<![CDATA[WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE.  HEY, YOU'RE ALRIGHT. - news/updates]]>Sun, 10 Mar 2013 04:16:02 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[Jimmy Kimmel Live!]]>Thu, 21 Feb 2013 20:06:26 GMThttp://www.adamjefferis.com/1/post/2013/02/jimmy-kimmel-live.htmlBOOKED IT!!  I worked on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week.  I played the "hipster/realist" in the Most Obnoxious Movie Goer Award of his monologue, at the top of the show 2/20/13...
]]><![CDATA[THE ACTORS' GANG TARTUFFE TOUR DATES ]]>Wed, 12 Dec 2012 02:55:05 GMThttp://www.adamjefferis.com/1/post/2012/12/the-actors-gang-tartuffe-tour-dates.html
Los Angeles, CA
January 17, 18, 19
The Actors' Gang 
Ivy Substation
9070 Venice Blvd
Culver City CA 90232
Phone: (310) 838-4264

Folsom Lake College
January 29
Three Stages Performing Arts Center
10 College Parkway 
Folsom, CA 95630
Phone: (916) 608-6888

Notre Dame University
February 1,2, & 3
Debartolo Performing Arts Center
100 Performing Arts Center
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Phone: (574) 631-2800
Miami, FL
February 8
South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center
Cutler Bay, FL
Phone: (786) 573-5300

Florida State University
February 12
Fred Turner Auditorium at TCC
444 Appleyard Dr
Tallahassee, FL 32304
Phone: (805) 644-6500
]]><![CDATA[Inspire Someone You Love...]]>Sat, 26 May 2012 01:21:33 GMThttp://www.adamjefferis.com/1/post/2012/05/inspire-someone-you-love.htmlI can't get this song out of my head, nor do I need or want to :)
]]><![CDATA[Making headlines....]]>Wed, 16 Feb 2011 04:35:14 GMThttp://www.adamjefferis.com/1/post/2011/02/press-making-headlines.htmlI recently was interviewed by my hometown newspaper.  Thank you Brandy Nance and Rob Gilligan, from the Emporia Gazette and congrats to Spence and Patrick!!  So glad to be in the company of you guys.  If you'd like to read the whole article"Making it in LA", click here
Adam Jefferis, son of Nancy Quandt and Jan and Janet Jefferis, moved to Los Angeles in 2003 after graduation from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a BA in theater arts. He grew up in Emporia and attended Village Elementary School and he got his start in acting in ESU’s homecoming musical “Oliver!”

“While in school I did my first feature film,” Jefferis said. “It was a low-budget independent film called ‘Almost Normal.’ After doing the film, several instructors in the theater and film department encouraged me to move to Los Angeles to pursue a professional acting career. That was nearly eight years ago. Time flies and I still feel like I’m on summer vacation sometimes.”

Jefferis’ most recent work includes the world premiere of “Break the Whip” at The Actors’ Gang theater. “Break the Whip” is the first chapter in a series of plays they are continuing to work on with aspirations of touring the series around the world.

Jefferis said he trained at iO West (LA’s Best Improv Comedy) and has been performing there for five years. In 2010, he landed eight commercial gigs, including two national spots (Weber Grills and Hot Pockets), a Comedy Central promo for David Hasselhoff’s Roast, three international spots (Esprit, Mercedes and Nissan) and two viral/internet commercials (Subway and Burt’s Bees). Most recently he booked a worldwide L’Oreal commercial.

“I’m keeping busy with commercial auditions, call backs and bookings,” Jefferis said. “I perform long-form with improv at iO West with different groups. We get a single suggestion from someone in the audience and do a series of scenes, games and monologues culminating into a 30-minute performance. I’m also work-shopping a new play with the artistic director of The Actors’ Gang, Tim Robbins. On top of all that, I’ve been meeting and working with some of television/film’s top casting directors in acting workshops.”

Jefferis said he never thought he’d do theater again.

“So when I found The Actors’ Gang five years ago, I knew I had found something special,” he said. “I’ve been so grateful for this creative outlet and consequently have come to call this place home. My commercial career is just getting started and I’m enjoying working as an actor and getting paid to do it. I’ve worked on a few TV pilots and several independent short films and look forward to more of that work very soon.”

There are many things Jefferis enjoys about theater and film.

“With theater, I enjoy the rush of an audience’s laughter, seeing them on the edge of their seat, hearing an occasional sniffle or gasp, and of course, the roaring applause at the end of the show,” he said. “With film, I enjoy the collaboration on set that makes it all happen. It’s awesome.”

With any career, the industry comes with its challenges.

“Juggling ‘survival jobs’ and my acting career,” Jefferis said. “I managed to stay positive with the moral support of friends and family. I have been so lucky to be working as an actor as much as I have the last couple of years, but I’m always wanting more.”

Jefferis’ favorite moment was his first commercial booking.

“I was ‘taft hartley’ed into the Screen Actors Guild,” he said. “Was flown first class to Dallas to shoot a commercial for Sonic Drive-in. While in Dallas, we happened to be in town for the U2/Muse Concert...a few of us managed to get backstage passes to the concert for free. Wow, welcome to the high life indeed.”

Jefferis’ most memorable role was this past summer when he played Tranio in “Katie the Curst.”

“Better known was ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ it was our annual family Shakespeare in the Park play,” he said. “We do a different adaptation every year and this was the first project ever in my career I got to put my tumbling skills to use. And it was my first Equity contracted show The Actors’ Gang.”

Jefferis offered advice for others seeking to enter the film/theater industry.

“Patience and persistence is the most important thing I’ve learned,” he said. “Everyone’s journey in this industry is different. You must create your own path and decide what makes you happy and go with that.”


]]><![CDATA[COMMERCIAL BOOKING!!]]>Sun, 10 Oct 2010 20:50:57 GMThttp://www.adamjefferis.com/1/post/2010/10/commercial-booking.htmlFun weekend shooting a commercial and print ad for ESPRIT.  It was for European distribution only, soooo I'm gonna be BIG in France, lol!!  Seriously though, everyone was a lot of fun to work with, actors, models, dancers, even the clients were great.  We were on location in Elysian Park, near Dodgers Stadium, and it was definitely a moment for me, living in Los Angeles, where I my internal compass was turned around :P  Needless to say, I was very grateful to be working and a special thanks to my good friends Kendra, Tricia, Bailey, and to my new friend Kate (who I met on set, she's totally rad).]]><![CDATA[BREAK THE WHIP]]>Wed, 22 Sep 2010 02:42:49 GMThttp://www.adamjefferis.com/1/post/2010/09/break-the-whip.htmlI have been working on this play.  I'm very honored to be working with Tim and the ensemble.  This is why I joined this company-to CREATE pieces like this.  If you can, come check it out.  We run through November 13.  There are "Pay What You Can" tickets available every performance!!  Here's an article the LA Times put out...Tim Robbins and the Actors' Gang seek to 'Break the Whip'
The theater company's latest play reflects on the connection and clash of cultures in the early years of Jamestown.September 17, 2010|By Mike Boehm, Los Angeles Times
  • Ryan Sheffer
To begin with, there was a reading assignment. Tim Robbins, actor and founder of the Actors' Gang, had long admired "A People's History of the United States," the 1980 revisionist history book by the late Howard Zinn that tells America's story from the perspective of have-nots rather than big shots.

Robbins asked all 60 or so Actors' Gang members to read its sections on Christopher Columbus, Jamestown and pre-revolutionary Boston; then they began to explore the dramatic possibilities in a series of workshops last summer that he hoped would point toward a play.

"I thought it would make a great theater piece. Not a lot of us are descended from the aristocracy, [so] these stories register more palpably than stories of the aristocracies," Robbins said last week after one of the preview performances of the play that came out of that process, "Break the Whip." The play opens Saturday.

The Academy Award-winning actor has been a playwright for 25 years now, and "Break the Whip" is the sixth full-length work he has written or co-written for the company he launched in 1981 while still a student in UCLA's theater program. He's also the show's director, and with the actors whose improvisations gave rise to this historical play about the early years of Jamestown, Robbins throws every theatrical device at the audience but the kitchen sink.

In a way, they get that too: A "kitchen sink" play is a drama set in the bosom of the family and steeped in everyday realism. The family in whose bosom "Break the Whip" takes place is the American people, and although the production doesn't include kitchen sink realism, it does strive for a strong degree of historical accuracy, or at least plausibility.

Jamestown was the first place where English-speaking whites, native Americans and African slaves were thrown together. "Break the Whip" deploys 23 actors, speaking three languages — a modified Elizabethan English, Algonquin and Kimbundu, the tongue of the Angolan slaves who arrive in chains near the end of the first act. A fiddler, banjoist and drummer are stationed behind and high above the stage, higher even than the screen where supertitles translate the scenes spoken by slaves and Paspahegh Indians.

The acting style derives largely from 16th century Italy: the commedia dell'arte that the Actors' Gang has fed on from its early days. All characters are masked, and key figures are drawn from the commedia's palette of archetypes. The stew includes politics, class warfare, racism and, given the repeating motif of cannibalism among some of the starving colonists, human flesh. There is a klutzy hero, a talking bear and a hopeful, sacramental ending. There is romantic love — within and between races, and within and between sexes. There is shadow puppetry enacting the creation myths of Christians, Angolans and Native Americans, and the play as a whole can be viewed as a creation myth of sorts for an American nation.

A crucial moment in early, unscripted experiments came when one of the actors, Alicia Simmons, spontaneously erupted in a kind of nonverbal speaking-in-tongues, her imperiled slave-woman voicing not only anguish and fear, but a passionate claim on freedom and acceptance.

"When it happened it was disturbing but incredibly inspiring," said Robbins. Not only did that moment make it clear that the Jamestown story was the chapter in their reading assignment that ignited the keenest emotions in the actors, but "I knew the ending of the play when we saw it."

By January, Robbins had written a script. Rehearsals showed him that what he'd written was going to need translating — not in the directorial sense of describing and analyzing the text, but in the linguistic sense. The credits include translators Carolyn Viera-Martinez (Kimbundu) and Bruce Pearson (Algonquin).

"We saw the native scenes acted in English and it didn't feel right," Robbins said. "In order to honor these peoples' lives, we felt we needed to speak their language."

With that decision, the actors' task doubled or tripled. "I've told Tim, 'This is the most difficult thing I've ever done on stage.' I sort of shudder to think of the actual number of hours I spent working on all of the words," said Scott Harris, who speaks virtually all of his many lines in Algonquin.

Robbins' previous plays typically have been sorties in the culture wars, conceived to fire satirical ammo from the left. In examining Jamestown's more distant history, Robbins said, the aim was not to dramatize an actual episode, but to tell a story that takes imaginative leaps while maintaining a safety net of historical plausibility.

"Part of our job," he said, "was to imagine and to dream and, with all respect, give life to a story that we knew had to have happened."

Some plot points that may seem surprising are grounded in the historical record, said its history consultant, Kwinn Doran. Those include English aristocrats refusing to condescend to manual labor, even in the face of starvation, and Angolan slaves helping to save the colony with the sophisticated agricultural know-how they brought from their homeland.

Robbins says that the aim in telling a story of divisiveness and suspicion set from 1609 to 1621 is not to allegorize the mistrust in today's America.

But for leading actor Harris, the play's "many parallels" to the current national scene hit home.

"The hope that we're looking toward at the end is really what society needs in general," Harris said. "If most people saw this and saw the generosity of spirit, it would be a good listen for everybody."

mike.boehm@latimes.com

]]><![CDATA[KATIE THE CURST, TAMING OF THE SHREW]]>Sat, 21 Aug 2010 06:11:29 GMThttp://www.adamjefferis.com/1/post/2010/08/katie-the-curst-taming-of-the-shrew.htmlThis summer's Shakespeare in the Park series at The Actors' Gang has been a blast!!  LISA WOLPE was brought in as a guest director and she ROCKED IT!!  My interest in Shakespeare has been reinvigorated because of Lisa.  She brought so much joy and love of the text to the ensemble, it was contagious.  I was cast as Tranio, servant to Lucentio.  And finally, after all these years, I was able to combine my love of tumbling to acting!!  I am so grateful to have worked with her, and I am stoked that the show has been as successful as it has.  There's only 2 weekends left...come check it out if you can.


Here's a review from the LA TIMES:
Theater review: 'Katie the Curst' at Media Park [updated]August 5, 2010 |  4:35 pmIn "Katie the Curst," the Actors' Gang gives "The Taming of the Shrew" a 1970s punk-rock twist that makes this fifth installment of free, family-friendly Shakespeare adaptations outside the Ivy Substation a loose-limbed lark.

Carnival festivity emanates from the outset, as popcorn and hot dog vendors scour the audience seated on the Media Park grounds before a sideshow tent. Presently, a blast of Nino Rota from sound designer Peter Bayne launches the heavily trimmed narrative.

Director Lisa Wolpe uses the natural setting judiciously, smartly bending the Bard around her talented cast. Donna Jo Thorndale's full-throttle Kate, aptly introduced with Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation," spurs Jean-Louis Darville's suave, leisure-suited Petruchio, whose bicycling entrance in tandem with R.J. Jones' rambunctious Grumio typifies the frolicsome attack.
As does Nick Huff's zany Lucentio, his disco poses mirrored by Adam Jefferis' acrobatic Tranio and Molly O'Neill's Mademoiselle-magazine-cover Bianca. Pedro Shanahan wields a mean mosh-pit guitar as Hortensio; Adele Robbins devours various characters, her Ed Grimley-skewed Gremio a particular hoot; and so goes the roster, with Jorge Deneve's grave Biondello fronting a charming brace of child players.

Costumer Allison Leach's loopy outfits are another asset, as in Petruchio's mega-punk wedding ensemble or Kate's post-marital "Dynasty" horror, tailor-made for deconstruction.

The picnic-grounds approach contends with street noise and malfunctioning mikes, while the pop-cultural mash-up adorns a laundered Cliff's Notes version of the text. Yet one can imagine many less worthwhile ways to spend an hour on a weekend. At base, "Katie the Curst" is just plain, unpretentious fun.

-- David C. Nichols

"Katie the Curst," Media Park, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City. 11 a.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Ends Aug. 29. Free. (310) 838-4264. Running time: 1 hour.

]]><![CDATA[First Post!]]>Sat, 21 Aug 2010 05:50:19 GMThttp://www.adamjefferis.com/1/post/2010/08/first-post.html