Alumni Snapshots
Debra Messing ’90
Major: Theater ArtsMovie and television actress
New York
Actress Debra Messing (“Will and Grace,” “The Starter Wife”), likened by some to comedic genius Lucille Ball, has always craved the spotlight. After seeing her wow audiences belting out the title role in “Annie,” her parents endorsed her dream, with one caveat: get a good liberal-arts education first, they insisted.
The advice, she told a celebrity reporter, was gold. Extolling the value of her Brandeis training, Messing said, “Acting is about putting yourself in the shoes of other people who are different from you. The more you can learn about the world, about different disciplines, it all just feeds into making you a better actor.”
Beyond honing her craft on the Spingold Theater stage, Messing enjoyed what she called the “intellectual and social stimulation” of Brandeis, and she spent a semester in her junior year studying at the prestigious European Studio Group in London.
Graduating summa cum laude, she continued on for an M.F.A. in acting at New York University. Today, the glamorous Emmy winner, wife and mother has a long list of stage, screen and TV credits as well as a name for diligence and personal groundedness.
Woody Allen, who cast her as his co-star in “Hollywood Ending,” said of Messing, “She lights up everything she does.”
Learning from the pros
Sheldon Best ’08
Majors: Theater and English and American LiteratureActor
Brooklyn, New York
Making a life on the stage requires talent, passion and lucky breaks.For Sheldon Best, the talent bloomed at age 5, when he began performing in plays at his grandmother’s Brooklyn church. The passion and lucky breaks came into play in college, where he found himself tapped six times to act with the distinguished Brandeis Theater Company, playing Oliver in "As You Like It" and Crookfinger Jake in "The Threepenny Opera," among other parts.
“At Brandeis,” he says, “I learned by working with graduate students in acting, with faculty and professional directors and with Equity guest artists.”
Breaking into the professional theater while still an undergrad, Best played in Berkshire Theater Festival’s "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" and SpeakEasy Stage Company’s "The History Boys," both with Brandeis directors. His credits also include the Boston Playwrights Theater’s Elliot Norton Award-winning "The Oil Thief," the off-Broadway romp "Soul Samurai" and the Actors' Shakespeare Project’s "Much Ado About Nothing."
“Whenever I go into an audition, I just try to have fun and do my best. I feel so fortunately blessed to be doing the work I love,” he says.
A world of musical praise
Oran Etkin ’01
Majors: Music and EconomicsMusician
New York
Born in Israel but raised in America, Oran Etkin has drawn on the experiences of a cosmopolitan life in composing his unique spin on world music.
Since studying classical clarinet and composition at Brandeis, he’s gone on to play with musicians from around the globe, including gigs at the United Nations and other venues in the United States, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East.
This international experience has helped to shape his debut album, “Kelenia,” which features a blend of Jewish and African influences that Etkin says naturally fit together. The critics agree. One reviewer praised the album for setting a new standard for world music in the 2000s.
Even with all the success he’s enjoyed since graduating from Brandeis, Etkin still gets help on occasion from his former professors, like Robert Nieske, who filled in for one of Etkin’s band members at a recent Boston concert. Proving that in music, as in life, it’s a small world.
Feeding a fetish for film
Scott Feinberg
Major: American StudiesFilm blogger, Los Angeles Times
Woodbridge, Conn.
At the age of 15, Scott Feinberg came upon a list of the 100 greatest movies of all time and vowed to see them all in his lifetime. After finishing the task within a year, he knew he had found his passion.
When it came time to choose a college, Feinberg says, everything about Brandeis impressed him; his sole reservation was that film, at that time, was offered only as a minor.
“But on the day I came to visit,” he notes, “I sat in on one of Professor Tom Doherty’s classes. They were intensively discussing a book by Camille Paglia about Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and I knew right away I was where I belonged.”
At Brandeis, he minored in film, brought classic movie stars to campus for the annual SunDeis Film Festival, and began interviewing current Hollywood celebrities for a blog he started — all while pursuing an American studies major and playing for the tennis team.
Today, he blogs about the film industry for the Los Angeles Times, often focusing on the race for the Academy Awards, which he recently attended for the first time.
From Avenue Q to the West Side
Robyn Goodman ’69
Major: TheaterBroadway producer
New York
In early 2009, when the bilingual “West Side Story” revival opened on Broadway, the marquee bore two Brandeis names. One was composer Leonard Bernstein’s; the other belonged to producer Robyn Goodman, who had already won best musical Tony Awards for “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights.”
Goodman had learned stagecraft from Brandeis’s legendary director Morris Carnovsky, acting with his celebrated ensemble in several world premieres at Spingold Theater. Since then, she has appeared in and produced dozens of shows on and off-Broadway, on TV and in regional theaters.
Now a principal of Aged in Wood Productions and artistic consultant to the Roundabout Theater Company, Goodman has worked with iconic director and producer Joseph Papp of New York’s Public Theater, helped launch the famed Second Stage Theater and the Manhattan Theater Club and won six Emmies.
Noting that her Brandeis experience whetted an appetite for new works, Goodman says, “I think my strongest skills lie in development. What satisfies me most is assembling a team of writers, directors and other talented people and enabling them to realize their vision.”