Around Town
‘She Is Getting Every Ounce of Performance That These Actors Can Give’: Town Resident Ali Tesluk Makes Professional Directorial Debut with Summer Theatre of New Canaan
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Though she’d spent many years singing, dancing and acting—and in live theater programs familiar to New Canaanites, including at the Performing Arts Conservatory on Pine Street, St. Luke’s School Theatre and Summer Theatre of New Canaan—town resident Ali Tesluk came to directing unexpectedly, as a sort of fallback. It was 2014, her senior year in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in theater arts at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Penn. Tesluk had a directing class under her belt when went out for the acting part of a gypsy in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”—a part she didn’t get. “I went to the head of the Theater Department and I asked him for some feedback, and he pretty much said to me, ‘You were so great, you were so great, but the other girl who got the part, it was her turn,’ pretty much,” Tesluk recalled with a smile during an interview in downtown New Canaan on a recent morning, about two miles from the outdoor stage where she soon will make her professional directorial debut.