Brother, sister take the stage to portray brother, sister

Chris and Andrea Acker take a moment prior to rehearsal last Thursday for the Tabor College production of ?The Glass Mena?gerie.? Andrea is a veteran of the Tabor stage, but this is Chris?s first experience in theater.Andrea Acker and Chris Acker will be playing the roles of their lives next week when the curtain rises on the Tabor College spring production of ?The Glass Menagerie.?

Well, sort of.

Andrea and Chris are a sister and brother in real life who will be playing a sister and brother on stage in Ten?nessee Williams? classic American drama.

The siblings have traveled very different paths to this production.

Andrea, a junior majoring in elementary education with a music minor, did ?a little bit? of theater while in high school at Littleton, Colo., but she?s become a frequent actor at college.

?At Tabor I?ve been doing more the musicals and whatever I can get myself into,? she said.

For Chris, a senior studying English, this is his first experience with theater.

?I?ve been involved in quite a bit on Tabor?s campus,? he said. ?This was just an area I hadn?t ever done before.?

Director Laurel Koerner encouraged Andrea to see if her brother would be interested in auditioning.

?I said I would but I was kind of skeptical,? Andrea said.

Chris said: ?Actually, I had very little intention of auditioning until Andrea asked me. She very politely and gently suggested that I audition. And I did?and I?m incredibly glad that I did.?

Beyond acting experience, theater and reality diverge on at least two other points. In the play, Andrea?s character, Laura Wingfield, is two years older than Chris?s character, Tom Wingfield. In real life, the age difference is flip-flopped.

Likewise, Andrea describes her character as ?painfully shy? while Chris describes his as ?very strong and independent.?

?He is the primary provider for his sister and his mother, which creates a lot of tensions between his desire to be independent and also his desire to care for his sister as well,? Chris said. ?That?s where a lot of conflicts in the play come from.?

The real-life sister and brother seem to have great rapport, not only off the stage but also on it.

?Working with Andrea has been great,? Chris said. ?Honestly, in the scenes I?m working with Andrea, I?m barely even acting. I?m interacting with my sister, which is incredibly natural. I love that.

?She really brings out the best in me and makes me more outgoing. Without her, I don?t know if I?d be able to be doing something like this.?

Andrea, meanwhile, has discovered the actor hidden inside of Chris.

?I didn?t really notice Christopher?s acting abilities until we were doing a read-through a couple of days ago,? she said. ?Chris?to?pher was doing a monologue and I was just watching. That was the first time I really noticed, ?Wow, that?s my brother.??

Said Chris, ?I?ve always enjoyed watching Andrea in theater, so it?s been just an incredible experience now to get to work with her.?

Director?s debut

Even as Chris makes his debut as an actor, Koerner is making her debut as director of theater at Tabor College with this production.

?I arrived at this play for my first production at Tabor because I wanted to begin with a process that would call upon my professional training as an actor to, in turn, bring the best out of student actors,? Koerner said.

?This is a play that puts the acting at the center, and I saw it as an opportunity to get to the heart of what makes theater exciting: the live performer.?

In ?The Glass Mena?gerie,? considered by many to be Williams? finest work, Tom Wingfield revisits memories of a meager life with his mother, Amanda, and sister, Laura, in a small St. Louis apartment.

Each of the characters sustains illusions in order to cope with the harsh realities of a radically changing world. Tom is caught between responsibility for his family and the adventurous life he desires.

?It deftly expresses the tensions that can exist between parents and young adult children while sharing close confines,? Koerner said of the production.

The production has at least one more real-life family connection beyond the Acker siblings.

?Ethan, my husband, is the technical director and designer, and we collaborated extensively?and still are?to develop our approach to the play,? Koerner said.

?The Glass Menagerie? will be presented at 7:30 p.m. April 10, 11 and 12, and at 2 p.m. April 13 in the Lab Theater located in the lower level of the H.W. Lohrenz Building at 400 S. Jefferson.

General admission will be $6, with a $4 rate for students. To reserve tickets, contact Kaylene Unruh at 620-947-3121, ext. 1033, or at kayleneu@tabor.edu.

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