Loyola University • New Orleans • Volume 95 • Issue 3
M THE MAROON SEPTEMBER 9, 2016
Courtesy of Ann Mahoney
Loyola theater professor Ann Mahoney spends her off time in Georgia cleaning up the undead By Sean Brennan shbrenna@loyno.edu
One Loyola Professor juggles acting, parenting and teaching, and shows her students the balancing act. In 1986, Ann Mahoney Kadar landed her first ever gig as an actress. At ten years old, she earned a spot in Loyola’s stage production of Fiddler on the Roof, a minor role that became the start of a lifelong career. Today, thirty years later, Kadar can still be found on campus, acting, chasing down new roles and helping her students do the same. Kadar is a mother of two, a pro-
fessional actress and a professor in Loyola’s theater department. When she’s not traveling for work or caring for her 3-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son, the New Orleans native is teaching students how to manage the reality of life in the acting business. “You’re juggling,” Kadar said. “That’s what actors have to do. There’s a lot to balance in life.” Last year alone, Kadar auditioned for 54 different roles, most of which came in the same cluster of weeks. This was on top of playing Olivia, a reoccurring character in AMC’s show The Walking Dead, a mom in the recent film Bad Moms and char-
acters in various other productions. This means that in any given week, Kadar can have less than two days to memorize multiple scripts in between playing taxi-mom to her kids, teaching her students and handling whatever else comes her way. Then, she has to convince a room full of casters to give her a job. It’s the routine of a working actress; full of auditions, callbacks and, often, waiting on nothing. Kadar takes these experiences into teaching, and informs her students about every one of her auditions, good and bad. “No one tells you if you don’t get the part,” Kadar said. “Out of those
54, I got three. You’re going to fail. It’s what you do over and over again. That’s why I keep them up to date on my auditions; the ones I get and the ones I don’t.” By showing students her failures, Kadar, who started teaching at Loyola in 2012, brings the less glamorous side of the performance industry to the classroom. Ronald Chavis, a 2016 Loyola theater graduate and employee in the Office of Student Involvement, met Kadar his freshmen year and he still attends her class to train and offer assistance. “It was important to me to have a professor who’s still working. It’s
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like, you are who I aspire to be,” Chavis said. “She shares her experiences, and they tell me that I’m doing something right.” Whether it’s performing in regional theater or traveling to Comic Con with the rest of the The Walking Dead cast, Kadar consistently supplies her students with professional lessons. With each, she emphasizes persistence, balance and toughness. It is something that Chavis, an aspiring actor, said he takes to heart. “You can learn to deal with it and be fine with it, or give up. People like Ann teach us not to give up,” Chavis said.
See MAHONEY, page 7