If the adage is true that if you want to master something, teach it, Megan Taylor Callahan will return to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in the fall knowing more about the craft of acting.
Last weekend, Callahan, a rising senior at NYU, was back in Vero directing advanced Vero Beach High School drama students in David Ives’ avant-garde comedy “All in the Timing.” Opening night, it was a packed house – though that wasn’t hard to do in the tiny Freshman Learning Center black box theater. But the intimate audience made a lot of noise, clapping enthusiastically after each of six vignettes, acted – and directed – at a level well beyond most expectations.
It was the second in Callahan’s Summerstage series, founded last year for the school’s competition drama troupe.
After the show wrapped up Sunday, Callahan moved on to a younger crowd of acting students the very next morning: the Vero Beach High School Drama Camp for kids in grades 3 through 8. After several years of working as a counselor, for the first time she has been hired as the camp’s director. At only 20, she has responsibility for some 50 students eight hours a day for two weeks, directing them in a production of the musical “Dear Edwina Jr.” in the high school’s Performing Arts Center.
Last year’s Summerstage production, “Almost, Maine,” marked Callahan’s directorial debut, coaching kids only slightly younger than herself, several of whom she has known from childhood and her days at Riverside Children’s Theatre.
Though camp director is a paying job, for Callahan, Summerstage was strictly volunteer. And she came up with the idea, presenting it to her former drama teacher Dee Rose, who was immediately all for it.
That meant coming home to direct as soon as exams were over at Tisch.
Not that she doesn’t need a vacation. In New York, she maintains a grueling schedule along with enduring the stress of city living and NYU’s scattered urban campus. In addition to rigorous academics, Callahan trains at the Stella Adler School of Acting, one of eight studios that partners with NYU. Three days a week, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., she moves from a two-hour movement class to a vocal class, a break for lunch, then two scene classes. She calls her instructors “incredible.”
It was under their influence that Callahan realized she wants to be a dramatic actor as opposed to playing in musicals, the bulk of her experience at both Riverside Children’s Theatre and Vero High. “There were kids who came from performing arts school where they were acting in plays like Gibson and Chekhov. “I didn’t know anything about classical plays.”
Directing her second straight play for Summerstage is reinforcing her training, she says.
“It’s helped me analyze my own acting, like, why isn’t this translating, or how could I make this scene better?”
As director of summer camp, Callahan is replacing Rose, the longtime Vero High drama teacher who is facing a summer of recuperation from knee surgery. Rose used to teach at Riverside Children’s Theatre, and met Callahan in a production of “Beauty and the Beast.”
“She was on my tech crew in 2006,” says Rose. “What 10-year-old would say, ‘Oh, I’ll go ahead and do tech since I didn’t get a role in the show’? And she would just do anything, no matter what task she was given. Very compliant, so willing and ready to learn.”
By the time Callahan entered high school, she showed enough leadership that Rose named her co-president of the drama troupe, standing in for Rose when she was unavailable. “That’s when she really blossomed. She really took the bull by the horns and everybody was extremely receptive.”
This summer, watching from her office, Rose has seen Callahan conduct rehearsals and marveled at the respect students give her. “It’s absolutely amazing,” she says. “She’s just three years into college, and these kids listen to her like she has 300 years of experience. I see my kids doing things I didn’t teach them, and they go, ‘Oh, we learned that from Megan last summer.’”
Indeed, last weekend the actors delivered performances of sophisticated absurdist comedy that would easily make an audience forget they were watching kids. “I hear that all the time from parents,” she says. She adds that this particular group is exceptionally talented.
“Every actor is unique,” says Callahan. “So I just try to look at how they think. If they’re musical theater kids, I try to relate things to songs, like, in a song you wouldn’t keep the same dynamics because that would be boring. You need to build in different colors in this scene.”
Even though she herself is still young – and a student – Callahan has found in herself a love of teaching that may well lead her to her ultimatum profession. She also has, from first-hand experience, an understanding of the safe haven a school drama department can be.
“Theater makes you so vulnerable when you’re up there and show yourself like that,” says Callahan. “In a public high school, the kids don’t really respect the theater like they would in an arts school. Having that close-knit group that takes it seriously is like an alternate reality. When I was in high school, competition drama was my escape. It was like my family.”
In ways, Callahan means that literally. She is an only child, born in Vero and raised by her father. The executive chef at The Isles of Vero and, before that, Dodgertown, Bruce Callahan understands his daughter’s passion. He pursued his own at the Culinary Institute of America in New York.
From Megan’s first play at Riverside, he has made a point of seeing not just every show, but every performance, sometimes for three weeks running and always in the same seat. He still flies up to see her performances in New York.
While his daughter had only an offstage role, Bruce Callahan saw all three of the shows she directed last weekend. Emerging from the theater and walking the gauntlet of celebrating cast members, he had a slightly stunned expression on his face, as if his daughter’s talent was showing itself in ways he never expected. “It was really good,” he said seriously. “Really good.”
“Dear Edwina Jr.” has evening performances June 24 and 25 at 7:30 p.m. and matinees June 25 and 26 at 2 p.m. All performances are at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center.
