Beautiful Cages is showing September 9-24, 2022! We reached out to Brandi Andrade to find out more about her and her experience working on this production.
What is this show about in 3 sentences or less?
It’s about a really messed-up family. It’s about how trauma gets passed down to the next generation no matter how hard you try to stop it. It’s about doing the best you can and less than ideal circumstances, and about learning to do for yourself when others let you down.
What’s your favorite thing about working on this production?
I like the people at this theater, And I am also pretty fond of the commute! 😉
How did you get into theatre?
In high school, I got to be in a play about Kaiulani, the last princess of Hawaii. (I played one of the white girls she made friends with when she went to school in England!). Kaiulani is a beloved and tragic figure, and the play made the older Hawaiians in the audience weep openly. We were invited to perform in Honolulu, the capital city, and took a program to the mausoleum where she is interred. It was such a powerful experience! No wonder I became such a strong believer in the power of storytelling through theater!
How is working with The Magnetic different from working with other theatres?
I like the theater’s mission of supporting new storytelling voices.
Do you have any upcoming projects that we should check out?
I am currently performing in HART’s production of The Book of Will, which is a great story about how close we came to not having Shakespeare’s plays. It was only through the tremendous efforts of his friends—a bunch of actors who believed in the power of his stories and wanted them to continue to be told after their deaths— that they were collected and preserved and now belong to us all.
What's your most interesting family story?
Positive angle: My parents broke out of the mold of small-town Midwest life and changed our family’s trajectory by moving from Missouri to Hawaii to follow my dad’s dream of being a preacher. Not so much: I am now a liberal, progressive Feminist in a family of ultra-conservative, evangelical Republicans. (Thanksgiving is a b*tch…)
Beautiful Cages is showing September 9-24 at The Magnetic Theatre in Asheville, NC. Grab your tickets here: https://app.arts-people.com/index.php?show=132411