Richmond Hill Players Veteran Jennifer Kingry On Stage in Two-Woman Play
Jennifer Kingry of Geneseo is synonymous with her hometown’s Richmond Hill Players and its iconic Barn Theater, not just because she’s been its longtime publicist.
She’s done lighting for well over 100 shows there and has directed 20 since 2000, including its last in August, the Steve Martin comedy, “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” Now, Kingry is stepping into rare shoes as actor, in the next production, “Collected Stories,” a compelling and deeply human drama by Donald Margulies, to be presented October 1-11. Mike Skiles, Geneseo, directs the play.
A 1997 Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama, Collected Stories explores the volatile relationship between Ruth Steiner, an established and respected short-story writer (played by Kingry), and Lisa Morrison, her eager, starry-eyed student-turned-protégé (Dana Skiles). Over six years, their bond deepens from mentorship to intimate friendship—until Lisa writes her much-anticipated debut novel based on a deeply personal, secret episode from Ruth’s past. This powerful two-woman play examines the complex boundaries of creative freedom, ambition, and betrayal, ultimately asking: who owns a story once it is shared?
Kingry said recently she was taken aback when the first director, Tom Morrow, wanted to cast her. One of Ruth’s appropriate lines in the play is, “There’s nothing worse than getting what you wanted.”
Her last onstage appearance was in Lora Adams’s production of “Silent Sky” at Moline’s Black Box Theatre in 2019. That pivotal play for Kingry is set in the early 20th century, and she played Williamina Fleming, a Scottish astronomical researcher at the Harvard Observatory.
She’s only appeared in four plays since she became active again in community theater in 1998. Two were for RHP (one was a dinner theater presentation at a separate venue), and in 2012, she played a few small roles in Prenzie Players’ “Henry V.”
“I did act more frequently when I was much, much younger, from grade school and on through high school, appearing in both school and community theater productions,” Kingry said by email. “Acting was my initial interest in theater. But I was also began directing very early and, gradually, that superseded as my primary pursuit. I’ve often said, the director in me recognized that the actor in me wasn’t particularly good!”
She noted “Silent Sky” was her favorite role. “I was already in love with that play; I’d submitted at RHP a couple of times and it kept getting turned down. When I saw Lora was going to do it Black Box, I could hardly bear not to be involved somehow. Then she put out a notice that she was looking for an older actress who could do a Scots accent, and that happened to be an accent I already had down,” Kingry recalled. “But I would say a close second favorite was my very first role at RHP, as the Dutch psychic Helga Ten Dorp in the 1998 production of Deathtrap. She was very kooky and, of course, she had the Dutch accent. I must like accent work.”
In 2022, she got to direct “Silent Sky” at the Barn in Geneseo, which (like “Picasso”) she made the unusual move of removing one side of seats to feature more set.
“The lead character, Henrietta Leavitt (brilliantly played by Kady Derbyshire in our production), has a soliloquy at the end of the play. She is looking back on her short life, which was spent calculating the distances between stars,” Kingry wrote. “Her soliloquy begins: “But light has never let me down.”
“The first time I read that in the script, I burst into tears. That speech, and the play itself, ends with these words: “Because wonder will always get us there… Those of us who insist there is much more beyond ourselves,” she said. “And I do. And there’s a reason we measure it all in light.”
“I’ve directed and designed lights for many different venues; each of them presented unique challenges and satisfactions,” Kingry said. “I’m passionate about directing because certain scripts simply capture my heart, or take hold of my imagination, and I feel like I have to do them or burst. And, in a development that came as a shock to me initially, it has turned out I’m a pretty visual person (back in my film school days, I was all about the story, didn’t think I had any particular bent toward the visual side.) So the lighting of a show – how it’s going to look ultimately – is intimately aligned with my vision of it and my desire to produce it.
The challenge of a two-person show
The biggest struggle doing “Collected Stories,” is naturally, because there are only two characters, there are a LOT of lines.
“I mean, tons of them,” Kingry said. “Simply reviewing all my lines takes at least a couple of hours, and I’m only talking about skimming through them, not the working and reworking certain passages that aren’t sticking. As an infrequent actor, my muscle memory for line memorization is not as strong as it should be, added to the fact that I’m 71 years old. So learning the lines is a big hurdle.
“We also had a shorter rehearsal schedule than most shows do at RHP, just four weeks and a bit, where shows more typically rehearse 6-7 weeks. Plus, I was tied up directing Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which closed the day before we began rehearsing Collected Stories; I spent all my spare time during the first week of rehearsal restoring the light grid from the approximately 44 adjustments I had to make to accommodate Picasso,” Kingry recalled. “Memorizing lines didn’t begin until the second week of rehearsal, something I deeply regret now.”
Looking back, she admits she doesn’t particularly enjoy acting.
“It’s a lot of work and suffering for something that I don’t end up drawing very much satisfaction from, probably because I feel like such a fraud onstage,” Kingry said. “The cost-benefit ratio doesn’t just work for me. Secondly, this will undoubtedly sound like a really shallow reason to object to acting, but there it is: I hate wearing makeup and I hate wearing ill-fitting clothes. I’m a person with sensitive skin who dresses entirely for comfort; the prospect of wearing things not primarily made of cotton immediately sets my teeth on edge.
“Back in far distant days when I worked in the film industry, I would sometimes talk to stunt people about the possibility of transitioning into their line of work,” she said. “But then, I would watch them have to squeeze into some polyester clothes that were sized for the actor they were doubling, and having wigs and makeup applied to them, and I’d think – no way! Frankly, the idea of wigs, makeup and uncomfortable clothes frightened me more than the prospect of learning to do falls.”
For all the work she’s put in learning the copious dialogue, “I do find the play to a very interesting character study,” Kingry said. “The characters are very well-written, very believable in their conflicting motives and viewpoints. Neither one is completely right or completely wrong. In that way, the play feels very human and mature, a play for grown-ups.”
Lighting up her life
In addition to all the RHP shows she’s done lighting for, Kingry has designed lights for 30-some shows at Playcrafters in Moline, and another 25-30 for various other groups and schools, since 1998. She’s also handled the sound for about 75% of her shows.
She has known RHP stalwarts Dana and Mike Skiles nearly 30 years, which for Dana means, since she was just a kid. Mike took over the task of directing when Tom Morrow had to bow out, during the second week of rehearsal, Kingry said. “That would be a daunting task for most people, but Mike is always a calm and reliable guy, and a hugely calming influence on the rest of us. He knows what needs to happen and he just goes about quietly getting it done.”
While Dana attended Western Illinois University in Macomb, Kingry would drive down a couple of times to see university theater productions with her, or to see her acting in community theater shows.
“At the time when she directed her first play in 2013, the Dispatch/Argus used to do profiles on an actor or director for each show. Since Dana was the person being covered that time, I was asked to provide a photo of her working with her cast, so I hung out during notes to grab that shot,” Kingry recalled. “Afterwards, I commented to her mom, Jackie Skiles, ‘Dana was giving really good notes; I think directing is something she’s going to turn out to be good at.’ It’s not that I was particularly surprised, but, the fact is, not everybody who is a good actor turns out to be a good director. And Dana certainly did turn out to be that. She’s one of our most successful director/designers at RHP.”
This is their first time acting together, and Kingry said their backgrounds in directing has “meant that we both pick up quickly on any changes either one of us wants to introduce in the blocking or in how we think a certain moment should play out. Numerous times, one of us has begun, ‘What if, instead, we tried this…’ and the other person always gets exactly where they’re going,” Kingry said. “That’s been a pleasure.”
Kingry is semi-retired, working part-time as an administrative assistant for First Presbyterian Church in Geneseo.
A warm, inviting home
She said Richmond Hill has a reputation of being a warm, welcoming place for all casts and crews.
“Of course, a lot of that flowed from John VanDeWoestyne, who was RHP president at the time I got involved (one of his several terms), and ‘Mr. Richmond Hill’ at all times, on the board or off of it,” Kingry said. “He was a big personality, a great talent, and he set the tone for the whole place then. But even since we lost him in 2020, I think RHP still maintains that atmosphere to a large degree.”
“To be fair, I think most other theaters are more open and inviting nowadays, perhaps from necessity. The COVID closure set a lot of groups back in terms of resources and volunteers, and there is more competition for participants due to there being more active theaters now than there were then,” she added, “So I think every place has become more receptive to newcomers. But RHP was the first home I found.”
Kingry also has a lot of personal investment in the Barn, her home away from home.
“When I first started working there, I immediately started investigating their light rig, because I had a show in mind to submit that I knew would call for special lighting, being a memory play,” she said. “I was a bit dismayed to find that, in ’98, they didn’t really have a real system in place. They were kind of just moving lights around willy-nilly, pointing them this way or that for each individual show. It was a pretty rudimentary setup then, at least as compared to what we have today, but they weren’t getting the most of out of what it could do.
“John asked me tech that show at the end of the first season. By my second year, I was re-arranging the rig to create better coverage on our stage, establishing a standard pattern that could work for almost every show,” Kingry said. “That way, designers usually only had to deal whatever special lights they needed to put in, rather than start from scratch each time. Larry Lord did loads of the hard work of running cable and repairing broken dimmers (he’s forgotten more about electronics and electricity than I will ever know! From time to time, I still have to ask him: ‘If I do this, will I be killed instantly?’) But the systemization came from me.”
“Similarly, when we did our major tech renovation in 2014, I worked with a professional theater designer, Casey Diers, then based in Chicago, on upgrading our entire system,” she said. “We had many telephone conferences, some face-to-face meetings, including rendezvousing at one of the annual conferences/stage expos of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology to study the equipment and developments. Casey provided the technical expertise to build the plot for our new setup and his input was invaluable, but he developed that plan according to the needs and wants I outlined. Effectively, it was a much-improved version of the system I initiated in ’99.
“So, yes, I do love RHP and the Barn does hold a lot of my heart.”
For “Collected Stories,” the performances will be 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays (Oct. 1-3 and 8-10), and 3 p.m. Sundays, Oct. 4 and 11. Reservations are recommended and can be made by calling the Richmond Hill box office at 309-944-2244 or by visiting the website at rhplayers.com.
Late seating is not permitted; no one will be admitted to the theater after the show has started. Patrons who leave the theater during the performance will not be allowed to return to their seat until a suitable break in the play occurs. Admission to all performances is $12.
An audio description performance will be held Friday, Oct. 2. Richmond Hill also offers Assistive Listening Devices (ALDs), which can be requested at the time that reservations are made.
