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Victoria Chatfield

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

Talking to Victoria Chatfield is like dealing with two people in the same body. The 20-year-old founder/executive director of Colloquial Theater constantly flits back and forth between being a young, go-getter college student who periodically bursts into awkward laughter and a well-heeled, forward-thinking arts administrator who knows the seriousness of her work. She is full of raw energy, but has the maturity and clarity of vision of someone twice her age. Since its start at a garage sale in 2002, Colloquial has put on over a dozen productions, each one run solely by students. With each new production, the company becomes more refined, the shows more professional.

Hometown: Buffalo

How did you get your start in theater? “I started doing theater summer programs back when I was four years old, and it sort of continued from there on in. I didn’t get really involved in it until I was about 12, when I started going to Buffalo United Artists about once a week. Javier (Bustillos) and Chris (Kelly) practically raised me. Also, it was always really important for my parents to take me out to the theater.”

How did you start Colloquial Theater? “Colloquial Theater got started when I was a sophomore in high school. I had wanted to be an arts administrator for a while, but I wasn’t so sure if that was the right path for me. I decided that the best way to find out was to start a theater company. So I had a garage sale of everything that I didn’t need anymore from my bedroom. I got $100, and we used that to fund the first show, an awful children’s show called Mossy Cape. After that season, we moved into doing adult shows with student casts, which works a lot better for us.”

How did you know that you wanted to be an arts administrator at that age? “I don’t really know. That’s what Colloquial Theater is really into, though, helping people find their place in drama. There are so many programs for kids who want to become actors, but people don’t really explore the other career opportunities, like directing, choreography, publicity, administration, grant writing. We give them all of those.”

Victoria’s schedule: Between semesters at Columbia University, Chatfield comes home to Buffalo to direct and produce shows for Colloquial Theater. During a show, she admits she has “no life,” often working 12-hour days juggling the entire administrative end of the company. “I hire everybody, work with the actors, balance the books, write grants…” During the school year, she works in the marketing and development department of Broken Watch Theatre Company while coordinating the upcoming shows for Colloquial.

How are you funded? “This year we got our first grant. We just got our 501(c)(3) status, which is great. But up until this point, we’ve been funded entirely by private donations. I don’t think we’ve ever lost money on a show. Of course, part of that has something to do with the fact that I’m so used to working on a restricted budget. Even though we have a bigger budget now, we still pick out musicals with the subconscious thought of, ‘Oh, this one doesn’t require a set.’”

Who’s Colloquial’s main audience? “Our main audience is primarily a student audience, but we get people of all ages. It’s great to see a lot of young people going out to see theater. While it’s often to go and see their friends perform, they keep coming back, and hopefully this audience will become the theater patrons of the next generation. It’s also great to have young people, because we traditionally do a lot of shows that are deemed relatively controversial when you have 16-year-olds playing the roles. We don’t shy away from that kind of material.”

Examples? “We actually did The Eight: Reindeer Monologues before BUA did it (laughs). Sister Mary was one of the first shows we did. We did The Love Talker, which was about sex in Appalachia. We had a 14-year-old in the chorus of Cabaret, although we didn’t realize it at the time. We did Rocky and Miss Julie. But we’re not the type of company that’s going to do Cinderella.”

What makes a Colloquial production unique? “I think students really bring something fresh and raw and innovative to the role, so it’s something very different from what you’d see in a 40-something actor. Young actors haven’t begun to specialize so much and limit their dramatic range. While older actors may have more practical experience and formal training, there’s something that actors at this age have that a more experienced actor would never be able to capture.”

What are your cast parties like, since you’re all under the age of 21? “They’re not like crazy orgies. We have a traditional policy in our contract that says no drinking, drugs or sex at cast parties. Although that doesn’t stop people from having regular parties and coincidentally inviting all the members of the cast. But I know nothing about what happens at those.”

Do most of your actors go on to bigger things? “Actually, we’ve had a lot of people end up in places like Boston University Conservatory and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.”

Current production: Suburbia, a show by Eric Bogosian. “I like the show a lot. It’s very relevant to our target age group, which is primarily late high school to late college students. It’s about characters in their early 20s who are dealing with the same issues we’re dealing with: whether or not to move away from home, when is the right time to do that, what motivations do you have in getting started to move on to your career and all that… being trapped in that limbo between post-adolescence and early adulthood.”

Suburbia is showing until Saturday at 8pm at TheaterLoft, 545 Elmwood Ave. (633-0226).