The well-worn comment, “I prefer my drama onstage,” takes a sharp twist to the left for members of the APL Drama Club. A new kid on the local theater block, the year-old troupe is cracking audiences up by mixing the expected with the unexpected. Using incongruity to make people laugh is a classic comic technique, but these actors live the concept.
Sponsored by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel for its employees, the club isn’t made of mainstream actors. It consists mostly of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians with a single thespian recruited from a local Shakespeare company and a veteran community theater director tossed in as afterthoughts. Most of these folks are expected to behave like left-brain dominant, methodical thinkers; and they usually do. In fact, they make very good livings in day jobs that focus on critical thinking and logic.
You probably won’t be too startled, then, to find any of them working backstage. But many are migrating onstage and, even though a few acted at least a little in college years ago, this seems inherently out of character…until you watch them perform. Whether they’re splitting atoms by day or splitting hairs during rehearsals at night, APL employees are consistent high achievers.
So, what draws members of the APL Drama Club to the spotlight on the acting side of the curtain, a domain traditionally associated with artists – those right-brain dominant, intuitive thinkers that tend to mix emotion into everything they do?
Chris Dong, President of the APL Drama Club, answers, “Acting lets me be someone else, even for just a little while. I don’t have to be the nerdy Asian kid typing up MATLAB programs.”
Actually quite handsome, Dong is one of those low-key people carrying deep undertones. You won’t know until you ask that he appears as an extra in Salt and met Angelina Jolie, or that he recently worked on the set of Transformers 3, or that he’s friends with professional actors Brandon Scott (Ryan Spaulding from Grey’s Anatomy) and Jason Dohring (Logan Echols from Veronica Mars). If you’re an audience member, you may never know that he’s the mission lead for lunar studies in the Space Department.
In October, the APL Drama club performed a modern comedy as guests at the Laurel Mill Playhouse. When asked how his coworkers reacted to his performance in Randy Wyatt’s Said and Meant: Ten Short Plays About Language and Misunderstanding (which, for the purpose of disclosure, I directed), Dong simply shrugs. “They said, ‘I never thought I’d see Chris do a flip. Oh, and I never thought I’d see him do a gay kiss either!’”
Jeff Dunne, a supervisor in the National Security Technology Department, is the tallest member from the cast and looks the most like a world-class scientist. Several members of the audience commented that he reminds them of Harold Ramis, who portrayed Dr. Egon Spangler in the original Ghostbusters movie.
Dunne didn’t invite his coworkers to the show.
“It’s a separate world,” he says. “I don’t emphasize my sense of humor and fun on the job. The drama club is part of my social life.”
Surprisingly ambivalent about performing, Dunne considers performances only secondary; he loves exploring the creative process and the warm camaraderie that he finds at rehearsals. And this cast loved rehearsing with him. When Dunne showed up particularly bleary-eyed to rehearse one evening after starting his workday at 5 a.m., he joked that the bad drivers who liked to flip him off would wake him if he felt drowsy driving home. Nodding and smiling sweetly, Dunne was serenaded by a silent chorus of rude gestures when he left later that night.
Scott Stanchfield doesn’t separate his interest in performing from his professional life. A natural comedian, he is also a software architect in the National Security Technology Department and teaches grad school classes in Design Patterns, Java, and XML at night. “Teaching is acting,” he explains.
Once upon a time, while attending the University of Michigan, Stanchfield worked as a writer and actor for its Comedy Company. “I’ve always been a laugh vampire,” he says.
The blue-eyed Stanchfield is even funnier in person than most of the characters he played in Said and Meant. A bubbly and happy-go-lucky guy, he is also brave enough to haul out the elephant in the room.
You could not pay many engineers and scientists to have anything to do with a drama club. Some politely say that actors, or artsy types, “have a different way of looking at things that is uncomfortable to deal with.” Stanchfield says it more honestly – he was worried at first that he would have to deal with pompous personalities.
“I was so relieved that it’s not the case,” he says. If you ask Stanchfield what stereotype he’d like to dispel that some artists might believe about techies, he’ll say that it’s great to be a geek and that there’s a definite distinction between a geek and a nerd.
“Geeks are not nerds – geeks have social skills.”
Stanchfield is well qualified to point this out. His brother Steve (also a geek by Stanchfield’s definition) owns Thunderbean Animation, a company that animates rare cartoons and serves as a boundless source of interesting conversation.
Eric Chang, who good-naturedly appeared onstage in typecast roles (as a stage manager and real-person interloper), says his backstage role of Technical Director didn’t feel far removed from working as an electrical/computer engineer for the Applied Information Sciences Department. Chang’s face glows if you ask him why he put so much work into mounting this show.
“Because, it’s fun!”
Chang, who loves playing with the toys required to run tech, first became interested in technical direction when he worked on a scholarship pageant run by the Chinese Student Association while attending college at Georgia Tech. He also supports events for the Asian American Heritage Club, another employee-sponsored club. Chang believes that creative extracurricular activities make him a better engineer.
“Good engineers are left-brain dominant,” he says, “but the best ones are able to tap into the right side of their brains.”
Interviewing this small sampling of the APL Drama Club felt like riding a verbal roller coaster. Conversations jumped from mind mapping to cartoons to abstract comments about personalities in the workplace in rapid-fire time. Perhaps if any of the female cast members had been available to interview (Stanchfield commented that one was drowning in work on a submarine somewhere), the conversation would have flowed more evenly. But ultimately, we agreed that whether any person is right-brain or left-brain dominant, and whatever activity they engage in, exercising both sides of the brain is a very good thing.
One other thing is certain; these guys all look really good in black.
In April, the APL Drama Club will present The Mouse That Roared, adapted by Christopher Sergel and based on the book by Leonard Wibberley at the Kossiakoff Center, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road. Stanchfield will direct. It will be interesting to see the troupe compete with Peter Sellers.
