Artist Spotlight: Alona R. Bach

Alona R. Bach ’16, a student in Cabot House, is a theatrical force on Harvard’s campus. Most recently, she acted in Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s production of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” playing the part of Miss Prism for the second time in her life. Bach passionately pursued acting throughout her youth, developing a distinctly rich comprehension of drama. Last fall, HRDC premiered her script, “With Fates Driving,” at the Loeb Experimental Theater. This week, The Crimson sat down with Bach to discuss her focused and extensive passion for theater.

The Harvard Crimson: When did you realize that you might be interested in playwriting?

Alona R. Bach: When I was 12, I auditioned for a summer camp in New Jersey at Paper Mill Playhouse, and they called me in…for their main stage production, “Ragtime.” Through a connection from “Ragtime,” I was asked to work on a reading of a show called “Laughing Matter” while they were still developing the piece. I think that was the first time that I realized scripts could change. They were still being made, and it wasn’t just like there was this library of scripts that people pulled from…. For the first time, a script was something that was totally fluid and dynamic.

THC: When did you become more interested in playwriting and scripts?

AB: During my gap year before coming to college, I helped out at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. I sort of said, “I know you can’t pay me, but can you give me a temporary library card so I can check all the scripts out of your library?” And they did! There was a limit of five scripts, so I would just go on Tuesday, take home my five scripts, bring them back Thursday, take home five more, and just read so much.

THC: You’re a History of Science concentrator—an interesting contrast with theater. How do you think the two disciplines interact?

AB: History of Science is this kind of strange in-between field of bringing to life ideas, which I find fascinating. The stories and the histories of science are really fun. There’s definitely a danger to historians in putting them on stage, and to scientists as well. What a lot of people get angry about, especially with, for example, “The Imitation Game,” is that [such representations can] misrepresent science as one person as the hero, when it’s really this communal effort.

THC: Can you tell us a bit about the process of writing “With Fates Driving”?

AB: Senior year [of high school]…we were reading the “Aeneid” in Latin class. And [my Latin teacher] just had this fantastic way of…pointing out the very subtle things that Virgil was doing and bringing these characters from the dactylic hexameter…to life. And so we were translating the scene where Dido and Aeneas come head to head, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, this needs to be a play!” And so I went home, and I wrote a scene. Eventually, I tried to write a whole script…. I put it aside until spring of my freshman year here, when I was taking Advanced Playwriting with Liz Duffy Adams…[where] I was able to finish to a first draft of the script.

THC: What was it like seeing your work come to life onstage?

AB: I sat there the first night, and it was surreal. I knew the lines, but I had found all of these nuances. After one of the shows, we had a talkback with professors from the Classics department. And they situated it within the context of Augustan Rome, and they talked about Virgil, and really, intense, text-exegesis kind of things. And I was blown away…. I was so happy they were taking it so seriously and engaging with it on this level.

THC: Your theatrical pursuits must be quite demanding and time-consuming. What has been the hardest part about balancing that in your life?

AB: I’m a Modern Orthodox Jew, and there’s no way to balance that with theater…. You’re going to have to [work] with electricity, you’re probably going to write things down, [and] you’re going to get paid for working on a Saturday. Balancing that has been challenging. I take things as they come. I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I love tradition.