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Salome Jens
biography
Salome Jens has a prestigious and award-winning career in the American Theatre including Broadway productions of Far Country, Denker, Night Life, The Disenchanted, Patriot For Me, Lie of the Mind and First One Asleep, Whistle. She was an original member of Elia Kazan’s company at Lincoln Center and starred there in Arthur Miller’s After The Fall, S.N. Berhman’s, But For Whom, Charlie, Tartuffe, Mary Stuart, and Ride Across Lake Constance. Her Off-Broadway appearances include: The Bald Soprano, The Balcony, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Shadow of Heroes, U.S.A – Jon Dos Passos and more. She played the lead roles in Joe Papp’s production of The Winter’s Tale and in Anthony and Cleopatra and Macbeth. Her Los Angeles theatre performances include Hamlet and Crystal and Fox at the Mark Taper Forum, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest at the Doolittle, Request Concert, White Crow, An Evening with Marlene Dietrich, and ...About Anne, an evening of Anne Sexton’s poetry which she tours and for which she received a DramaLogue Award as well as the Bay Area Critics Circle Award. Other awards include a Chicago Critics Award for A Moon for the Misbegotten, Straw Hat Award for Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, Clarence Derwent Award for The Balcony. Her television appearances include: LA Law, Gabriel’s Fire, MacGyver, Cagney and Lacey. She had recurring roles on Falcon Crest, Mary Hartman, Melrose Place and as The Founder in Star Trek - Deep Space Nine. Movie of the week appearances include: The Lottery, From Here To Eternity, Tomorrow’s Child, Portrait of a Mistress, The Grace Kelly Story and more. Her movie roles include: Angel Baby, Seconds, Me Natalie, Fool Killer, Just Between Friends, Clan of the Cave Bear and more. She narrated the eight hour documentary The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century which aired on PBS and the BBC. Recent Los Angeles theatre appearances include the title roles in How Shall We Be Saved by Donald Freed and We Are Family by Murray Schisgal and Old Times by Harold Pinter. She also directed Bad Hurt on Cedar Street at the Tiffany Theatre and Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart. She is currently appearing in Leipzek by Wendy Graf at the Marilyn Monroe Theatre in Los Angeles. Ms. Jens is Associate Professor at UCLA in the Masters’ Theatre Program.
Prerss Release
SALOME JENS in
…ABOUT ANNE
winner of the L.A. Dramalogue Award and Bay Area Critics Circle Award
“Jens’ rich and brilliant performance gleams in the memory.”
—The New York Times
“Jens is poetry in motion.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Jens is magnificent in her reprise of ...about Anne in Hollywood”
—Los Angeles Times
Salome Jens’ shines in the award-winning production ...about Anne, a performance of the poetry of Anne Sexton. Following the show’s premiere at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre and Interart in NYC, ...about Anne went on to win The L.A. Dramalogue Award (Los Angeles) and The Bay Area Critics Circle Award (San Francisco). ...about Anne consists only of Sexton’s poetry. “Each Poem is an event — dramatic, personal — and true,” says Ms. Jens. “Anne wrote of her children, her feelings, her husband and her falling apart. She speaks. I arranged it (the sequence of poetry). It’s coming through me. No filler. She filled it all. It’s me “zinging words out into the air as Anne wrote — me and Anne.” And by the time she has spoken a few dozen lines, the poems come to life and Sexton, her parents, her husband, and daughter, God and strange, inspired people fill the stage. From “Cripples and Other Stories” there are reflections on the poet’s childhood: “My father was a perfect man / clean and rich and fat. / My mother was a brilliant thing. / She was good at that.” In My Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman, Sexton wrote a tender, delicate and blazingly honest tribute to her adolescent daughter. And while her love affair with death is well documented throughout her work, and revealed here in the harrowing “Sylvia’s Death,” there are other equally fierce urgings for life. “Your Face on the Dog’s Neck” expresses Sexton’s jealousy of the dog on which her sleeping husband lies. “When Man Enters Woman” deals with the sexual unity of men and women. With her cap of gold hair, her pale, mobile face and her tall, insinuating body, Jens commands the stage with-out imposing anything alien to the spirit of Sexton’s poems. She can be subtle as well as strong, and she lets us see beyond the tormented soul “rowing toward God” to the artist who found Him and made Him in her own words.