Chris Jeszeck is determined that any article about her tenure in theater really be about everyone else.
As she chats on the phone, in between church and a busy night of rehearsals, she enthusiastically rattles off the names of people she’s worked with over the past several decades who influenced and guided her.
The record is of importance at the moment to Jeszeck because she recently announced her retirement from community theater. Having been a member of the Lompoc Civic Theatre since the 1990s, starring in productions such as Nunsense, Steel Magnolias, and Wally’s Cafe, she now looks to a life focused on her art and painting. But parting, as William Shakespeare wrote, is such sweet sorrow.
The actress was born in Arcadia and later moved to the Santa Barbara area in her early 20s. By 1987, she was married and seeking to move.
“We wanted to buy a house,” she said. “But everything was too expensive. So we moved to Lompoc in 1987, and we’ve been here for 30 years.”
Jeszeck had dabbled in theater as a drama student in both junior high and high school but never pursued it further. It wasn’t until she ventured into a production at the Lompoc Civic Theatre as an audience member that she got bit by the acting bug again.
“I thought, I can do that,” she said. “So I worked up the nerve to audition.”
It is here that Jeszeck makes a point to single out Marian Stave, a member of theater group since 1973 when the group formed. Stave has played some kind of role—offstage or on—in some way or another in almost every production since then.
“Her whole background is theater; she’s been acting since she was 10,” Jeszeck explained. “She’s an amazing director, actress, and friend. … I credit her with everything. I always strive for excellence, and that was a lesson I learned from her. She taught me everything I know.”
Stave also directed Jeszeck’s first show, 1992’s The Boys Next Door. The play, by Tom Griffin, was about a group of developmentally disabled men living in a group home and their interactions with a caretaker over a few months’ time.
“It was funny and touching,” Jeszeck recalled. “It was a wonderful play, so beautifully received. For [the Lompoc Civic Theatre’s] 40th anniversary, we reprised it and did it again.”
Jeszeck also credited Larry McLellan, current Civic Theatre president and producer of plays such as the recent Wally’s Cafe, with being a guiding force behind much of her work and efforts.
But Jeszeck didn’t just keep her role in the organization limited to onstage performances. She’s also directed numerous plays. She is set to conclude her work with the group with one last play she will direct, a holiday production titled An Implausible Claus, about the unlikely friendship of a young girl searching for Santa Claus who finds her way to an elderly Jewish man living in a retirement community in New Jersey.
“I much prefer being an actress, it’s much less work,” she said. “With directing, you’re acting for everyone on stage. You have to figure out everyone’s motives and work from there. So you’re playing multiple parts when directing. That’s a challenge, and it’s rewarding in itself.”
But the work of an actress or director in community theater is never limited to treading the boards or giving notes on performances. It’s an all-encompassing effort that involves everything from designing and building sets, making costumes, creating marketing materials, and selling tickets and concessions
“I like to have my hands in everything,” Jeszeck said. “I like doing props, dressing the set. I generally design all my sets, although I do round up some good people, including my husband, to help build them.”
Some of her favorite shows she directed include Dracula, which they produced twice, and Frankenstein, the last production to run at the original historic Lompoc Theatre. Frankenstein was also arguably the group’s biggest hit, raising the largest amount of money.
Working as a director or actress, Jeszeck said one of her most important tools in theater is a character study. It’s an actual written history for a character created to help define who they are internally.
“You come up with where they came from and where they are going in life,” she said. “It helps form reference points as you work through the script. It helps you figure out motivations or the reasons why they might do or say certain things. The characters become more three dimensional; they’re like a real person.”
Jeszeck said her method was always to immerse herself in the part, reading the script daily and underlying all the adjectives used to describe her character. Finding out what the writer and other characters have to say about her character is a useful tool for defining who they are.
But now that practiced passion will go into another of Jeszeck’s loves: art. She plans to focus on her painting and develop more as an artist. She said it’s not easy to leave behind something she was so involved in for so many years.
“I’ll miss the camaraderie,” she said. “It’s like a family. It’s a nice group of people with a common love of theater. I think especially in light of today’s world, theater is an escape. People love to laugh.”
Arts and Lifestyle writer Rebecca Rose is also nunsensical sometimes. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 16-23, 2017.