Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Betsy Roth. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Betsy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

When I was a sophomore in high school, I saw the US premiere of “Ragtime” in Los Angeles. I cried my teenage tears as Mother sang her heart-wrenching goodbye to Father and by the end of “Journey On,” I knew that this was the thing I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. I continued to sob through pretty much the rest of the show…and I still can’t make it through “Back to Before” in the shower without breaking down. I had been acting since the fourth grade and singing since before I can remember, but sitting in my seat at the Shubert Theater was the first time that theatre felt like it had the power, not just to entertain, but to matter. This felt different than when I opened my bedroom window and sang, “My White Knight” at the top of my voice into my neighbor’s driveway when I was supposed to be sleeping – sorry neighbors – or when I locked myself in my room to sing THE ENTIRETY of the “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” soundtrack from memory. This felt…important in a way that I knew I could never walk away from now that I’d seen it.

Betsy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I never know quite how to answer this question…perhaps because of how many hats I wear. I am an actress, a producer, a costume designer, a nearly compulsive reader, and a homeschool mom. I am also a new Texan and am positively beside myself with excitement to be playing Rosalind in Fair Assembly’s upcoming production of “As You Like It!” Before relocating to Dallas at the end of 2021, I acted in theatre and TV commercials in Los Angeles and ran a small theatre company called Little Candle Productions that I co-founded in 2012 with two of my fellow classmates from the theatre program at Southern Methodist University.

The idea for Little Candle Productions was born at a happy hour before an SMU alumni event. The night started with the three of us lamenting not being able to find work we really felt excited about, and by our second round of drinks, we had decided to start making the work ourselves. We took the inspiration for our name from a line in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” about how far a little candle shines and we dove in headfirst.

After our first show — a spectacular, one-night-only production of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” at one of L.A.’s most beautiful historic theatres — we dug into developing two new scripts: “The Innocence of Father Brown” and “Cold Tangerines: The Play.” That process ignited a passion within our company for new work and ultimately led us to refine our mission: “New plays aren’t scary. Little Candle creates new, intelligent, story-centered theatre for both the hesitant and enthusiastic audience member.”

I have found, at least in Los Angeles, that new theatre is often intentionally edgy and boundary-pushing, and tends to be developed with a seasoned theatre-goer in mind. But we didn’t want to be that. There is enough of that already being done – and done well. We wanted to create new plays that were still intelligent and thought-provoking, but that also felt accessible to theatre-newbies. Frankly, I think we all sort of became theatre evangelists because, as much as we all love making theatre for die-hard theatre people, there is nothing like the excitement that radiates from a brand new convert to the theatre.

I remember, during one performance of our 2017 world premiere of Stephanie Allison Walker’s “American Home,” several audience members were taking photos during the show. At first, we were all aghast that anyone would dare violate such a basic tenet of theatre etiquette…but then it dawned on us that those are exactly the people we want to reach: those who have NO CLUE what the rules of the theatre are, but who have trusted us to tell them a story anyway.

As the team and I grew Little Candle out in Los Angeles – typically at the pace of one production a year, with the exception of one crazy summer that we thought it was a good idea to mount a fully produced show at a non-traditional outdoor venue AND two smaller shows at the L.A. Fringe Festival all within the same month – fellow SMU Meadows alumna Emily Ernst was here in Dallas building Fair Assembly. She and I actually met my senior year when she was a prospective student and then reconnected more recently when she reached out to swap notes about this crazy business of producing that we had both found ourselves in. I enjoyed watching Fair Assembly’s journey from afar and loved their collaborative, actor-centered approach to working. Shortly after my move to Dallas, I saw their production of “Macbeth” and was blown away. The acting was engaging, clear, and powerful. The design choices they made on an absolute shoestring budget to create the stripped-down world of the play were so smart. I couldn’t wait to work with them.

And it turns out, I didn’t have to wait long. Just before Thanksgiving, Emily came to me with the idea of producing “As You Like It,” with her and I playing Celia and Rosalind, respectively. With my most recent Shakespeare roles being Constance in “King John,” Elizabeth in “Richard III,” and Hermione in “The Winter’s Tale,” the idea of embodying one of the Bard’s most iconic young lovers felt almost as daunting as those three tragic matrons might feel to a young actress just on the heels of Helena or Hermia…but there was still no way that I was going to say no! Again, I jumped in headfirst and haven’t looked back. Discovering Rosalind has been an absolute joy, and we are only just beginning!

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

This is like asking me what my favorite book is…I don’t know how I could ever choose!There are so many things that I love about making theatre, but if I HAD to pick ONE, I think it would be the way that theatre asks us to suspend our own agendas and to live, for a moment, in someone else’s story – to consider what their experience is like and why it matters. Honestly, it’s the same thing that I love about reading: the way that stories deepen our understanding of both ourselves and of each other.

In Shauna Niequist’s book “Cold Tangerines” (which Little Candle adapted for the stage in 2014) the author tells a story about looking for a sympathy card for a friend who was going through a hard time. Each card missed the mark until she found one that simply said, “You too? I thought I was the only one.” Those words bring tears to my eyes every time because – wow – what a powerful acknowledgment of the healing that comes from recognizing our shared experience, but also of how hard that recognition can be to find, how much more often we stay alone with our fear and our pain. What a gift to create something that gives its audience a taste of that recognition.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Ok, this one is a doozy, and I understand that I am WAY behind the curve here, but hear me out:
I never imagined that I would still be working as an actor at this stage in my life, with three young kids at home. The lessons I had been taught about motherhood didn’t leave space for things like making art. I’m pretty sure the younger me thought that I would just take a casual twenty year hiatus – as one does – to raise my kids and then come back at fifty ready to rock all of the Shakespearean queens.

But when I co-founded Little Candle Productions in the spring of 2012 and then wound up pregnant that same summer, I just kind of…kept going. I ended up co-directing our next production with my co-founder Allison Gorjian, because she had a newborn and I was so pregnant by then that nobody knew how long I would be able to hang in there. We figured, between the two of us, we’d be able to function at least as well as one “normal” director. True story: when my water broke on closing weekend and my OB told me I would need to go to the hospital that night to be induced if labor hadn’t started on its own, I asked him if I could go to the theatre first for the show. He gave me a gentle, but firm, no.

And from there, at each transition, when I have considered stepping back from theatre to focus solely on my family, something has nudged me forward again, saying, “This is still important,” and my husband has been right there beside me asking, “What do you need to make this work?”

When my kiddos were younger, the value in the work was largely for me. Theatre is my greatest, lifelong passion and creating it is the thing that makes me feel the most like myself. In those early years of parenting, when it is so easy to lose sight of oneself in the blur of motherhood, having a tether to that part of myself was something I hadn’t realized how much I would need.

Now that my children are a bit older – 5, 8, and 10 – I am beginning to see the value in it for them. Central to what I hope to instill in my children with our homeschooling is the joy of being a passionate, lifelong learner and I can’t think of a better way to teach that than to live a life, alongside them, where I continue to apply myself to developing my gifts and passions. When one of them comes down the stairs for a glass of water long after I thought they were asleep as finds me sitting at the dining room table with my script, my laptop, and a whole pile of reference books, with the hum of the dishwasher running in the background, they are seeing exactly the kind of person I hope they will be.

I wrote, on my long-abandoned blog, — link: https://bugandbabygirl.com/2016/08/24/is-there-room-for-me-in-motherhood/– about my experience acting in (and producing) a play with two young toddlers and what a significant moment it was for me when my oldest – three at the time – said, “Mommy, when I get bigger, I want to come see your play.” I wrote something along the lines of those words giving me a glimpse of a future I had never given myself permission to imagine. Seven years later, my kiddos are finally going to get to come see “my play” and I cannot wait for them to meet this precious part of me when they sit in the audience of “As You Like It” in August.

You know, it’s funny that we started this conversation talking about “Ragtime,” when there are so many parallels here to Mother’s journey over the course of the play…but I guess that goes back to what I was saying about the power of the stories we tell onstage. My story has certainly been more mundane, but we have had many of the same fears to overcome and lessons to unlearn and I am sure that, were we to meet in some other lifetime, we would – first, sing a duet and, then – ask, “You too? I thought I was the only one.”

Contact Info:

• Website: www.littlecandleproductions.com AND www.fairassembly.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/littlecandleproductions AND instagram.com/fairassembly

Image Credits
Dana Patrick, Marnie Shelton, Eleanor Imbody, Mike Quain, Betsy Roth, & Karen Almond