Today we’d like to introduce you to Beatrice Onions

Hi Beatrice, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?

Gosh—where to start! Okay, bear with me. My grandma (I call her my Nanny) worked as an elementary school teacher in South Wales during the day and made artisanal chocolate out of her garage at night. My earliest memories are of sneaking into that chocolate factory and sticking my finger in the chocolate tempering machine while it was spinning! Fast forward a few years, and my parents emigrated to New Zealand, where I attended primary school in both Swansea and Queenstown.

I dabbled in lots of extracurricular activities, including guitar lessons, Irish dancing, netball on Saturdays, pony club on Sundays, and sending emails to my favorite authors late at night when they killed off my favorite character *ahem* Allegiant. My introverted hours were (and still are) spent reading fantasy books. I started drama classes one day because my Mum, while cracking the ice on the horse water trough, heard a girl singing over the fence— probably the most Kiwi sentence I’ve ever written. It turned out my neighbor was a singing and acting teacher. I joined the next week. I learned an Alice in Wonderland monologue and sang the part of Simba in The Lion King. I liked that the less I worried about being good, the better I seemed to be. Between late-night reading and my growing love of theater, I started to feel like I’d found my “thing.”

After some angsty teenage years, I discovered writing, and boom—I was off. It took a few attempts to get into a drama school, and the one I landed on was Tisch. I spent a good amount of time writing plays, interning for producers, assisting on film sets, memorizing sonnets, spotting celebrities, and sitting on my couch in the East Village dreaming up magical “what-ifs” with my best friends.

What am I up to today? I’m writing for The New York Theatre Guide. I’m the dramaturg on an Off-Broadway production of The Nursery. I’m working a 9-to-5 entertainment job, creating content that feels authentic under the alias @paperback_pantry, and spending every second of my weekends zipping around on a Citi Bike, playing pickleball with friends, making an assortment of late-night dinners with my roommate, and collecting stories to inspire my own writing.

I fell in love with the characters in my family, like my Nanny, who moved to Qatar and then Siberia by herself at 53, and then back to Swansea, where I now visit her often! I fell in love with characters like Alice, Simba, and all the others who made me feel courageous at twelve years old. And now—hmm, I guess New York is full of characters, isn’t it?

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

A smooth road—how boring! Let’s throw it back to school. I loved school. I enjoyed the routine, the classes, the rules, the expectations. I loved covering my textbooks in that sticky paper, doing the homework, and making sure my lunchbox was in the fridge the night before. The bumps and wobbles came pretty swiftly after graduation! None of the aforementioned things carried over to post-high school life. In fact, my expectation that they would hindered my ability to navigate the new terrain.

I went to a small arts university in New Zealand because that felt like something I should do. I hated it. I felt overwhelmed by the “create your own adventure” mindset that all of my peers grasped so easily. On top of this, I was studying theater (an oxymoron in and of itself). But I felt deeply ambitious and driven. I wanted to be around inspiring people and do something crazy and juicy and amazing, but I didn’t know how or what. So I set myself a sort of… “between opportunities boot camp.”

Bear with me for this tangent: The Red Queen Effect is a biology term, meaning organisms have to keep running ahead to stay in the same spot to avoid extinction, just like Alice in Through the Looking Glass. That’s how I felt. When I dropped out of my English Lit degree in New Zealand, I applied for theater degrees in New Zealand and all over the world. I was taking online courses through Yale, writing a Peaky Blinders spin-off (who asked?), and learning Norwegian. By the time the pandemic hit, I was reading two to three books a week and meditating three times a day. I was gluten-free, dairy-free, and occasionally vegan. I was creating rules just to follow them. I completed 100 small tasks a day to feel the hit of dopamine that comes with to-do lists and 15-minute errands.

I became a bit of a lone wolf, writing angsty poems in parking lots and wondering why I hadn’t done anything remarkable despite being alive for a whole twenty years. It drove me mad. I was running in the same place.

And then I moved to the U.S.—New York City, to be precise! I grew out of my perfectionist phase and plunged headfirst into theater-making. I was writing a play a week and I didn’t have time to check if they were any good. I was attending Broadway shows like it was my goddamn job and meeting so many new people from all walks of life- it was theatre from the stage to the streets! I let my hair down, fell in love with bagels, and started asking for what I wanted. New York sharpened a lot of my soft edges and softened a lot of my sharp ones… growing up?

There was a short renaissance of rule-following panic when I graduated college, but nothing as potent. I chose not to put myself through perfectionist boot camp again. I think struggle is just a stage of life. It’s called your twenties. I’m still whacking through the weeds. I try to pull more faces in the mirror. Anytime something goes wrong, it’s “another chapter in the memoir!”

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?

I’m a multi-hyphenate creative, sitting at the crossroads of creative writing, theater-making, marketing, and producing. I specialize in communication. Whether it’s on set, in a corporate office in Flatiron, behind the wings in a theater, or in life, I feel deeply responsible for ensuring that everyone and everything is understood and that there are clean, clear, and executable next steps. Sometimes this has set me up well in production, but most recently, I am writing professionally for the theater—the purest form of communication. Well, second purest after talking out loud, which I do a lot off the clock.

I am writing for The New York Theatre Guide. I’ve written about the Stranger Things play, Redwood with Idina Menzel (which is making its way to Broadway), and have reviewed Off-Broadway productions like Walden, 300 Paintings, and The Merchant of Venice.

What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?

Save all of your drafts. I’m not just talking about scripts. Every version of you IS you. I’ve come to realize that the best stories, friendships, and experiences come from bringing your whole self—including all of the ‘you’s’ before now, and in the future. There is something so wonderful and impossible (and therefore wonderful) about bringing as much of yourself as possible. Friends, family, and art top up the rest. Now that’s a full life!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.beatrice-onions.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paperback_pantry/

Image Credits

Image of three girls sitting on a couch in white dresses- Anna Barrett // @thelilurbancowgirl