Several years ago, at a Geva fundraiser, I “won” a live auction bid to have dinner or coffee with Jen Cody, who was going to be starring in Sylvia the next season. Unfortunately, her run in Rochester coincided with her father falling ill and dying, so it was not a good time to impose further on her generosity. How she managed to go on stage and give us those amazing performances portraying a dog, while dealing with personal loss, is a wonder, and a credit to her professionalism. Our date would have to wait... But it was only a matter of time before she’d return to our stage, and Hard Cell turned out to be the perfect vehicle for her.
So, the day before I saw the show, I had a lovely lunch with her at Amore. Of course, I forgot to ask her some of the questions I’d had, like what it was like to be in Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party (incredibly, there were two different musicals that year based on the same 1928 poem, and she was in the least awful production…). Or what it was like to live a partly nomadic life. Although I did ask her a few questions right out of the gate, our lunch was more of a conversation than an interview (I think?). I learned that even though she grew up in the suburbs of Rochester, she never went to Geva as a child. Instead, she went on school trips to New York City to see shows. And it was a production of Noises Off that opened her eyes to the possibility of acting as a career. She said she’d started out as a dancer (and now I’m wondering, was she the sprightly young actress I vaguely recall bouncing all over the Wild Party stage? I might just have to bid on dinner with her again to get some answers), and I loved her comparison of timing (and math!) in dance to comedic timing. And yes, she really is that petite, and apparently after the set for Geva's Women in Jeopardy was built, they had to lower some of it so that she could be seen by the audience over it!
Jen is such a “regular” person, that we also just talked about regular stuff – her rescue dog from Puerto Rico’s Dead Dog Beach, the gentrification of New York City, and Rochester winter. We also talked a bit about the current play, a world premiere, and her feeling that it deserves to be seen by a wider audience.
Hard Cell was truly enjoyable, and all of the actors in it (although there wasn’t enough Jen Cody…) were marvelous – the four whose characters were more caricatures as well as the one whose wasn’t, and served as kind of an anchor. The show definitely requires you to suspend rationality at points that are required for comedic effect, but it’s worth it. The show runs through February 3, and tickets are still available at www.geva.org
