ANNE MARIE CUMMINGS

…moved to Los Angeles in 2015 after spending 30 years in the theatre as a professional actress (working with Tony-award winning directors); playwright (Off and Off-Off-Broadway); and director and artistic director of her own theatre company in Upstate New York. In its final years, her theatre company moved from a black box theatre into a movie theatre where she began to film her plays and the trailers for the plays she directed. This was the beginning of her new direction launching her avant-garde theatre work off the stage directly onto the screen.

To help her reach her full potential as a writer, when Cummings arrived to L.A., she (for the first time in her life), formally studied writing with acclaimed television writer, Ron Osborn (“Moonlighting” TV series) and wrote her first feature, “Eat Bitter, Taste Sweet.” However, it was Ron’s hard-core teaching style that pushed Anne Marie to churn out her first one-take TV series – “Conversations in L.A.”

With “Conversations in L.A.,” Cummings intuitively brought together her vast experiences as an actress, writer, and director by organically merging her vision of “theatre onto film” with unique, single-camera episodes, each filmed in one take, and each highly choreographed.

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Cummings grew up in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and began acting on stage at the age of six. After performing in multiple professional productions, by the age of 16 she auditioned for and attended the conservatory drama program at Carnegie Mellon University. During her summers at Carnegie, she continued to study acting at Northwestern University and the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England (BADA). At BADA, she attended lectures with some of the greatest artists of our time such as Simon Callow, Jeremy Irons, the late Peggy Ashcroft, and the late Sir John Gielgud. At Northwestern, she studied Anton Chekhov’s plays with the master of Chekhov – the late Earle R. Gister.

Following her dramatic education, Cummings performed in regional theatres around the United States. It began with Peter Sylvester who cast her in the role of Irina in “The Three Sisters,” by Anton Chekhov, at Synchronicity Space in New York City. Subsequently, she worked at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, with director Gregory Boyd (“A Flea in Her Ear,” by Georges Feydeau), and with directors and writers Anne Bogart and Tina Landau (“American Vaudeville”). She then ventured to Austin, Texas, to perform the role of Constanza in “Amadeus,” by Peter Schaffer (directed by Mark Ramont at the Capital City Playhouse). She also enjoyed playing the role of Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ directed by Anne Ciccolella at the Austin Shakespeare Festival.

Cummings traveled to Seattle and created her first theatre company, The Immediate Theatre. She teamed with theatre and opera director, Chuck Hudson, who directed her in the role of Gregor in an avant-garde production of “The Metamorphosis,” by Franz Kafka, and as Marie in “Woyzeck,” by Georg Buchner. Cummings enjoyed experimenting in the theatre and also collaborated with director Benji Bittle and played the role of Taylor (as a woman) from the play “K2,” by Patrick Meyers. Cummings, a method actress, trained for this intense role by summiting the majestic, 14,000 foot Mt. Rainier looming right outside the city. For this production, a large dance studio was turned into a mountain created by scaffolds (designed by Andrew Davidhazy) and Anne Marie, wearing a harness around her waist and koflachs with spikes on her feet, scaled the metal bars and ceiling of the studio.

Cummings also performed with established theatre companies in the Seattle area: AHA! Theatre, Alice B. Theatre, the Seattle Shakespeare Company, the Seattle Children’s Theatre, the Seattle Opera, and the Seattle Repertory Theatre where she worked with Tony Award-Winning director, Doug Hughes. Hughes directed Cummings in the black box and mainstage productions of “Voir Dire,” by Joe Sutton, as well as a reading of the play at the New York Theatre Workshop in the Big Apple.

A year later, director Mark Cuddy cast Cummings as Rosaura in “Life is a Dream” at the Sacramento Theatre Company which inspired Edward Payson Call to cast Cummings as Antigone, in the Jean Anouih version of “Antigone” at the Cleveland Playhouse and GeVa Theatre in New York. But it was at this point that Cummings moved back to Manhattan, and shifted her focus from acting to playwriting and directing with performance readings of her plays “Helen of Purgatory,” “Touche!,” and “Extremes.” The readings took place across the city at the Culture Project, the Cherry Lane, the Classic Stage Company, Vineyard Theatre, and SALAAM Theatre. Performance readings of her play “India Dreaming” were directed by Leigh Fondakowski (writer of the film “The Laramie Project”) and starred Indian movie stars, Madhur Jaffrey (“Vanya on 42nd Street”) and Lilette Dubey (“Monsoon Wedding” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”). With further development, “India Dreaming” turned into “India Awaiting” and was performed Off-Broadway and directed by Tyler Marchant at the Samuel Beckett Theatre starring  Maulik Pancholy (of TV shows “30 Rock” and “Weeds”). Following the limited run of “India Awaiting,” Cummings made another shift – she moved to Ithaca, in Upstate New York, to focus more intensely on writing and directing.

Meanwhile, and to make a living, Cummings worked as a columnist and journalist. As a columnist, she created the controversial “Instant Message” (for Gannett publications). With this she interviewed youth churning out monologues about teenagers’ personal issues from eating disorders, family dysfunction, being bullied, relationships, school life, learning, and so on. Also for Gannett, she wrote food reviews called, “Ithaca Eats,” and for Tompkins Weekly she wrote breaking news stories, each featuring her own photography.

Yet during this time, Cummings continued writing plays. She wrote the play “Sinkhole” and had more performance readings of her play “Extremes” (a reading was held at Primary Stages in NYC starring Michael Cullen from the film “Dead Man Walking” and Jessica Blank from the award-winning play “The Exonerated”). She also made major revisions to “Helen of Purgatory” which then turned into the play “Purgatory Row” (with a performance reading starring Steppenwolf theatre actress Kate Buddeke). Around this time, Anne Marie created her second theatre company, The Readers’ Theatre of Ithaca, which began in a book store and moved into a black box theatre with performance readings of modern plays such as “Oleanna,” by David Mamet, “The Mercy Seat,” by Neil LaBute, and “Detroit,” by Lisa D’Amour.

However, it was when Cummings moved The Readers’ Theatre of Ithaca into Cinemapolis (the only independent movie theatre in Ithaca) that she began dabbling with theatre on film, as she called it. She wrote her play, “Soul Mates,” and filmed it in one long take at a diner, and then she wrote and filmed a short called, “Easy Prey,” with each scene being filmed in one shot. For The Readers’ Theatre of Ithaca, Cummings began to film trailers for the modern plays she directed which were performed on a small stage built in one of the movie theatres. But it was after one year at Cinemapolis that Cummings moved to Los Angeles, CA, so that she could merge all of her experiences from the theatre into television and film.

Cover Photo by Paul Smith Photography