VERO BEACH — What it took to bring Jeff Horger to Vero to take the director’s job at Riverside Children’s Theatre proves the cliché “life is not a dress rehearsal.” But he probably wishes he’d had one.
Amid a frenzy of tough decisions, Horger interviewed for the job with Riverside’s Kyle Atkins and Jon Moses in early March; two weeks later he flew down to Vero and RCT’s Linda Downey offered him the job.
A month later, he and his wife had barely toasted his Master of Fine Arts degree before he packed his bags for New York and then Havana, Cuba, to perform in a landmark play.
Meanwhile, his wife had finished up her comprehensive exams for her doctoral program, and was getting ready to tackle her dissertation, but where to write it was up in the air.
“My hiring process was so rapid that there came a point where we had to have a conversation,” recalls Horger of the head-spinning summer. “There were other options, but I told my wife I really like the town, I really like the job, we need to make a decision.”
So they made it: It was “Yes” to RCT.
Horger fills a vacancy left by Angelo Cerniglia, a popular teacher who spent four years with the Vero children’s theater before moving on to teach dance and acting in Atlanta earlier this summer.
Along with teaching, Horger will direct plays including an RCT program that brings performances to school children throughout the region.
Before tackling the job, though, Horger had made his third trip to Havana in two years.
The University of Alabama’s Cuba-Alabama Initiative has sent graduate acting students and professors to Cuba to work with actors there. Horger, who speaks Spanish and was earning his MFA, was an obvious choice to participate.
Last year, Horger helped translate the script for the play of a contemporary American playwright, then flew to Havana again.
As the sixth actor in a cast of five Cubans, he became the first American actor to perform a contemporary American work of theater since Fidel Castro’s takeover in 1959, he says.
This year, the program went even further, bringing Cuban actors to the States to train and perform, including a stint off-Broadway in New York.
A professor wrote an original play, and the Cuban government approved the Cuban actors’ travel to the U.S.
For a month, they rehearsed in Tuscaloosa, performing at the university for a week before heading to New York for a three-week off-Broadway run.
The company including Horger then went to Havana to perform for another two weeks.
“I was performing in English and there I switched to Spanish,” he says, describing that challenge as “bilingual schizophrenia.”
During those two weeks, due to Cuba’s limited technology, he was entirely out of cell phone and e-mail contact with his new employer, Riverside.
“I dropped off the radar,” he says. “I have to appreciate that they trusted I would just show up to work on Monday.”
Saturday, August 3rd: Horger was in Havana, staging a play with Cuban and American actors through his just-completed MFA in acting program at the University of Alabama.
Sunday, he flew to Miami, where his wife, Jess Hitchins, picked him up at the airport, a sizable favor considering she drove all the way from Tuscaloosa.
Monday morning, Horger reported for his new job at RCT.
That morning was Hitchins’ first look at Vero.
“Fortunately, she absolutely fell in love with the town,” says Horger.
His chief concern these days is to carry on a program begun last year, when Cerniglia and fellow RCT director Kevin Quillinan launched a new outreach program for RCT: Theatre on the Go.
It was designed to take short plays to schools with a group of intern actors, who also offer workshops relating the play to the kids’ day-to-day curriculum.
“It was the success of last year that is really allowing us to continue these,” says Horger. He is already rehearsing two of the four plays with this year’s cast of interns, “a fantastic trio,” as he calls them.
Those interns, college graduates with theater degrees, will change each year. Prior to the program, for the past 30 years, RCT has sent its instructors into schools to perform.
“We think it’s very important to infuse arts into academia,” Horger says. “There’s no such thing as an overexposure of the arts in education. We’re looking at ways to supplement kids’ academic prowess in school as well as letting them know we exist, that we have scholarships, after-school pickups, and home school options. It’s a way for us to get what we do out there.”
Once teachers have booked the group and the interns begin their nine-month run of performances, Horger will turn his focus to other things at Riverside, he says.
He has already absorbed the holiday vernacular – there is the Halloween Spook-tacular, and the Festival of Trees. And he’s going to be the music director of “A Christmas Carol,” which Quillinan is directing.
“We’re all theater generalists here,” says Horger. “And we’re all running a crazy Venn diagram of hamsters on wheels.”
As for Cerniglia’s dance instruction, Horger has assumed the teaching of one class in tap, though he “came to that party late” – when he got a part in “42nd Street” his sophomore year in high school. But the strongest “threat” of the famous “triple threat” in theater is not dance but music.
He plays a number of instruments including the bagpipes, and he sings.
Horger’s college years were designed to make himself a sort of academic triple threat, triple-majoring in theater, education and Spanish. When he graduated, he got a job teaching high school Spanish while working with the school’s drama clubs and coaching the speech team.
After three years, he quit to earn a BFA in acting at Alabama.
“They let me take a lot of undergraduate dance classes. I was the old geezer in the room. I wouldn’t say it qualified me as a dancer – I’m more of an ‘actor that moves’ – but it opened my eyes to a community involved with choreography and movement. And I learned the proper names for steps, not just ‘Faster.’ ‘Smoother.’”
The gene for performing seems to run through Horger’s siblings.
While his parents, a professor and a teacher-turned-dietician, weren’t on stage, they were “not necessarily theatrical but they were dramatic,” says Horger with a smile. His brother and sister-in-law perform in a band and his younger brother is in culinary arts.
“We all got involved in drama clubs and community theater.”
She and Horger have been coping with living apart since they met in high school, on “a prom date that never went away,” he says.
A year older than Horger, Hitchens went off to college while he finished high school. Then he went to college in a different town from hers.
The couple married right after graduation.
But then her Master’s program put distance between them again. It was only when she enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Tuscaloosa, and Horger pursued the MFA in acting, that they finally settled into their own home.
“But I still had auditions and summer work,” he says.
Horger and Hitchins are house hunting again, this time in Vero Beach.
Once they settle in, Hitchins will start looking for a job, hoping to still find time to write her dissertation in social and cultural foundations.
As for Horger, there are no more degrees in his future.
“An MFA in acting is a terminal degree,” he says. “I love the process of learning, but it’s like law school for a lawyer, or med school for a doctor. I’m done.”
