Olivia Spokoiny has been in The Sound of Music three times
and Annie twice. She has been in Nora at Intiman,
White Christmas at the 5th Avenue, and only one fringe theater
production, Macbeth with Ghost Light Theatricals. She is 13
years old.
Olivia’s mom—who bought this story in this year’s
Strangercrombie auction—took her to her first audition when she
was in first grade: The Sound of Music at the Village Theatre
in Issaquah.
“My mom was pregnant with my little sister and saw an ad in the
Village Theatre paper,” Olivia says. “She asked if I wanted to
audition, and I loved the movie, so I said yes. I did the song
‘Do-Re-Mi.'” Olivia doesn’t sing songs, she does them.
While Olivia waited for her callback, her sister Eva was born. “My
baby sister went with me,” Olivia says. “She was just a few days old.”
Olivia got the part.
But that wasn’t Olivia’s first time onstage. When she was in first
grade, her mother, Elizabeth, organized a Fine Arts Night at Olivia’s
Issaquah elementary school. “It was just something they did once a
year,” Olivia says. “She knew I’d really love it. I did a dance my mom
made, from West Side Story, to that song that goes ‘boy, boy,
crazy boy.’ Then my mom asked if I wanted to do more dancing.”
Elizabeth (a substitute teacher) and her husband, Larry, (a lawyer)
enrolled Olivia and her older sister Leah in dance classes. They
started working the competitive dance circuit, dancing tap, ballet,
jazz, and hiphop. Soon Olivia was winning awards at pageants such as
Dance Masters of America, Dance USA, Spotlight, Petite Miss Starpower,
Petite Miss Spotlight, and Petite Miss Dance of Washington.
Olivia is also a member of the Seattle Storm Dance Troupe, a group
of girls who dance in KeyArena during WNBA games. Her signature dance
move is the worm. It always drives the crowd bonkers. So the Sonics
asked her to occasionally join their dance team of grown-up
cheerleaders.
But Olivia prefers the theater. Theater is an exciting and
mysterious place for a child—a place where the universe is
topsy-turvy, and children can be as important, as powerful, as adults.
From backstage, Olivia sees the props before they appear, knows when
the audience will laugh or clap or cry, can watch stagehands pulling
ropes that move the scenery around.
Being backstage during her first play, The Sound of Music,
was a little unsettling. “I looked up and there were a bunch of set
pieces (I think there was a big wooden bed) hanging over my head,”
Olivia says. “That was scary. And there was so much going on backstage
and you couldn’t touch the ropes because something might fall on the
actors’ heads.”
School plays aren’t satisfying for Olivia—those have four
months of rehearsals and only two performances, instead of the two
months’ rehearsal and 30 performances. The latter is better, Olivia
says, because you can watch the other actors grow into their
characters, watch them recover when they screw up. “You learn,” she
says, “how to make something more than just a show. You can get into
the character more.”
Olivia likes directors Jane Jones and Myra Platt, of Book-It
Theatre, for the same reason: “They give you a lot of information about
your character.” Olivia has been in three Book-It
Productions—The House of the Spirits, A Tale of Two
Cities, and Peter Pan, where her performance won the
attention of a reviewer from the Seattle Gay News: “The way
the mermaid moves is truly remarkable and has to be done by a very
strong and physically proficient person. Here, Olivia Spokoiny—a
young lady of many talents—makes the mermaid swim.”
Theater is where Olivia got her start, but film may be her future.
She talks fondly about an action movie, called Bullets, Blood &
a Fistful of Ca$h, she was in a few years ago. In the movie, she
meets a mysterious bleeding man, gets chased by a bad guy, and has to
run through an exploding door. “There were mini firecrackers going all
around it,” she says. “We could only do one take because it took them
two hours to set up the shot. They just pulled me through and I
screamed and hoped I didn’t get hit by any of them.”
She also played an orphan in Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the
Brain!, his silent-movie fable (with narration, a live band, and
Foley sound effects) about sexual development and a family romance on a
barren island. Olivia knew it was going to be creepy during the
filming—in the movie, the woman running the orphanage sucks the
youth out of children by way of wounds in their necks—but it was
creepier than she expected. “We didn’t know about making the woman
younger or the nudity or anything like that,” she says. “It was a huge
surprise because I knew the guy they showed in the nudity scene. I was
in A Tale of Two Cities with him. I closed my eyes and said,
‘Wow, I really didn’t need to see that.”
Olivia’s next audition is this Monday, January 28, for The Diary
of Anne Frank with the Evergreen Family Theater. 
