout the USA and Canada, whenever her shooting schedule allows with co-stars Heather Tom and Sonia Satra. In LA, Allison teaches drama and improvisation at The Aviva House, a home for troubled teenage girls in West Hollywood. She is also a standardized patient at USC, a writer and an acting coach. |
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