Episode 2: Amelia Rose Moore. In this episode, host PJ Caywood sits down with actress Amelia Rose Moore to discuss "A Year with Frog and Toad".
Tell us about yourself and your history with SLAC!
My history with SLAC began in 2010 when I was invited to do a reading of my play Charm in the New Play Sounding Series. I was new to Salt Lake and to be honest, I didn’t know where I was or what to expect. But the SLAC theatre community embraced me and my play, and we began a long working relationship over the next fifteen years, which included a pretty crazy play about my reaction to Utah’s dinosaur country, called Course 86B in the Catalogue, two political dramas, The Persian Quarter, inspired by the years I spent in Iran as a young woman, and Harbur Gate, about women in the military, which I researched with interviews at the VA Hospital in Salt Lake. Silent Dancer, is an experimental work about a young woman who dances in silent films, which combined dance and the spoken word, directed by Cynthia Fleming, with choreography by Christopher Rudd from Ballet West.
SLAC has been an artistic home for you for many years, what makes SLAC unique from other theatres you've worked with?
I am who I am as an artist because of the Salt Lake Acting Company. SLAC gave me a home and allowed me to become a playwright.
Why should people come to see The Robertassey? What makes it unique from other plays you've written?
My new play at SLAC, The Robertassey, almost didn’t make it. It was saved from drowning by Cynthia Fleming who called me last March and said she and Latoya Cameron had re-read the play (it had been in the New Play Sounding Series in 2019) and they saw something in it – but it was buried and confused. Yeah, I knew that... So in 2024 I began working on a play I hadn’t looked since 2019. This exciting magical thing happened because I knew just what to do. It was, in a sense, given to me in a new way.
The Robertassey is a play that is both autobiography and imagination – it’s a play about reality which is completely made up. It’s emotionally true and entirely invented. It speaks with a voice I haven’t heard since I wrote CHARM all those years ago...
The Cast of The Robertassey - Photo by Laura Chapman