Spotlight: Marya Sea Kaminski

Known for her bold leading roles and stirring solo work, Seattle’s Marya Sea Kaminski takes herself offstage—and into the condos—with her new production

Staging A Condo
Good thing marya sea kaminski didn’t pay too much attention to her fourth-grade drama teacher, who, during a school production of The Wiz (in which Kaminski played both a crow and a flying monkey), asked her to “tone it down.” The 32-year-old actress, playwright and director has been stealing scenes ever since. 

She’s played leading roles—massive, memorable leads—in productions too many to number, most recently in Seattle Repertory Theatre’s My Name Is Rachel Corrie, Washington Ensemble Theatre’s BlahblahblahBANG! (a Hedda Gabler adaptation performed at On the Boards), Seattle Rep’s Road to Mecca and Seattle Shakespeare Company’s Electra. Kaminski has also written and performed more than 20 solo shows—brave endeavors she says she likes to tackle “because it’s dangerous.”

Her current project, Condo Millennium, is a different kind of risk. She’s writing and directing again, but this time she’s letting local actors do the performing. The concept took root in Kaminski’s mind four years ago as a personal reaction to the condo boom on Capitol Hill, where she was living. Then came the condo crash, providing even richer fodder. The play explores stereotypes (construction worker, real estate agent) as well as actual people living inside and up against condo culture (the script is partly based on hours of interviews). She intends it to paint a panoramic—and authentic—view of how condos have affected our urban landscape.

As with her flying monkey performance, Kaminski’s recent work hasn’t gone unnoticed. She received a City Artist Award from the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture (2009); was named Seattle’s Best Stage Actor by the Seattle Weekly (2008); earned a Spotlight Award from Seattle magazine (2007) and won a Footlight Award from The Seattle Times (2004 and 2007). Plus she’s a veritable Susan Lucci of The Stranger Genius Awards, short-listed every year from 2006 to 2009 without ever receiving the prize.
But the affable, endearing Kaminski is humble about all this glory, noting that her day job as an acting teacher at Cornish College of the Arts (“the best job in the world”) keeps her grounded. “The students are so hungry, they want it so much,” she says. “It reminds me to stay hungry.”

Growing up in Rochester, New York—her father was a chemical engineer and her mother, a homemaker—Kaminski’s appetite for performance emerged early. In elementary school she took dance classes and entered beauty pageants (nabbing Miss Greater Orleans County in 1987). Her mother regularly drove her into New York City for auditions (“but my little brother tagging along got all the roles,” she says). She pursued drama throughout high school and at the University of Pennsylvania, where she completed a B.A. in English literature and theater arts.

Kaminski took to the streets of New York City upon graduation, earning her solo-performance chops busking amid the huddled masses. Performing a collage of bits that she wrote, directed and produced—some overtly political, including a piece in which she tap-danced while reciting passages by Emma Goldman—she says she learned how to draw a crowd close.

Her thirst for solo performance whetted, Kaminski set her sights on the University of Washington’s Professional Actor Training Program, at the time one of the few advanced drama degrees with a solo work component. Most of her early solos were autobiographical—what she calls her “bootstraps girl” period. “I needed to be bootstraps girl at the time, but it doesn’t feed me like it used to,” she says somewhat wistfully.
Though her girl-next-door looks and quick-to-smile composure might mask it, Kaminski is deeply introspective about her role as performer. “Sometimes being an actor isn’t that fun,” she says, sincerely. “It can be unnerving to have people looking at you so much.” Which, given her recent spate of mega roles, is one of the reasons she’s decided to remain behind the scenes in Condo Millennium.
The multimedia performance includes animation, video portraits (à la Andy Warhol’s infamous screen tests), singing and dancing, music by local experimental composer Korby Sears, forays into the history of Seattle neighborhoods and flights of magical realism. It may be the most imaginative piece Kaminski has ever written.

“I’m most creative when I’m in safe circumstances—when the rent is paid and there’s food in the fridge,” she says, happy to have recently moved with her boyfriend into a house in Ravenna. “What is it that Flaubert said? ‘Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’” Kaminski laughs a big, booming laugh and adds, “It’s so uncool, but it’s sustainable.”
Originally published in May 2010