Five Acts with Jodeen Revere - part one

photo credit: Lila Streicher

Welcome to the "Five Acts with..." series, featuring artists, performers, musicians, and more from around the Treasure Valley. In this series, Arts Boise presented artists with five questions (or, in this case, Acts) and below, the answers, in their own words.

In this edition, we spoke to Jodeen Revere. Jodeen is an actor, performer, writer, massage therapist, and lapsed, but now recovering, yoga instructor. She has performed in the Treasure Valley for 30 years. She has worked with Boise Contemporary Theater, Migration Theory, and Alley Repertory Theater, plus appeared in commercials and independent films. Jodeen has also been a featured storyteller for Story, Story Night, Ming Studio 7:00 and My On Mondays, and recently finished a five-year stretch of writing and performing – for both film and stage – her one-person show 'The Persistent Guest'.

ACT I: What is your background in the arts?

My father formed and was in a rock and roll band, so I grew up in the entertainment world. I would in no way describe him as a musician, but he was for sure a performer and entertainer. He was a very, very funny man. They were on a tv show called Where The Action Is for a couple of years, followed by another called Happening 68. So I grew up on locations and in tv studios and meeting other people who were entertainers. My earliest memories are of standing on whatever surface would support my weight and singing, dancing, reenacting my favorite movies. It was kind of baked into me. I did lots of theater in high school, local community theater, it was always the only thing I wanted to do.

Then when I had my first boyfriend, I stopped everything because I believe somewhere in my subconscious was the idea that you could never be in a relationship and do this thing because that had been my experience: a father who was an entertainer and was never around and eventually that blew up the family. So I wanted love instead of following what I really wanted. So cringe! I didn't do anything for ten years. Many years later when I was married to someone who was nothing but supportive of me, I picked it [acting] up again.

I took scene study classes when we lived in LA with Jeannie Berlin ( I had no idea what a big deal she was at all. Daughter of Elaine May and a fantastic comedic actress who was nominated for an Academy Award for The Heartbreak Kid) and that reminded me of how much I loved this. When we moved back to Boise, I found my way into local independent film, theater, commercials and voice overs. We self produced some events with a group of other artists called Speakeasy Productions. We transformed a very small studio space into a speakeasy (this was thirty years ago) Photos by Deborah Hardee and Katherine Jones, a dance piece by Amy O'Brien, poetry reading by Josephine Jones with Sam Merrick playing live behind her and I turned a short story of Dorothy Parker's into a 20 minute monologue. It was sensational.

I was in an Idaho Theater for Youth production of Charlotte's Web, which is when I met Tracy Sunderland. Later, I was in the premiere of The Last Paving Stone by Y. York. These were the days of performing at the black box theater at The Morrison Center and the schools came to you, instead of you being on the road. It was wonderful.

A couple of years after that, BCT [Boise Contemporary Theater] made its entrance on the Boise scene and I was fortunate to be in their first season, in The Cripple of Inishman, directed by Tracy Sunderland. with an all star cast of humans. I was also in the premiere of Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso. He came to opening night and I got to meet him, which was thrilling.

I am grateful to have had an ongoing relationship at BCT in their 5 x 5 reading series as both an actor and a first time director.

Then Alley Rep came into existence and I have been fortunate to have done many shows with them. Love Person, Rapture, Blister, Burn, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Sonia is my favorite character I’ve ever played), Women of a Certain Age.

My biggest achievement to date was developing and premiering my solo show The Persistent Guest at BCT. Developing that show, shooting the feature film version in the empty theater during COVID before we ever did it on stage and then touring a stripped down unplugged version of it, has been my focus the last five years. Five years?!!!

I received small grants from Arts Idaho and a $10,000 Light of Day grant from the Alexa Rose Foundation which helped make that possible. Which has been amazing, but man I am ready to put that down and move on!

ACT II: Why do you love theater (or performing arts)? What discourages (or can be improved upon) about theater?

Oh my god, what else is there?! Truly. Theater, or dance, or music, any sort of live performance is a singular sort of experience. The only people who will ever have that experience are the people in that room. It will never be the same show again. It cannot be rewound, there cannot be another take, there is no editor to manipulate your performance. You cannot stop and start again if it gets off to a rocky start, or goes off of the rails, you have to fix it in real time in front of the audience and have them not know you are fixing it! It is the bravest sort of endeavor. There have been studies that show that an audience's heartbeats sync up during a live performance. It is the ultimate communal experience. And then when the run is over, the set is taken down, the actors and crew disperse and there is no evidence that it ever happened, except for the memories of the people that had that experience together. Like a sand painting that gets swept away. When I was young it made me sad, and now I find it makes the whole enterprise that much more poignant. Be present, because this will dissolve and vanish.

I love film deeply, but it is a wildly different experience because it is so specifically crafted, manipulated, if you will, and edited, before it is then locked into a form that will always be available for viewing. For better and for worse it exists in perpetuity. As an actor it requires very different skills. Smaller, more subtle performance, because the camera catches everything. Also, film is mostly shot out of sequence so you do not have the luxury of riding the arc of the story in chronological order. You may shoot an intensely emotional scene without having shot the lead up to that moment yet. You have to jump to attention at a moment's notice, because so much of making a film is waiting around until suddenly it is Go! Go! Go!

My primary discouragement in the theater realm is with audience behavior honestly. The proliferation of streaming stuff at home, along with the alienation of the COVID years has birthed a truly rude and clueless monster. Phones are always going off. I cannot think of a performance that I have been to where someone's phone does not go off, even after the consistent curtain speech of "please turn your phones off. Not in airplane mode, not to silent. Turn them OFF." Still every single show there is a phone blowing up at least once. I have witnessed people answering their phones and saying "I can't talk right now, I'm watching a play!!!!"(or watching a movie) People whispering and talking to the people next to them, asking what was said, what just happened, or talking back to the actors. It is mindblowing that they do not realize that those are real humans on the stage and that they can see and hear you. The same thing happens in movie theaters, people acting like they are sitting on their couch in their house carrying on conversations with no regard to the other members of the audience. It is infuriating and unbelievable that it is something that even needs to be addressed.

For me, seeing art in any form, walking through a museum, seeing a dance or theater performance, a concert, a film, it is a time for silence and respect. Shut your mouth and heighten all of your other senses and drink it in! It is sustenance. It is communion.

Also, I must say, Boise I love you, I love how supportive of the arts you are. I love how people go to see things enthusiastically and, please stop giving every single thing a standing ovation. Applause and cheering is a fine acknowledgement for the performers, but a standing ovation is for next level above and beyond performances. They should be a rarity, not a given. It lacks discernment. Not everything is the best thing ever, which does not mean that it is not good. I know you mean well, but perhaps reconsider this. It starts to feel like false praise and loses its specialness. Like a Christmas program at a grade school in an auditorium full of parents.

ACT III: Who and what inspires you? (In the arts, and beyond!)

After my comment about standing ovations, I have to laugh because I find almost everything inspiring in some capacity. Inspiring in the sense of I can have great respect for the artistry of what I saw, or I am appreciative that someone had the guts to make something at all, or I appreciate being shown an example of something that does not work and then looking at why it didn't hit the mark, so that I can take that information forward with me, when I work on something next. It is also why staged readings and previews are so important because we often don't know what a thing actually is or if it works until there is an audience involved. Valuable information comes from that interaction so that changes and refinement can be made.

Come back on January 2 to find out who and what inspires Jodeen, plus more, in part two of the interview!