Playhouse event sparkles

New acting program zeroes in on children

<p>Jenny Gray/FULTON SUN</p><p>A full house came to the Sneak Peak event at the Brick District Playhouse Friday evening and learned about a new children’s theater initiative coming to Fulton. The theater, built by the Glenn family in 1928, is undergoing a major reconstruction project and for many, this was the first time they got to see the improvements.</p>

Jenny Gray/FULTON SUN

A full house came to the Sneak Peak event at the Brick District Playhouse Friday evening and learned about a new children’s theater initiative coming to Fulton. The theater, built by the Glenn family in 1928, is undergoing a major reconstruction project and for many, this was the first time they got to see the improvements.

Jill Womack, artistic director and creator of Theater Reaching Young People and Schools (TRYPS), is bringing her passion for theater to Fulton, she announced Friday evening at the Brick District Playhouse's special Sneak Peak event.

Her long time friend and Playhouse board member Debbie LaRue said the program was long planned.

"This is a big thing for us," LaRue said.

TRYPS and its outreach program is also associated with Stephens College in Columbia, according to Womack.

"We want to grow with the children in the community," she said of the new program at the Playhouse. "We're all nonprofits. I just look at this space and think about what it will do for the community."

Also on Friday, another announcement was made by Fulton Mayor LeRoy Benton, who recently hosted the Mayor's Golf Tournament at Tanglewood Golf Course. He handed a $4,690 check to LaRue to benefit the Playhouse restoration project.

Womack's passion

Performing on stages all over the United States and in London, Womack is a recipient of the Kennedy Center's Coolfont Scholarship and the Kennedy Center's Award of Excellence. Womack conceived and commissioned the first original script "The Selfish Giant," which was selected for the 2002 Kennedy Center's New Visions/New Voices Festival.

Womack said her connection with Mid-Missouri began in 1979 when her family moved to Columbia.

"I went to MU (University of Missouri)," she said. "I majored in theater with no fall back."

She then went to Florida State University in Sarasota and interned at the Asolo Repertory Theatre.

"I (then) went to New York and I did an off-Broadway reading of a new work," Womack said. "I lived in the same apartment where Eliza Hamilton lived after the duel - the Hamilton-Holly House."

Eliza Hamilton was the widow of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first secretary of the treasury and subject of the famous Lin-Manual Miranda play "Hamilton."

"It was a wonderful apartment in a run-down part of town," she said. "There were no ghosts, but I have a history with some other ghosts."

She described her New York City venture as an "Outward Bound experience" and learned a lot.

Womack then trooped west to Los Angeles with a group of friends and studied under actors including Burt Reynolds, Charles Nelson Reilly and Charles Durning.

"They were all our teachers for actors in a theater company. We did the most wonderful theater there," she said.

Reynolds helped encourage the actors by calling agents and helped them all get regular work. But during the day, Womack said, she worked for Sports Illustrated in its marketing department.

After a big earthquake in January 1994, Womack returned east where she worked for the U.S. Library of Congress' new start-up Civilization magazine, which published 1994-2000. She also got her masters of fine arts degree in 1997 at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

Along the way, however, she'd fallen in love with children's theater.

"I loved Chekhov and Shakespeare - I trained in London and L.A., and had done serious theater," she said, laughing. "But I fell completely in love with an audience that would talk to you. I felt like the Grinch - my heart grew three sizes."