Alison H. Rich ’09

I’m gonna be a big deal,” jokes Alison H. Rich ’09. A veteran of the Harvard stage, she is preparing to take New York City by storm.

“No,” she amends, “but I am going to move to New York and just start auditioning and see where all that takes me. I feel like I’ve wanted to be an actor for so long that I’m just over being afraid of it. I’m just going to do it and I’m going to make the world take me as an actor.”

Throwing herself into the world of theater shouldn’t be a problem for Rich—it’s what she’s done since elementary school.

“I decided to be an actor when I was 9, before I really knew anything about any of it,” she says.

Since coming to Harvard, Rich has performed in 16 productions, playing characters such as Lillian LaFleur in “Nine,” Samuel Byck in “Assassins,” and April in “Company.” She has worked behind the scenes in several shows including “Alice and Wonderland” and “Bent,” but performing is both her passion and her priority.

“I’m kind of vain that way,” she quips. “No, I just love the experience of being on stage. It forces you to be in the moment in a way that you can’t duplicate in any other pursuits in life.”

Rich is also the co-president of the Sunken Garden Children’s Theater, a group that performs for Cambridge children during Arts First weekend. “It’s really just fun and fulfilling and goofy and great,” she says.

Performing to a younger set comes naturally for the charismatic and vivacious actress. “I like to do a lot of really over the top characters,” she says. “So I think children are my core audience.”

Although Rich has been extremely successful in theater at Harvard, there was a time when she thought she’d rather study acting elsewhere. At the end of her freshman year, she applied and was accepted to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she would have majored in theater. But at her parents’ urging, she remained at Harvard.

“I think it actually would have killed me to go to a conservatory where everyone’s just being snotty and competitive and vapid,” she says. “The students here are really serious about theater, but they also have serious opinions on politics and all those other fields. It has made me a fuller person than I would have been. I guess the thing is, I don’t always know what’s best for myself.”

Unlike Tisch, Harvard does not have a Drama concentration, but Rich has been able to pursue a special concentration in Dramatic Arts, in which she studies theater through the lens of literary analysis and psychology. As a culminating project, she has written a 75-page, 8-character play, which she describes as “really fun and farcical.”

As Rich anticipates her future dramatic endeavors, there are certain aspects of the theater community here that she expects to miss sorely.

“I take theater very seriously, but it’s also nice to do it in such a safe space,” she says. “Here, if I try to do a show and I bomb miserably, it doesn’t matter—there’s always another show. When you do that in the professional world, it starts to matter. It’s someone’s paycheck. It’s a review.”

Despite trepidations about leaving the warmth of Harvard’s theater community, Rich is excited for the challenges of New York theater.

“In the short term, I’d just like to be an independent person, getting professional work, not living in my parents’ home,” she says. “In the long term, the sky is the limit! I want to do everything.” She pauses briefly. “Really well.” —Staff writer Rachel A. Burns can be reached at rburns@fas.harvard.edu.