Pulp!

MARISSA ELKINS

m.elkins@mac.com

Marissa Elkins is a partner at Amherst law firm, Allison, Angier & Bartmon LLP and spends her days muddling about in Massachusetts' courts of law, but eternally pines for her first love, theater. Like so many before her, she loves the law, but what she really wants to do is direct. Years ago, Marissa toiled in the wings at Houston's Theater Under the Stars and Main Street Theater, stage managing her way to near-financial-solvency. She also served on the board and as Associate Artistic Director of Unhinged Theater. Along the way the way she learned the ins and outs of big musical theater and the small ensemble and somehow fit in time to earn a Masters in Theater from the University of Houston (though it did take her four years!)

Though she thought she had put those days behind her, since moving to western Massachusetts, Marissa has fallen in again with the theater crowd. She has planted herself at the side of Linda McInerney of Old Deerfield Productions, acting as Assistant Director for several ODP productions including "Doubt", "A Christmas Carol", and "The Last High Queen of Ireland." Now Marissa is out to do her own thing, albeit with a little leg up from Old Deerfield Productions artist development program, The Upstarts and the invaluable mentoring of Linda McInerney.

Marissa wants to bring more theater to western Mass. Nothing fancy, just more of the shared experience that is theater, more of the empathy that is engendered when we witness human emotion collectively, more of the awakening that comes from translating our lives into text and visual metaphor and reflecting it back at ourselves.