Today we’d like to introduce you to Alexandra Szeto-Joe.
Hi Alexandra, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I was always a creative kid and discovered the transformative power of art and creation at an early age – drawing, making up songs or dances, putting on little skits, playing very elaborate games of pretend with my brother and friends. It felt magical and invigorating to take an idea or feeling from inside my head and figure out how to express it accurately and fully, and it feels like I’ve been chasing that high my entire life.
Like any theater artist, I adore stories and I love the process of figuring out how to tell a story. I was drawn to literally any medium where I could explore and expand that love, my first big exploration being the sport of figure skating. I fell in love with the beautiful artistry and performance aspect of it: similar enough to the ballets I watched as a child, but just a little more daring given its all done on a 1/4 of an inch metal blade. I skated throughout childhood, competing locally and regionally, training and learning how to portray a narrative with just my face and body. In a funny way, the freedom and expression I found in figure skating set me up perfectly to take on the world of theater. Though the mediums are so technically different, both possess a necessary harmony of the mental and the physical in order to tell a story with one’s entire self – mind, body, and heart. I took up dance to supplement my figure skating training, and wound up finding the same thrill of performance off the ice. Dance led to the discovery of theater, and realizing that I could actually use my voice onstage.
I’m not sure I ever really had an “aha!” moment where I decided I needed to pursue theater as a career and a life. The more I learned about theater, the more curious I became. And the more answers I uncovered, the more I fell in love with acting. Sir Ian McKellen said it best, when faced with a similar question, he said, “I wanted to know how to create starlight.” I kept chasing this love, this insatiable curiosity to “create starlight.” What resulted was a steady, but relentless pursuit: theater summer camps turned into auditioning for the middle school musical, which turned into the joining the Acting Company in high school, which quickly turned into learning which colleges offered degrees in theater. An achievement of one goal immediately inspired the pursuit of a subsequent, bigger one – if I could overcome one challenge, what else could I do?? What else was possible?? I was also very lucky to have a mother who saw all this creative energy buzzing inside me, who supported me wholeheartedly, who exposed me to theater and dance in the first place, who found programs and arts education opportunities for me, and who was (and still is!) willing to learn about this crazy industry right alongside me. She told me that I could be anything I wanted to be – and she truly meant it – so it never really occurred to me that I shouldn’t try.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Oh, it’s been a rollercoaster. Things didn’t go at all how I imagined they would when I choose this career, but I’m incredibly grateful for every twist and turn.
Beyond the typical plight of being an actor (endless auditions and rejections, the spirals of comparison and self-doubt – all that fun stuff!), the biggest wrench in my plans was the 2020 shutdown. 2020 was the year I graduated college (NYU Tisch), so you can imagine the anxiety that was already building just increased tenfold. Staring down post-grad life as an actor was already daunting, but to graduate into an industry that simply didn’t exist at the time was devastating. Having spent the last 4 years in NYC, I thought I would stay in the city to build my life and career. That just wasn’t possible by the time I received my degree, so I moved back to Houston with a heavy, yet ultimately hopeful heart.
Those months in the shutdown were not easy, but with the support of my friends and family (and my own Capricorn stubbornness), I kept trucking along: reading plays every day, studying bootleg performances, honing my self-tape skills, performing in many a Zoom production – basically doing anything to keep fanning the flames of performance and art and expression. I didn’t know what the future held (no one did), but I knew I couldn’t just stop pursuing my dream. That simply was not an option. My heart wouldn’t allow it. By the time theater started opening back up, I still had no real plan for getting back to NYC, so in an effort to save rent money and do something with my time, I began auditioning for local Houston theaters. One audition led to another to another to another and the next thing I know it’s been 5 years and I’m staring at an extremely fruitful and wonderful start to my professional career. The Houston arts scene houses amazing opportunities and an incredible community, and experiencing all it has to offer has given me the support and strength to find my way back to NYC. I’m so grateful to be able to build and enjoy a career that crosses the country!
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I am an actor, but I’m really interested in exploring and creating art in any of its endless forms. There are thousands of ways to tell a story, and I’m fascinated by each and every one of them. For a majority of my career, I’ve performed in straight plays: I feel most at home in fast-paced, contemporary works akin to Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, and I also thrive in the denser, text-heavy classical worlds of Shakespeare and Chekhov. But I also adore musical theater, having spent half of my time at NYU training specifically in that genre, and I hope to do more musicals in the future. I’ve also found that I have a fondness and knack for farces, the sharpness and physical comedy that used to intimidate me now simply providing me a new avenue of expression.
Moment work is one of my favorite things as an actor – I love dissecting a scene beat by beat and digging around for all the nitty gritty details and nuances that make a character unique. It’s in that work that you find a character’s personality, their values, their logic, their triggers, their relationships. Discovering all of that knowledge and holding it in your body is the difference between just saying the words printed on the page and truly embodying those words and imbuing them with life and humanity. I’m constantly searching for all those things, even long after a show has opened and I’m performing every night. The investigation and discovery never stops. I think this practice allows me to find the unexpected multitudes within a character, and affords me the opportunity to surprise audiences (and on occasion, castmates) with a certain reaction or line delivery or perspective that can enrich my character’s arc even more. I’ve played many characters who present themselves a certain way at first, easily identifiable and able to be categorized by the audience. But I never want to play my idea of a person or a character. I always aim to ground them in reality and try to build them into a fully realized human, and in this pursuit I’m able to find bursts of expression that seemingly contradict the picture that was originally presented. As stated in ‘The Mirror Crack’d’ which I performed at The Alley this past summer, “No one is ever just one thing.”
Right now, I think I’m really proud of my work in my current show, “Becky Nurse of Salem” by Sarah Ruhl. It’s an emotional beast of a play. I play Gail, the granddaughter of the title character, and she’s so different from any character I’ve had to play in recent years. She’s loud and messy and angry and gets ugly, and she feels everything at 110%. She’s overflowing with multitudes and contradictions, and possesses the spitfire that only a teenage girl who is screaming to be heard can have. It’s been a wonderful challenge stepping into her shoes and charting her journey every night.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
I grew up in a Lord of the Rings household, so one of my favorite memories has to be every year when we’d break out our DVD box set and hunker down for a rewatch of the entire trilogy – extended edition, of course. We’d make popcorn, turn off all the lights, and just let the story wash over us. And after the movies, we’d watch all deleted scenes and bonus features too!!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://alexandraszeto-joe.com/
- Instagram: @alikittycatt (Alexandra Szeto-Joe)
Image Credits
All known photo credits should be in file names!!
