CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – Christina Elizabeth Smith is no stranger to being on stage, but after a year of shutdowns, this Clarksville native is eager to get back under the lights.
She is starring in one of the first shows set to return to a New York City theater post-pandemic: a revival of the 1984 David Rabe play “Hurlyburly.”
Meet Christina
Smith was born and raised in Clarksville. Her father was a little bird pilot with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment headquartered at Fort Campbell.
“I was lucky enough to be military, but I didn’t ever have to move around. I got stay in Clarksville my entire childhood,” Smith told Clarksville Now. “I liked it, I loved running around in the woods. I loved growing up there.”
She was a dancer growing up, which is how she discovered her love for the stage. At age 10, she became a touring competitive dancer and at 14 became a national champion in tap dance.
Smith graduated from Northwest High School and then went to Austin Peay State University for a few years. “So I’m deep Clarksville,” she added with a laugh.
“I always knew I was be something stage-related, or stage performing arts of some kind, and then going into Austin Peay, I was so that kid that was like let me just take guitar and theater and any sort of elective that was around the arts,” Smith said.
She then decided she was going to position herself to move out to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, and raised the funds by working at the Chili’s restaurant in Clarksville.
Since then, Smith has starred in TV shows like “NCIS: New Orleans,” “The Young and The Restless,” “Days of Our Lives,” “Paradise Lost,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and several others. She also starred in the 2019 LGBTQ movie “Ever,” which won the Chicago Reeling International Film Festival’s Audience Award. She has worked alongside several acting greats like Geena Davis, Alan Ruck and Scott Bakula just to name a few.
“TV and film I really loved, because it’s so different from the stage, but the stage training really informs it,” Smith said. “It was just about getting in the right doors and the right agents.”
She also wrote, produced and starred in “Pretext,” a short film about the aftermath of sexual assault.
In addition to all of that, Smith is also a professional painter.
Challenging ‘Hurlyburly’ stereotypes
The off-Broadway play “Hurlyburly,” of which Smith is starring in the revival, debuted in 1984. A review from that year in The New York Times called the play “inventive and disturbing,” as it featured themes of drug use, domestic abuse and suicide.
The original cast included Cynthia Nixon, Sigourney Weaver, Judith Ivey, Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Christopher Walken and Jerry Stiller.
The new cast includes Rich Orlow, PJ Marshall, Ali Reza Farahnakian, John Adams, Jeanine Bartel and Smith.
In years since, the play has been revived a handful of times, but the director and producer of the revival, Rachel Bennett, told Clarksville Now that she feels the play also has a revived sense of relevancy in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement.
Bennett also stars in the revival.
“This show seemingly, if you just look on the surface, is a show that might seem as if it’s celebrating misogyny, but it’s not,” Bennett said. “It’s my intention to show this play as a way to celebrate the women and how they actually are the impetus for the men to change.”
And for Bennett, this kind of awareness is deeply personal. It also led her to create her own production company, Ohm Production Foundation, during the pandemic.
“My production company came, I think, from the necessity to make art. Both because of the pandemic, because all art was shut down, but it was also the culmination of decades of being frustrated as a female artist and constantly having to give my power to other people,”
Bennett said this necessity was also where the drive to produce a reimagined version of the show “Hurlyburly” came from. Throughout the last year, table reads and rehearsals were conducted via Zoom.
Looking forward
The pandemic affected every single person although in a variety of ways, but for artists in particular, the time in isolation forced a moment of introspection on uncertainty and unpredictability.
Smith said this was exactly why her involvement with the play’s revival felt important.
“It’s called ‘Hurlyburly.’ It’s just a bunch of things and people rubbing up against each other and not knowing how they feel and it’s messy,” she said.
Bennett too said that this play felt like a more realistic display of the emotions many are feeling after living through this pandemic, and now reckoning with a return to some normalcy.
“I think we often forget the power and imprint of art, and what it brings us. It brings us togetherness, it brings us healing, it brings us empathy,” she continued.
Smith said it was an honor to be a part of one of the first plays to return in New York, and to see the culmination of a year’s worth of work was exciting, but nonetheless unnerving.
“I think it’s sort of a metaphor for what the world is feeling right now. It’s like we’re super excited but also anxious and kind of terrified. We would be lying to say that we were not,” Smith said.
The “Hurlyburly” revival is still in the process of securing the theater, and has plans to conduct 16 performances of the play when it reopens in the fall of 2021. To do so, the cast has set up a GoFundMe to help support the return of New York’s theater industry.