The big, troublesome question for local artists—”What the hell are you doing in Seattle?”—seems to go double for actors. Even if you allow for the quality of work available here, the relatively small volume makes it increasingly difficult for a performer with ambition to make a career of any meaningful description.
Stranger Genius Award nominee Emily Chisholm, increasingly prominent on stages and screens in town, has a list of reasons why she remains in Seattle, including the community that has nurtured and mentored her, the great work she has been able to do thus far, and the knowledge that another city would be just as difficult to break into without rewarding the kind of creative risks her Seattle milieu thrives on.
“I’m doing everything I can to make this work,” she says. And if that means keeping a day job (or two), it pays off in other ways.
