Good morning world – what a great weekend! So happy to present this week’s Women in Entertainment article on my friend, Katie Rubin, an actress, writer, comedian and spiritual healer whom I met a couple of years ago at the Hollywood Fringe Festival.
Rubin has been a force on stage for many years. She got her early education at Amherst College in Massachusetts before moving to the west coast to attend the University of California Davis, where she received her MFA in 2005. During those early years, she also received training in New York City, as well as Los Angeles. She has performed on stage in Los Angeles and Sacramento, appeared on A&E’s 100 Center Street and three indie films, as well as written and toured with four solo shows.
She toured her first comedic solo show Insides OUT! to venues across the country for eight years. The show received a nine week Equity production at The Sacramento Theater Company from March through April 2006, as well as a four week run at the Foothill Theater Company in Nevada City. The show has toured to over 100 events and venues.
Her second solo show Amazing and Sage was commissioned by Capital Stage Theater Company. Her third solo endeavor My Spiritual Death, a Comedy Show! is currently touring the country, while her fourth show Everything, All at Once! is on commission with The Cell Theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In fact, she was performing her third show when I met her at the Hollywood Fringe and convinced her to bring the show (originally called Why I Died, a Comedy!) to Missoula, Montana for the 2014 Zootown Fringe Festival.
Her first original piece PartyBoobyTrap was performed while she was an undergrad at Amherst College, while her second Avoiding Less Blue was performed at the 2000 New York Fringe Festival. She also wrote two plays under commission of the UC Davis Department of Health, as well as a 10 person play for the Capital Stage’s annual fundraising event.
Among her multitude of acting roles are performances as Tanya in The North Plan, as Mrs. Daldry in The Next Room or The Vibrator Play, and as Wendy in Hunter Gatherers, all at the Capital Stage Theater in Sacramento, California; as Izzy in Rabbit Hole and as The Nurse in Wit at The B Street Theater; a double role as Mrs. Cratchit and the Ghost of Christmas Past in the Sacramento Theater Company production of A Christmas Carol and as Mayella in To Kill a Mockingbird; and as Mrs. Pennywise in Urinetown at the Foothill Theater.
What inspires Rubin? “In terms of what inspired me to get started on this crazy path, it was the fact that I always had something to say and a strong desire to say it creatively, in characters, and on stages. I am a Writer/Performer, which is to say- I have always had strong points of view about the world, big questions about existence and being alive, and an equally big need to talk about and explore them creatively. I don’t know where those particular drives come from- I imagine it is the same for athletes and/or entreprenuers- that a strong need to do a seemingly strange, but ultimately inspiring thing arises and one either answers the call, or suffers at the hands of not having done so. I know for msyelf when something wants to be created and I do not create it, my experience of being alive is painful- it’s like I’m living a lie or half-living. It’s empty and vacant and unsatisfying. Then again, in heeding the call, there are all kinds of other stressors and tensions- anxiety, fear, doubt, time and money pressures, social pressures, expectations, etc. These, however can be managed. But the life unlived, the words not said, cut much more deeply. For me, anyway. I think that is because each of us is here to contribute to the Communion of We, to the greater good, to mankind and its evolution. And when we refuse or fail to do so, I think we suffer, and the purpose of that particular brand of suffering is to drive us forward.”
