Making Magicin the Wings
A Starcatcher’s Origin Story
By George Soltes
Photos by Annie Graebner
Amanda Yeoman Brooke always knew that she would be an actor. As a child obsessed with the 1950s sitcom “I Love Lucy,” she would memorize and reenact entire scenes, playing the parts of both Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. “I thought, this is the best way to live life,” she recalled. “You’re just making people laugh.”
After graduating from the University of Washington with an acting degree, Yeoman Brooke followed the trajectory of many aspiring performers and took off for Los Angeles. The experience was sobering. “When you think about being an actor, you’re facing 99 percent rejection,” she said. “It’s such a drive of, ‘What can you do for me?’”
When she and her husband, animator Jordan Brooke, began to consider starting a family, they decided that they didn’t want to raise kids in L.A. and returned to their roots in the Pacific Northwest.
While Yeoman Brooke continued to pursue roles for herself, she found that she had a new goal: to help young people experience acting without having to run the same gauntlet she did. “I had this drive to make teens feel like it’s more accessible than I felt,” she said. “I wanted to show them that you don’t have to wait around for people to hand you yeses. You can go out and create for yourself.”
She began offering acting classes at the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts and, after settling on Bainbridge in 2018, started teaching on the island. When the BPA Theatre School, paused during the COVID pandemic, was revived in 2022, Elizabeth Allum, BPA director of education at the time (and now its executive director), brought Yeoman Brooke on board. She gradually transitioned to take over Allum’s former role and, about 18 months ago, became Theatre School manager.
Since then, the school’s productions have become ever more ambitious. Last summer, Yeoman Brooke directed her first ever musical, “Disney’s Mary Poppins JR.” After the success of that abridged, 60-minute show, she started to think even bigger. “Our theater school students can handle so much,” she said. “They are so capable and wonderful that I couldn’t just go back to a junior version of something. I felt they could probably take on a full production.
That production, which will debut this summer, is the five-time Tony Award-winning “Peter and the Starcatcher,” which tells the story of how a nameless orphan became Peter Pan. The play’s themes resonated deeply with Yeoman Brooke. “It’s about the true sense of belonging that you discover along the way with the right people,” she said. “I think that really mirrors the way theater school feels to a lot of these kids.”
“Peter and the Starcatcher” will feature 28 actors, aged 9 to 17. Willow Schmidt, 14, who has been with BPA since fifth grade, will be one of the cast members. She said that Starcatcher’s story reminded her of her original motivation to perform. “When I started doing theater” she said, “I did it because I wanted to play pretend for as long as I possibly could. For me, that’s kind of what this show is about.”
Laurel Marlantes, the show’s choreographer, echoed those sentiments. “It’s a celebration of imagination and wonder,” she said, “and that, to me, is what is so precious about childhood.”
While Starcatcher’s youthful cast members are undoubtedly the theater school’s splashiest and most public-facing students, Yeoman Brooke emphasized that there is something there for everyone, young or old, even those who have no desire to be in front of an audience. Recent classes have taught directing, set building, writing and choreography, in addition to staples, such as improvisation and acting. For the curious but uncertain, Yeoman Brooke even offered a workshop called “Acting Workshop: For Those Who Never Thought About Taking an Acting Workshop.”
Whatever their goals, Yeoman Brooke hopes that all students will come away with more than just a new skill set.
“It’s really a space of feeling like I can show up as I am and walk through the doors and I’m already enough,” she said. “No matter where you’re at in life, you’re going to come to this space and awaken and discover something within and then realize that you’re in a place where that’s supported and uplifted.”
>>“Peter and the Starcatcher” opens on July 24. For showtimes and tickets, and to learn more about the BPA Theatre School, visit bainbridgeperformingarts.org.
