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Marissa Toogood heads for home in freeFall’s comedy ‘Lone Star Spirits’

Bill DeYoung

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"Lone Star Spirits." Photo: Suzanna Mars.

You can’t go home again. Well, of course you can – but should you?

That’s the central question posed in Josh Tobiessen’s comedy Lone Star Spirits, opening Friday at freeFall Theatre. In the show, Marley – who’s been living in too-cool-for-school Austin – returns to the tiny West Texas town where she was born and raised.

Confronted by her traditionalist father and her dimwitted high school beau, neither of whom has changed a speck, Marley ponders the ramifications of mixing past, present and future (she’s accompanied on the hometown trip by her hipster fiancé, who naturally fits in like a square peg in a cactus-shaped hole).

“It’s coming to terms with the people and places that have made you what you are,” observes actress Marissa Toogood, who plays Marley. “But they are so relatable, these characters. It’s so easy to see someone in them that you either went to school with, or was in your hometown, or is reminiscent of someone in your family.”

Marissa Toogood

For Toogood, who grew up in Butler, Pennsylvania, a steel-town suburb of Pittsburgh, there are other similarities. “I love my family, and I relish every opportunity to go see them,” she insists.

“But it’s weird – you go to the places where you used to park on Friday night, or hang out after the football game. And those things don’t exist any more, or it’s all cut down.”

This production of Lone Star Spirits comes to freeFall, part and parcel, from the Hippodrome State Theatre in Gainesville, where it played to packed crowds over a three-week run. In a unique arrangement, freeFall’s most recent show, Marie and Rosetta, is now traveling to the Hippodrome.

It’s what Hippodrome artistic director Stephanie Lynge, who directed Lone Star Spirits, calls cross-pollination.

According to Toogood, it’s a win-win deal, for everybody. “It gives actors an opportunity to work somewhere else, it gives the production team an opportunity to look at different spaces,” she explains. “You’re working with a different creative team.

“And it essentially cuts costs for both parties involved, because funding is just getting slashed – it’s hard to keep regional theater going. And one of the things we’re doing is reaching out and making relationships with other theaters. So that we can collaborate, and survive, and make something that’s even better.”

In freeFall’s “Assassins,” 2016.

Toogood, who’s been part of the Hippodrome’s semi-regular acting company since 2013, previously played Squeaky Fromme in freeFall’s 2016 take on the musical Assassins. She was also seen here in Peter Pan and Peter and the Starcatchers.

In her mind the two theater companies, freeFall and the “Hipp,” are remarkably similar. “They’re creating from the heart,” Toogood says. “And I know that’s where all of our theater should be coming from, but it’s not, not all the time.

“Everybody is on the same team. And we have the ship going in one direction, and it takes everybody working towards that same goal.”

That includes the mandate that theater should be something more than the same old, same old cash-cow shows. The most innovative theaters, Toogood observes, “are willing to take these leaps and bounds that I think are super-progressive and challenge you to open your mind and your heart, and think about things on a different level.

“We could go with the straight and narrow, and head-on, or we could turn it on its head and make it something completely out of the box.”

She left Butler, PA at the age of 15 – with her parents’ blessing – to live with an aunt and uncle in Orlando. They were zoned for Dr. Phillips High, a magnet school, so that Marissa – already a theater nerd – could take her desired deep-dive into arts studies.

After graduation, Toogood attended the Florida School of the Arts in Palatka, Florida, about halfway between Jacksonville and Gainesville. It was there she met and married fellow actor Logan Wolfe – perhaps you saw him in The Little Prince at freeFall in 2017? – and subsequently transferred into the theater program at the University of Florida.

Theater people who study and learn at UF inevitably find their way, somehow, into the Hippodrome orbit. “We were taken in,” Toogood smiles. “We had an environment where they were nurturing, but also molding us, making us better people, better actors. We took on side jobs there, where we were working front of house, and box office. Bartending.”

The full “Lone Star” cast: (l-r) Brooke Tyler Benson, Mann, Mercer, Toogood and Niall McGinty. Photo: Suzanna Mars.

And, of course, performing. Toogood’s memorable Hipp shows have ranged from the wacky (Avenue Q) and lighthearted (A Year With Frog and Toad) to the edgy (All Girl Frankenstein, Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play) to the intriguingly bizarre (Zombie Town: A Documentary Play).

With its ensemble cast already fine-tuned after a dozen or more Gainesville performances, Lone Star Spirits is a proud addition to Marissa Toogood’s diverse resume.

“This group of people, they’re incredible,” she says. “We’re all really grateful for the casting in this one, because we all really enjoy each other’s company. It’s really fun to rely on another person.

‘And I have a really cool job in this one. Lately I’ve been really blessed with roles where I’m either the oddball, or I have some sort of schtick where I’m a goof. And in Lone Star Spirits, I’m the straight man. It’s been a completely different creature for me. And I’ve had such a hard time not laughing.”

Tickets and info here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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    Gyni Rimer

    March 6, 2020at12:53 pm

    Good luck and congratulations Marrisa ! I told you you, you would go far when we last saw each other at the McKee reunion in Butler a few years back ! Keep up the good work and more success in your future. Your cousin Gyni Rimer Lake Milton Ohio

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