American Players Theatre adds four actors to core company

Lindsay Christians, The Cap Times

In one sense, Laura Rook has worked at the job she just got for more than a decade.

Rook, a Chicago-based actor, made her American Players Theatre debut in 2012. She recently joined three other three other longtime APT performers — Josh Krause, Phoebe González and Samantha Newcomb — in the largest infusion into the core company in the history of its existence.

Core company actors make APT their artistic home, and often end up settling in rural Spring Green just west of Madison. Other members of the current core company include families, like James Ridge and Colleen Madden, and Tracy Michelle Arnold and Marcus Truschinski.

For summertime audiences at the Spring Green classical repertory theater, this means more roles played by familiar faces, with future productions influenced by this core team of players.

“The goal we are working toward is the core company looking and representing in the same kind of parity as the acting company at large,” artistic director Brenda DeVita said in an email. “It is a relationship building process, an intentional process, and there are invitations that will possibly take years to come to fruition.”

As for the job itself, “not a lot changes” for core company actors, Rook said. In her decade-plus with APT, she has gone from a Shakespearean ingenue role in “Troilus and Cressida” to directing “Once Upon a Bridge” in the Touchstone last year.

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