Stars of the AVT #36: Audrey Crabtree

This post is one of a series profiling the hundreds of performers I’ve presented through my American Vaudeville Theatre in celebration of its 15th anniversary. Don’t miss the American Vaudeville Theatre’s 15th Anniversary ExTRAVaganza in the New York International Fringe Festival this August!

Audrey Crabtree is a performer of a gazillion accomplishments, so it’s hard to lead with just one of them. Her training, skills and experience, if she included it all,  would turn her resume into a mile-long scroll, resulting in a very good clown prop. She is an actress, improv sketch comedian and clown (those may sound like the same things, but while they are related, the techniques for achieving those three performance styles can be elaborately different.) She is also a teacher and she co-founded and directs the New York Clown Theatre Festival. By days she works with the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit.  Not only is she always performing, she is a tireless supporter of other people’s work.

I have written a good bit about her work with Ten Directions and her artistic partner Lynn  Berg on this blog already, notably here and here. Oh, and here. Oh, yes, also here.  I’ve had the pleasure of acting with her many times over the years, favorite times being 2009′s Kitsch and the 2008 film Poison Shirt/ Boots of the Transsexual:

But I’ve also had the good fortune to have her in my variety shows. In 2007, she impressed me mightily simply by doing walkaround at my vaudeville show at the Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge. She was in her clown character Officer Crabtree (a character I’ve also seen her do at the Brick).

Impressed me? Yes, because I think she’s a great artist, and she really didn’t think herself above doing walkaround for scattered strangers on a desolate pier in Red Hook. She’s lucky SHE wasn’t arrested! But she gave it her 100% professional best. I can say I’ve never seen her give less than that.

In 2009, she came and clowned at a burlesque benefit I produced at Theater for the New City to raise money for their green roof. As I recall, she did a  roller skating routine which turned out to be a warm-up for Ten Directions’ hilarious show Icetacles: The Last Chance of a Lifetime, produced later that year:

I’ve always known her to be busy, but at the moment she seems to be involved in ten times as many projects as ever before. Lest ye she think she’s lazy, she wants you to know that:

* She is co-hosting Tiny Dangerous Fun in Brooklyn next Tuesday 8pm,  with John Leo

* Next weekend she is doing a clown show in Vermont, with Zea Barker and Peter Musante

* Wednesdays in July she is at Triskelion Arts in Whoa Weds Variety Hour

*  July 26th at Dixon Place  she will be doing a reading of a new play by Ryan Tracy

* She and Gabriella Munoz will be doing their new clown show at the Clown Theatre Festival this September- directed by Hilary Chaplain

* She is working with “an awesome group of performers” in the Physical Comedy Lab weekly with John Towsen “getting in shape, learning skills and developing extreme physical comedy material”

* Her company Ten Directions is developing for a new bouffon piece about the history and religion of The United States of America

* The Spanish language stage version of La Strada (for which she was clown consultant ) is setting up to run again this fall in NYC

* The Clown Festival in Mexico City will be March 2012

To learn more about vaudeville past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.