We recently connected with Kayla Engeman and have shared our conversation below.

Kayla, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I’ve always known I wanted to perform a solo show and I have had the great privilege of performing “I Need a Hero” around the country for the last two years. I began writing it in 2020 as a series of solo sketches poking fun at my life as an adult theater kid navigating her 20s. While writing the show my close friend passed away in a sudden accident. She was a comedic writer and filmmaker and was helping me to shape the piece. The only silver lining of losing her was knowing how I wanted to end the show.

I went on to perform the show in New York City for a sold out run of 5 performances. Soon after I had my Off-Broadway debut with the show as part of the United Solo Theatre Festival. In the last two years I’ve brought the piece to Milwaukee, Denver, Los Angeles, and headlined the Detroit Women of Comedy Festival with I Need a Hero in May 2024. I am deeply grateful for the many people who have seen it, especially those who’ve seen it twice!

I Need A Hero is a one woman show which features dancing, projection, singing, power points, voice over, and embarrassing home videos from 1998 to show the audience all the ways in which Kayla needs to be rescued: whether it’s from living at home with a loud Italian mother, going to endless weddings of her girlfriends, trying to walk home from a bar down a dark street, or losing a friend in a sudden accident. The show progresses through a list of trivial and serious grievances while using music, multimedia, and comedic storytelling to hit on themes of grief, anxiety, death, dating, family, friendship, childhood dreams, and trauma.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I consider myself a comedian, writer, and actor. I’ve always wanted to be a performer and thanks to my parents for putting me in dance, singing, and acting classes and community theater as soon as I could ask them to, I was warmed up by college to go for it. I started my comedy journey doing improv at UCB back in 2012. Concurrently, at Hofstra University I was learning about sketch comedy and performing on our live student television show Thursday Nite Live. After school I continued to study acting, comedy, and writing sketches. In 2019 I began doing stand up comedy and I drew on all of these realms to create I Need a Hero.

Now that I’ve crossed off my number one bucket list item, I’m excited to start the creative process over and source material for my next one woman show. In the meantime, I’m also committed to gaining more television credits by auditioning many times a week in my 380 square foot apartment, with my blue backdrop, tripod, and very vocal feline companion, Cannoli.

If I could hack into the Universe and adjust the knobs and dials of my destiny, I would be some magical combination of Julia Louis Dreyfus and Bo Burnham.

You can see my work and more at www.kaylaengeman.com, and follow my comedy on Instagram @kaylaengeman.

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

I’m addicted to the feeling of resonance. It is so satisfying for someone to come up to me after a show and say, “That’s exactly how it feels, and you captured it.” After one of my performances of I Need a Hero, someone came up to me and told me she had been writing a thesis on disenfranchised grief — the pressured feeling of not being allowed to grieve. I’ve heard this phrase before when a pet dies and it feels inappropriate to weep or take a day off work for bereavement. In my case, as I joked about in my show, the feeling of pressure to “hurry up and stop grieving,” as if I was taking too long. When this woman approached me and said I captured the essence of disenfranchised grief in twenty minutes I was moved to tears. Any emotion shared by audience and performer is sacred, and to have that validated at the stage door meant so much to me. At other performances folks would come up to me and tell me about the friends and family they have lost and their struggle with grief, and we would cry together, even though we never met the person the other was crying over. To be able to provide an opportunity for these audience members to feel understood, validated, and relief, is so powerful and I’m honored to hold that.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

We need to make entertainment more affordable, especially theatre. I live in New York City alongside the best actors and performers in the world and I cannot afford to see them perform. I get my fill of entertainment on my phone, in my bed, in a portrait orientation scrolling for hours. It dissuades me from sitting down and watching a feature film, or going out to see a play. Don’t get me wrong, I subscribe to streaming services and live for the next episode of Hell’s Kitchen with Gordon Ramsay to be on Hulu, but the balance is off. There’s less and less art in media, and more media than ever to consume. The bottleneck effect of what gets my attention yield far too easily to TikToks of luxury luggage “Pack my bag with me,” and excludes museums, plays, local short film festivals, and more all in my immediate community. My schedule is however jam packed with stand up comedy shows in bar back rooms … but anyone who has been to more than two stand up shows in one week knows there’s a limit to how enjoyable that can be. I hope my cheekiness comes through in text.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kaylaengeman.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kaylaengeman
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/kaylaengeman

Image Credits

Photos by Caitlin E. Reid (@lomallapictures)