Today we’d like to introduce you to Jacquelyn Landgraf.
Hi Jacquelyn, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My life so far has been divided among the three big cities of America–I grew up a good Catholic girl from the South Side of Chicago, moved to New York when I was eighteen to be a wild woman of the theater, and eighteen years later moved to Los Angeles for the low rent and gas prices.
I am an actor, writer, director, producer, and teacher. I was lucky to have felt a sense of vocation early and even luckier that I had people around me take that instinct seriously. I always had older mentors. I was indoctrinated from age eleven into what I would call the “Chicago Gruff School of Artists.” The credo being: this is work, it isn’t easy but it is an exhilarating and meaningful life, so roll up your sleeves, put your nose to the grindstone, show up on time, be prepared, be kind and curious, take your imagination seriously, focus on what’s in your control, and settle in for the long game. So by the time I got to college, when our teachers who were professional artists themselves were telling us, “Don’t wait around for a phone call. Create your own work, it will save you,” that was a clarion call that made sense to me.
I have been nurtured as a creator through many long collaborations with wonderful people and companies. Primarily, the Atlantic Theater in New York City, where in addition working as an actor and director in their off-Broadway theaters, I became their youngest faculty member at twenty-three years old, teaching their signature acting technique, Practical Aesthetics, to the NYU Tisch School of the Arts undergraduate actors and their professional conservatory students. The same year I began teaching I joined the experimental theater company The New York Neo-Futurists, where I worked for eight years as an ensemble member and co-artistic director. We wrote all of our own material, including the cult hit late-night shows Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 plays in 60 minutes) and The Infinite Wrench, and a long roster of downtown performance pieces and plays that garnered New York Innovative Theater Awards, the Caffe Cino Award, and Drama Desk nominations.
These companies helped shape my aesthetic and feed my passion for incubating new material and for helping others develop their ideas and bring their stories to life. I love being part of a newly created thing. As an actor, I have been in the original cast of the U.S. premieres of plays by John Guare, Chuck Mee, Koffi Kwahulé, Mark Anthony Turnage, Suzan Lori-Parks, Steve Drukman, and Liz Swados, among others. I write and produce my own work for the theater, audio, and other mediums. I teach acting and writing workshops across the country and internationally, and I work closely with performers, ensembles, film and television directors, screenwriters and playwrights and podcasters as a story consultant and coach. A lot of my work is about guiding people through a highly focused and disciplined but also radically playful creative process that leads them to their best results.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Well, as I’m sure many people reading tidbits in Voyage LA and on their own LA voyages can relate to, in pursuit of artistic work, I feel I have taken unconventional paths that lead to an unconventional but full life. It is sometimes difficult, always extremely suspenseful, but it’s usually not lonely and it’s not boring. In the in-between times, there is worry about making ends meet and about finding the next right thing. I made a leap of faith when I moved from New York to LA. As I used to tell my freshman college students, when you change your geography, you change your destiny. It just so happened that I settled into my apartment here on March 1, 2020. Navigating a new chapter of life in a brand-new city through the pandemic was strange and sad, doubly disorienting. But the timing also made me feel real gratitude towards Los Angeles in ways I may not have been so alert to if it was all business as usual. There is so much beauty here, and good people. I felt a real refuge in the city, in my little apartment on the east side with the hummingbirds and hibiscus and the pull-down ironing board and old forgotten tiny door for the milkman. There has been an abundance of newness since I got to LA, and I am excited for what’s next, even if it’s not always smooth sailing down the literal and metaphorical freeways.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m excited to talk a bit about my current project. I write, direct, produce, and star in the musical fiction podcast It Makes A Sound. The show is about a woman who has returned home to a decrepit golf course community to care for her mother who has dementia when she finds a cassette tape from 1992 in the attic containing the lost concert of a forgotten local genius, Wim Faros. Tragically, the tape is rendered unplayable, and in the attempt to recreate the music entirely from memory, soon she and her mother find themselves fronting a wildly avant-garde multigenerational band that accidentally becomes a cult sensation.
The series touches on many themes that I tend to return to obsessively–the fallibility of memory, nostalgia, caretaking, fandom in all its quirky glory. But it is especially about transcending solitude and loss with whimsy, faith, and rock and roll. We just released the second season, which was written and recorded remotely over these past few years, and I think deeply infused with the feelings of that/this time.
I love making this show. Fiction podcasting was initially a journey thrust upon me and it has been such a creative wonderland. It Makes A Sound has a devoted listenership of passionate fans of all ages and over one million downloads worldwide since its debut in 2017. The cast includes some of my favorite actors and people: Annie Golden, Melissa Mahoney, Wes Zurick, Rebecca Delgado Smith, Esther Moon, Roberta Colindrez, Siobhan Fallon Hogan–and original music by Nate Weida and Vin Cacchione. We have an original soundtrack album, Wim Faros: the Attic Tape, that charted in its first week due entirely to word-of-mouth from fans. Our second soundtrack album will be released later this year.
What does success mean to you?
Being able to keep your appetite large for what the world has to offer. Feeling that your forward-facing self aligns with your inner best impulses so that you are sharing and not hiding the goodness and greatness you know you are capable of, and making a positive impact on others.
Contact Info:
- Website: bio.site/jacquelynlandgraf
- Instagram: @jacquelynlandgraf
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacquelynlandgraf/
- Twitter:@jacqlandgraf + @
IMASpodcast - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ItMakesASound
Image Credits
personal photo-Maura Grace Photography It Makes A Sound logo-Dave Watt
