FRIEND CRUSH A behind the scenes look into the friendship of Theatre West directors Katy Nahra, Ann Rocarek and Christian Aanestad.
T H E AT R E W E S T FEATURING....
Christian Aanestad Technical Director
Kathy Nahra Director
Ann Rocarek Director
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PROFILES FEB. 21, 2020
BY MISHA CANIN & NATALIE DUNLAP
I
n the morning, the three meet for coffee ahead of their busy days. At lunch, they are gathered around the dining table in Room 102, definitely not gossiping about their students. In the evenings, they can be found in the auditorium blocking scenes, building set pieces and planning for the upcoming production. This is just an average day for the iconic trio of Theatre West directors made up of art teacher Christian Aanestad and English teachers Katy Nahra and Ann Rocarek. In the summer of 2018, just months out from the upcoming production of “Miracle on 34th Street,” Theatre West was in dire need of a technical director. Sitting at Bluebird Diner discussing the issue, Rocarek asked Nahra who she would choose to fill the empty position if she could pick anybody. Enter stage left: Aanestad. He was the perfect match for the position, whether he knew it yet or not. “I didn’t feel like I was qualified,” Aanestad said. “I’m still not actually, technically qualified. I didn’t know how to run a lightboard. I didn’t know how to run a soundboard. I didn’t know how any of it worked.” He agreed to take the position with the understanding that it would be a temporary arrangement and that he would do the job while they looked for someone else. After all, Aanestad had never worked in the theater before. He called auditions “tryouts,” rehearsals “practices” and intermission “half-time.” However, Nahra’s unexpected pitch came to Aanestad at an opportune time for him. “In hindsight, I think I was looking for a new creative outlet artistically, and I didn’t realize that this could be it,” Aanestad said. And so the first act began, three teachers at West High would soon become the best of friends, each of them playing a vital role in the other two’s lives, in and outside of the theater. Nahra and Rocarek’s families are close in both a literal and figurative sense. They live near each other, and sometimes people even think they live together because they refer to their area as where “we live” and their children as “our kids.” The pair have supported each other as colleagues and fellow parents by
balancing their workload among each other. “It got to the point where we said if we’re going to keep doing this, we can’t burn out … So, Ro was kind enough to offer to do a show when I was on maternity leave with [my son] Charley. It went really well,” Nahra said. “And then I think she got the bug for [directing] too and was like, ‘Actually I really enjoy the creative process and doing all this.’ So we said, ‘Well why don’t we each take a show, but instead of one of us always doing a musical or something we just flip flop every year?’” Besides Rocarek taking the directing role in
“TH E R E’S ALWAYS ON E OF US THAT I S STABLE . WE’ R E ALWAYS ALLOWE D TO HAVE FR EAK OUTS, BUT OUT OF TH E TH R E E OF US SOM E BODY HAS TO BE STABLE . AN D IT’S FU N NY HOW IT CHANG ES.” - KATY NAH RA , ENGLISH TEACH ER