Setting the Stage

For a long time, the doubts in Kristina Leach’s head kept her from embracing what she knew was in her heart: the desire for a life in the theater.

Now the recent Cal State Fullerton graduate is immersed in almost every facet of stagecraft--and is awash in praise that has poured in for her work as an actress, director, playwright and teacher.

A heady and hectic two weeks lies ahead for this 27-year-old from Tustin, blessed with leading-lady looks and a hearty, vivacious personality that can easily win friends and influence people.

Leach will spend this week in Washington as one of the stars of the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival, an annual event that honors student work.

Her prize-winning one-act, “Supernova in Hamlet,” will be performed Saturday morning at a small theater in the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts--one of two works by student playwrights chosen for the festival from among hundreds of contestants nationwide. This is Leach’s second consecutive appearance at the festival. In 1999, she performed at the Kennedy Center as one of 16 finalists for the festival’s highest acting award.

As the winner of the John Cauble Short Play Award, Leach will return with a check for $1,000, a membership in the Dramatist Guild and publication of “Supernova” by Samuel French Inc., which means a listing in one of the leading catalogs pored over by theaters seeking plays to produce.

Previous playwriting award winners include 1977 honoree Paula Vogel, who went on to win the 1998 Pulitzer prize for “How I Learned to Drive,” and Matt Williams, a writer-producer known for his work on “The Cosby Show,” “A Different World,” “Roseanne” and “Home Improvement.”

Leach will also take along pages from her first full-length play, “Grasmere,” for discussion in a three-day seminar at the festival led by noted Los Angeles playwright Jose Rivera. “Grasmere”--an absorbing dramatization of a passionate and poignant intellectual love triangle among Romantic poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth’s journal-writer sister Dorothy--will premiere next year at Cal State Fullerton.

Founding Company in Long Beach

When Leach gets home, she and her nine partners will scramble to mount the first production of the Six Chairs and a Couple of Artists Theatre Company, a small theater they are launching April 28 in Long Beach.

As the new theater’s business manager, Leach will tap her strength as a successful motivator. She’s a former coordinator of volunteers for the Orange County chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

There will be time, of course, for acting, writing and directing. Leach will perform in Six Chairs’ first play (rights pending), “Defying Gravity,” a 1987 account of the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

Also on the horizon is Leach’s bow as a produced playwright--junior division--at South Coast Repertory, where she has worked part-time the last two years as an assistant director teaching teenagers in the Young Conservatory.

The Costa Mesa theater commissioned her to write a play for 12- and 13-year-old aspiring actors in its new Junior Teen Players company. “72 Degrees and Sunny” plays June 3-4 on the Second Stage.

Leach is not one to trumpet her accomplishments, but she has lots of others to do it for her. Writing in the Times, T.H. McCulloh and Daryl H. Miller have praised her acting since 1993 in college, community and small theater productions across Orange County.

Among her notices: “strong and volatile,” “heartbreaking,” “very funny and a little touching,” “wonderful, a sheer delight in her . . . comic stylization,” “show-stopping performance. . . . her comic timing never fails” and “excellent . . . with enough honesty to make her simplistic character seem real.”

“She’s got the kind of personality that’s really endearing on stage. Audiences just can’t get enough of her,” says Dave Barton, who last year directed Leach in “Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love” at the Empire Theater in Santa Ana. Leach says it was her most trying role, involving sex scenes and nudity.

“A lot of us think she is one of the most talented students to ever walk through these halls,” says James R. Taulli, a theater professor at Cal State Fullerton, where Leach graduated last June. “She really is a Renaissance girl.”

Praise Pours in for Leach’s Intelligence

Donn Finn, who has 19 years’ tenure in the Cal State theater department, agrees. “She’s one of the most mature and intelligent students we’ve ever had at the university. There’s no arrogance there.”

Judith Royer, a theater professor at Loyola Marymount University, scouted “Supernova in Hamlet” for the American College Theatre Festival when it was produced at Cal State Fullerton. Royer praises the play for its strong, believable dialogue and its inventive structure, which puts an unusual twist on the standard lovers-quarreling-in-a-room scenario by having two troubled relationships play out simultaneously, the dialogue from one couple interspersed contrapuntally with the other.

“There’s a nice combination of commercial viability and some really substantial writing,” Royer said. “She has some soul to what she’s writing. She’s still a very young playwright, but I think a very promising playwright.”

“We’re so excited for her,” says Sheila Hillinger, director of SCR’s Young Conservatory, who commissioned Leach’s children’s play. “The kids [in the show] adore the piece, and they’re the toughest ones to sell. I’m very sure she is a name who will make a difference in the future of American theater.”

The only naysayer about Leach, it seems, is a voice inside her own head.

Another young actor/playwright with her references and awards might be rushing out scripts and performance dossiers in hopes of landing an agent and accelerating the arrival of that big, career-making break.

“People tell me all the time, ‘Why aren’t you doing that?’ ” Leach said during a recent chat on a cafe patio in Costa Mesa, not far from the office where she just became a full-time gofer at a video production company to pay her bills.

“I think it’s hard for me to believe somebody would want it. I have this little voice in the back of my head: ‘What makes you think you can? Who do you think you are?’ ”

Leach says she is learning to talk back to that voice: “I say, ‘I’ve accomplished these things. So I can do something.’ ”

She knew what she wanted to do from her first audition for her first part--as Napoleon’s wife--in her first play, a fifth-grade class production at Holy Family School in Orange.

After graduating from Mater Dei High, Leach took theater classes intermittently at Orange Coast College during the early ‘90s while acting in campus and community productions. But she couldn’t bring herself to declare a theater major.

“I just kept running from it because there seemed no way I would be able to do anything with a theater degree.”

Leach finally let her stage-loving heart win over her doubting, career-minded head and became a theater major in the fall of 1997. She primarily studied playwriting and branched into directing as well.

Todd Kulczyk has watched Leach’s development as her writing collaborator on several plays, her partner in the new Six Chairs theater and her closest friend.

“That will always be Kristina, that’s who she is,” he said of her doubting side. “But she’s slowly discovering her voice, and that’s making her feel more comfortable with the idea of continuing with this business.”

Kulczyk was Leach’s shoulder to cry on after her worst moment as a playwright. At last year’s Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival, she took part in a playwriting seminar given by Marsha Norman, of “‘Night, Mother” fame. Other participants gave an out-loud reading of Leach’s one-act script, “Consummate.”

“It went over like a lead balloon. At the end I stared into a bunch of blank faces,” Leach recalled. Later she realized that the readers, fellow writers posing as actors, failed to capture the snap in her comic dialogue. “But at that point I was blaming myself, beating myself over the head. I think I started crying at one point. ‘I’ll never write again.’ ”

“Supernova in Hamlet” drew an opposite reaction when it was performed in the festival’s regional competition in Las Vegas earlier this year by a cast of Cal State Fullerton actors.

“[The audience] sat around and talked for 40 minutes after the play,” Leach said. “I was blown away. It wasn’t that they liked it or didn’t, it was that they were talking about it.”

One-Act Features Duo Dialogues Overlapping

Leach conceived her contest-winning title when the stage manager for a play she was acting in at Cal State Fullerton turned up with a copy of Sky and Telescope magazine. She was intrigued by an article speculating that a reference in “Hamlet” was inspired by the appearance of a new star--a supernova--during the late 1500s.

The magazine, and the premise of the article on “Hamlet,” turn up pivotally in the play. Leach says the story grew directly from two of her failed romances. One petered out as familiarity bred boredom; the other was a brief, exciting and disenchanting fling with a guy who was attached to another woman and wouldn’t give her up. Leach’s play offers a more hopeful slant, at least for one of its stuck couples--the one trying to get beyond over-familiarity and boredom.

After writing about the two relationships as separate scenes, she noticed common rhythms in the dialogue. With similar experiments by Craig Lucas and Tony Kushner in mind, she let the two conversations overlap and found that they flowed and resonated together.

“Supernova” director Christopher Younggren, a recent Cal State master’s recipient, acknowledges it’s not an easy play to follow, but “the people willing to invest themselves and focus have really enjoyed taking that trip.”

What journey awaits Leach in the theater remains uncertain. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas has offered her a full scholarship to its graduate playwriting program--UNLV’s theater department hosted the college festival’s Southwest regional competition where “Supernova” was seen--but Leach wants to defer that for a year to concentrate on “living my life a bit” and establishing the Six Chairs and a Couple of Artists Theatre Company.

She worries that entering a graduate program might mean having to decide among acting, playwriting and directing.

“I cannot choose,” she said. “I love doing all of them equally, and I want to get better at all of them.”