Kathleen Wilce is an actor, director and writer who has produced many of her one-act plays at different NYC venues. “I wear a lot of different hats, but if I had to choose one, it would be Actor,” she said. She brings a keen sense of humor and emotion to her work in film, television and theatre.
Wilce has played the lead in the four films Broken Change, Long Shot Louie, Molly, and Out of the Blue, among others. Long Shot Louie garnered an Outstanding Achievement Award at the Williamsburg International Film Festival.
She also was in her first musical as part of a Medicine Show Theatre production called Bound to Rise, in which she played a handful of characters simultaneously. “It was a fun challenge,” she said. The production is an Obie Award winning musical revived under the direction of Barbara Vaughn.
Wilce played the role of Sue Lawson in Not Now Darling at the Amateur Comedy Club, a non-profit theater club in Manhattan’s Murray Hill that has been putting on plays by its members in unbroken succession since 1884. As an associate member there, Wilce also was Assistant Director of the dark comedy, To Be or Not to Be which is by Nick Whitby.
She was introduced to The Lambs by the late Scott Glascock, who was active in Amateur Comedy Club, The Lambs, Episcopal Actors Guild, The Players and the Yale Club, among a number of other organizations.
Among plays that she wrote, directed and performed, The Temp in 2014 which she debuted at The Players’ Theatre on MacDougal Street was a memorable experience. The show is about a woman journeying to New York City and struggling to be something other than a corporate clown. She befriends a homeless man who gives her a much deeper perspective of what it really takes to follow your heart and dreams to fulfill your destiny.
Another favorite Wilce wrote, directed and performed is a comedy play, Break In at Tiffany’s, in 2013 which was accepted by the Venus NY Theatre Festival uptown in Inwood. Written from a woman’s perspective, the show explores the relationship between men and women, in which “we do care for each other and there is a love, if we could just stop fighting!”
Born in New Jersey, Wilce exhibited an interest in theater from a young age. Her first play was Peter Pan in fourth grade at a Catholic school, St. Mary’s in Denville, N.J.
She attended Kean University. She majored there in theater and communications, where she won a prestigious Director’s Award for outstanding performance and rehearsal techniques. She was later accepted into the noted Moscow Art Theatre Intensive program at Columbia University, directed by Slava Dolgatchev, which was a three-month summer program that emphasized the Stanislavsky Technique.
At college, she was in Twelfth Night she played the lead, Viola. “It was one of my all-time favorite roles.”
She loved Shakespeare and the British stage so much that she she headed to England on a college exchange program in her senior year of college, where she stayed south of London in Kingston-upon-Thames. She studied the arts and attended as much theater as she could. Some plays that were memorable include Mother Courage, Twelfth Night, and Importance of Being Earnest. Asked about difference between American and British theater traditions, she said, “We both learn from each other.”
She recalls the humor of working at an English pub called the Blue Hawaii, which had an owner from the Middle East who was obsessed with Elvis Presley and would perform his music there nearly every night in his sideburns and flared pants.
She returned to New York, where she held a variety of positions including; restaurant & office work, a restaurant promoter, telemarketer, catering, and vocal coaching, which she has mined for material in her theatrical works. She recalls a winter where she stood freezing outside the doors of a NYC restaurant a few doors down from Joe Allen’s and while promoting the restaurant, also promoted herself to the likes of Meryl Streep, Danny DeVito and Jene Reno and Rosie O’Donnell as they walked by. “Some day I’ll be walking in with them” she said to herself, never keeping her eye off the ball or losing sight of the big picture.
She also auditioned and took drama classes to keep up her craft. She was a student of Arthur Reel who ran the Drama Committee Repertory Theater. “Arthur Reel taught me how to communicate and how to come out of my shell,” Wilce said. She played the lead in Maggie: Girl of the Streets, an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s fiction.
She continues to study twice a week with Wynn Handman, age 95, who was a student of the noted teacher Sanford Meisner. Wilce said “Wynn provides everything you could want on an actor’s journey.” He reminds me to “agitate the essence,” his well-known phrase.
She has learned from other mentors, too.
At HB Studio, she studied with Alskey Burago, where she learned the importance of the psychological in the work of the actor. “He stresses the psychological meaning behind what you do and what you bring to a performance.” He helps you “bring layers to the surface to make it live.”
She said that another instructor Seth Barrish was great at teaching “the techniques and tools of a working actor to survive.” She worked with Roy Steinberg on the play Not Now Darling. She said that Steinberg was “so comfortable to work with; he allowed me to explore and grow in the role.” At the Stella Adler Studio, she studied with Bill Hopkins, who gave Wilce her first introduction to film technique. Along the way, Wilce has landed roles in crime television series.
Her obsession of Tolstoy led her to produce her first full length play which was Helen Edmundson’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. Wilce played the lead character Anna at the Beckmann Theatre at the American Theatre of Actors located in Hell’s Kitchen.
She also performed such shows such as Love without Law her solo show which was a deeply rewarding and very therapeutic experience.
Wilce also performs Standup comedy at Gotham Comedy Club and elsewhere. “It’s really raw, funny, a little profane.” “It helps me to breathe again”, she said.
Her film work includes Broken Change, which shown at the Hoboken International Film Festival; the award-winning Long Shot Louie, garnered an Outstanding Achievement Award at the Williamsburg International Film Festival.
She has also done commercials, including for hair products and make up. She said they are a lot of fun. “You come out looking great, money in your pocket, and your face is seen all over the place. How can you not like it?”
The Players’ Theatre’s Short Play Festival awarded first place to her performance work Obama’s in Town. It’s a two-character spitfire comedy.
She also writes children’s books. One is about a five-year-old boy who is going to be an artist. He is drawing in crayon all over the house. “The mother gets him artwork supplies. It ends well,” said Wilce.
She is excited to be going back to doing her own works. She has recently written a short film called Italian Hospitality, a farce about the Mob that begins filming this summer. She has longer-term plans to make it an episodic series. Italian Hospitality is about Isabella, a single woman who was uprooted from Bensonhurst at the age of 7 and brought to live on the Upper East Side due to the mob activity of her Uncle Tony. She is a schoolteacher, has two adorable dogs and is in extensive therapy for her shopping addition. She forces herself to revisit her past in the hopes of getting closure but finds that she may be more like her Uncle Tony than she is willing to admit. Kathleen will play the role of Isabella.
“It has been a rewarding journey so far”, Wilce says. “If I’ve made one person laugh or cry then I guess I did my job.
– Gary Shapiro