To the Soaps and Onward

The uncertainty that awaits Rachel Melcher, who graduated from Whitman College this spring with a degree in theater, is something that excites rather than frightens the 22-year-old actress.

"I'm ready for the next step in life. I'm excited about going to auditions and scanning Backstage West for parts."

Melcher, who came to Whitman from Ephrata, Washington, plans to gravitate toward Los Angeles and its plethora of opportunities for young actors.

Given her impending plunge into a profession with few guidelines and absolutely no guarantees, it is both fitting and fortunate that Melcher made her final Whitman stage appearance in Mac Wellman's The Hyacinth Macaw, an absurdist play that challenges actors and audience alike with far more questions than answers.

The play, performed on the Freimann Stage at Harper Joy Theatre, defies easy explanation, although uncertainty and disease are two of the themes it bats about.

"To begin with, the play doesn't really have a resolution," Melcher says. "One of Wellman's major points is that life doesn't always have endings or special moments when major issues are resolved. He also plays a lot with language to show that people really don't know what they are saying at times."

Melcher portrayed Dora, an emotionally bedraggled wife and mother "who is very tired of it all, and who isn't allowed to be very intelligent," Melcher says. "Preparing for this play was interesting and challenging because it's so far outside what people normally expect from theater. It's also fun to do something designed to really force the audience to think."

She considers her role as Dora to be the most challenging assignment of her four years at Whitman. Last November, to fulfill her senior drama project requirements, she tackled the role of Dr. Livingstone in a presentation of John Pielmeier's Agnes of God.

"My role qualified as a senior project because it was such a huge part," Melcher says. "The play is very, very wordy, and it has only three actors to carry the entire load. To that point, it was my most challenging role at Whitman, but that was before Dora came along."

Two of Melcher's senior classmates, Sayra Miller and Eliza Sulzbacher, filled the roles of Agnes and Mother Miriam Ruth. "The three of us had a very good rapport," Melcher says. "We knew each other and could trust one another. I was very pleased in that I thought each and every performance we gave was a strong one."

One inadvertent bit of wisdom Melcher gleaned from Agnes of God is that she really doesn't like to smoke. Her part as a chain-smoking psychiatrist required that she puff her way through 16 to 18 herbal cigarettes for each performance.

Melcher's other major drama endeavor this year was her role as an actress in "Character" by first-year student Jerome Schwartz, the winning entry in Whitman's annual One-Act Play Contest.

As Dr. Livingstone in Agnes of God, graduating senior Rachel Melcher, left, plays a tense scene with her classmate Sayra Miller in the role of Agnes. Melcher’s challenging performance in the three-person drama qualified as her senior project. Eliza Sulzbacher, also a member of the Class of 2000, appeared as Mother Miriam Ruth.

By the time she left high school, Melcher had developed a lasting interest in acting. As a junior and senior she had played parts in Cheaper by the Dozen and Twelve Angry Jurors and also had sharpened her skills with local community theater groups.

At Whitman she found immediate openings in the Harper Joy Theatre program, appearing her first year in The House of Bernarda Alba, Don't Dress for Dinner, and Private Eyes. The next year, she stayed busy with a number of student-produced plays.

"As an actress, you put the same amount of effort in plays produced by students as in plays produced as part of the main Harper Joy season," Melcher says. "But the atmosphere is very different with plays produced by students. The actors have more freedom to involve themselves in the play's creative process. There is more freedom to experiment and adapt."

Melcher, who also appeared in the Walla Walla Little Theater's production of Road to Mecca when she was a sophomore, received the 1998 Jean Morgan Stone award, given annually to the most promising first- or second-year actress.

During her junior year, Melcher appeared in Stepping Out, a main stage production that required learning to tap dance. "We took that production on tour around the Northwest, which was fun."

Looking ahead to her search for professional work, Melcher has set her sights on television and motion pictures rather than the live theater. "I'm ready for a change at this point," she says. "I really like the idea of giving a performance, doing it really well and then being done with it. With live theater, you may perfect your performance, but you still have to keep repeating it over and over and over again."

Television acting roles available to young actors include those on daytime dramas. Some of today's most talented actresses, Melcher notes, got their starts in soap operas.

Enrolling in private "on camera" acting classes, which are routinely offered by various casting directors, is one plan of attack Melcher intends to follow as she looks for acting roles. Such classes are designed to help young actors trained in the theater begin the process of trans-ferring their skills to camera work. "There is a big difference between acting on stage and acting for the camera," Melcher says. "Standing on stage and showing distress to an auditorium of 300 people is not the same kind of acting as showing distress to a single camera."

The classes also help young actors make valuable contacts with individuals in charge of casting various productions. This particular strategy was passed along recently to Melcher and other drama students by Patrick Page, '85, who has a long-standing role in the Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast. "That's one benefit of having gone through the theater program at Whitman," Melcher says. "We have alumni scattered all over the country, and all of them are ready to help in whatever way they can."

One Whitman alumnus Melcher hopes to run across at some point is Shane Johnson, who graduated two years ahead of her at both Ephrata High School and Whitman. It was Johnson who latched onto a small part in Saving Private Ryan during the summer before his senior year at Whitman. "I have heard through the grapevine that Shane is still in the Los Angeles area, and that he recently landed a role in a TV pilot with Whoopi Goldberg," Melcher says.

Like others before her, Melcher is ready to wait tables or take other odd jobs after beginning her search for acting work. And, if her foray into the acting world eventually proves fruitless, she even toys with the idea of someday going to law school. "I think that's because I can get very angry about all of the injustices in the world," she says. "A legal career would be one way to address those inequities."

For the time being, though, "I think I'd be more than happy to just play the role of a lawyer."