"But Don't You Want To Do More Than Just Dance In The Chorus?"

I'm glad I took the time to go through the old stack of newspapers - I very nearly missed Anita Creamer's column in the Sacramento Bee (dated February 23, 2007, and which has now slipped into SacBee Archives), and her interview with Greta Gerwig!

Greta Gerwig played the character of 'Judy Turner' in Woodland Opera House's Summer 1999 production of "A Chorus Line" (I was a Cut Dancer in that production). So what is she doing these days?

Her day job involves tutoring students from Manhattan's pressure-cooker high schools. ... What happens when a Sacramento childhood as a fencer, actress and ballerina -- as one season's Clara in the Sacramento Ballet's "Nutcracker Suite," no less -- collides with a Barnard College education and the professional theater world?

A budding career as an independent film actress.

In 2006, aside from graduating from Barnard magna cum laude with an English degree, Gerwig acted in four independent films, two of which she also helped write. One of her movies, "Hannah Takes the Stairs," premieres at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Texas next month, with a half-dozen other film festivals to follow.

... "It's an amazing world she's moving in," [Greta's father, Gordon] agrees. "She says, 'People would kill to do what I'm doing.' But she didn't plan it. It just happened."

Really, it did. A River Park childhood filled with dance and voice lessons didn't hurt. Neither did all those years of seeing plays at Sacramento's Celebration Arts and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

But until now, Greta Gerwig has been known only to a select audience -- for example, those who caught her performances at Sacramento's Actors Workshop while she was in high school or in Columbia University's Varsity Show.

She insists that she prefers writing to acting, and she's applying to graduate playwriting programs at the Juilliard School, Yale University and New York University.

It was her writing -- kind of -- that led to her budding indie film career.

She appeared in "LOL," which deals with technology and modern courtship, mainly courtesy of her voi! ce mails and instant messages to her then-boyfriend, one of the film's creators.

That led to "Hannah," which she co-wrote and filmed in Chicago last summer. (She plays Hannah, of course.)

And that, in turn, led to "Baghead," directed by Mark and Jay Duplass, whose previous film, "The Puffy Chair," played at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005.

And in December, she finished filming "Nights and Weekends."

..."I love acting," she says, "and I'd like to keep doing it. But I have no illusions. I'm not a trained actor the way actors onstage have to be. I don't have the kinds of gifts they have.

"As a 23-year-old blond girl, there are 50,000 of me. I don't feel I'm particularly needed in that capacity, but theater needs ! more female playwrights, and film needs more female directors."

Smart. Very smart.

She's struck up a friendship with theater veteran Dasha Epstein, who produced "Children of a Lesser God" and "Same Time, Next Year" on Broadway, and she's determined to have a play on Broadway, or off ... But for now, Greta lives in a Brooklyn apartment with five other recent Barnard grads and waits to see where the world of theater and independent film will take her.

"It's an exciting time to be where I am," she says.

Like 'Judy Turner' says: "Well, I want to be something besides the tall, skinny [blonde] second from the end."

At the "South By Southwest" Film Festival Website, the have some funny trailers. I recommend "McGriddles" (a discussion of the problem with blogs) and "Who's This Guy?", featuring Greta (and the indignities of filmmaking).