This article was published on January 20, 2017

MEET JENNIFER LE BLANC

Jennifer Le Blanc, Miriam A. Laube and Nance Williamson in The Book of Will, 2017. Photo by Adams VisCom

At the Theatre Company: Pride and Prejudice and Our House. Regional Theatre: Love’s Labour’s Lost, Macbeth and The Three Musketeers at Colorado Shakespeare Festival; Silent Sky, 33 Variations, and Sense and Sensibility at TheatreWorks; Disgraced at Capital Stage; Fifth of July at Aurora Theatre Company; Othello at Arabian Shakespeare Festival; Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew at Livermore Shakespeare Festival; By and By at Shotgun Players; Eurydice at Artists Repertory Theatre; and Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Imaginary Invalid at Pacific Repertory Theatre. Training: MFA from National Theatre Conservatory

• Hometown: Oakland
• Web site: jenniferleblanc.com
• Training: BA in English Lit from UC-Berkeley; Masters in Fine Arts from the National Theatre Conservatory at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts
• What was the role that changed your life? Playing Rosalind in As You Like It and Desdemona in Othello at the Napa Valley Shakespeare Festival. After being cast in those roles, my husband, Gregg, very sweetly encouraged me to quit my job at a software company and pursue my love of acting.
• Why are you an actor? I love sharing stories with other people. It’s exciting to imagine seeing the world through someone else’s eyes and trying to understand how they feel and why they make the decisions they do.
• What would you be doing if you weren’t an actor: Dramaturgy or teaching English.  I adore research and books. I’m a total word nerd.
• Ideal scene partner: Emma Thompson is incredible. Her combination of honesty, intelligence, humor and ease inspires me.
• Why does The Book of Will matter? We think of Shakespeare’s canon as this great collection of phenomenal plays, as a fixture of every Literature Department – and this play shows how it came to be. We get to meet the remarkable people who made it possible.  And we get to see how their lives were touched by their friend Will, as well as William the playwright.
• What do you hope the audience gets out of seeing it? I hope the audience experiences a story of great friendships, a fascinating moment in history, some humor, some heartbreak and some adventure.
• Finish this sentence: “All I want is …”
  ” … to learn more and to do more for the world around me.”