Zoren: ‘Rise’ star playing Frenchy at BCP in ‘Grease’ talks career

Erin Kommor was excited when she found out Harry Truman High School in Levittown is about 20 miles from where she is currently playing Frenchy in “Grease” at Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope.

Truman is the model for Stanton High, the fictional school in which NBC’s bygone series, “Rise,” was set.

“Rise,” though popular and critically acclaimed, lasted only one season, but it was enough to cement it in fans’ memories and to make Erin Kommor, who played the troubled Sasha Foley, familiar enough to attract more than 183,000 followers to her podcast and Instagram page @SPRINKLES.

Kommor has been invited and is eager to speak to the current drama students at Truman. She has a lot to tell them about forging a career as an actor and about maintaining the mental health necessary to stay grounded in what could be a precarious profession.

I guarantee that whatever Kommor talks about will be entertaining. A 50-minute telephone conversation with her didn’t flag for a second.

Kommor can pinball from theater to books and from psychology to love for acting with speedy aplomb. She mingles animated energy and quick, funny responses that show her intellect, humor, and zest for life in general.

No wonder she has so many people tuning into podcasts and looking or her Internet posts, although Kommor says, “I don’t know why I have so many followers. I find it confusing.”

“Rise” came along at a timely moment for Kommor.

A meaty, long-lasting TV role was her “end goal” when she studied acting in her hometown, Louisville, Ky., and later in Boston and Oxford — Oxford, England.

“I moved to New York right after finishing a two-month program at the British American Drama Academy. Even though I’ve been involved with acting since age 9 and never wanted to do anything else, I gave myself five years to launch a sustaining career.

“‘Rise’ came along in the fourth year.

Kommor played one of the more dramatic roles in the series.

Sasha Foley had a rough upbringing and a rough life, including a teenage pregnancy and teenage abortion.

She wasn’t totally accepted by others in the Stanton theater program. Yet she derived comfort from it and the relationship she formed with its assistant director.

“She was played by Rosie Perez, who was so giving and generous. I learned a lot from her, just as Sasha learned a lot from her character.”

Kommor says she is often cast as a young person facing struggle and adversity even though that is far from her perspective and personality.

“That’s why it’s so much fun for me to play Frenchy. She has problems, but she’s so loving and trusting and optimistic. She never lets her setbacks bring her down. She believes she can overcome them. Or she just doesn’t acknowledge them. She has so much hope.

“Frenchy is bubbly. She and her boyfriend, Doody, are the nice kids who like and get along with everybody. I enjoy playing someone so positive even when her life is not going well.

“Between the role, Hunter (‘Grease’ director Hunter Foster) the cast, I’m having a lot of fun.”

Another optimistic character attracted Kommor to the theater in the first place.

“Annie,” Kommor says.” “My mother took me to see ‘Annie,’ and that clinched it. I told her right there I wanted to ‘do that,’ be on stage. She took me at my word and supported me through all of the phases it took to become a working actor.”

The two places Kommor says changed her life at different intervals in that life were the Youth Performing Arts School in Louisville, and the British American Dramatic Academy in Great Britain.

“I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but Youth PAS changed my life because it ignited my love for theater. There, I was studying Shakespeare by age 9.

“BADA changed my acting life because it showed me a technique that is better for me than the American preference for The Method. The British are better actors than we are because they work from the outside in and use their voices and understanding more than their memories or emotions.”

Music to my Anglophile ears, I reinforce Kommor’s stance with stories about differences between British and American actors on movie sets, including Laurence Olivier’s famous rejoinder to an actor who painstakingly lived the experience he was about to play, being awake for three days straight: “Good God, man, haven’t you heard of ‘acting?’ ”

Between Youth PAS and Oxford, Kommor benefited from attending Boston Conservatory, her choice as a training ground and one of the three top-ranked schools for studying acting.

“I consider myself an actor who sings. The acting comes first, and I like that my education included so many types of roles and various approaches.”

Erin Kommor attends the “Rise” New York premiere at Landmark Theatre on March 7, 2018 in New York City. (Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)

Acting is not the only way Kommor performs.

There are those popular podcasts and posts, the former being currently in abeyance.

With a fan base initially derived from fans of “Rise,” which Kommor says had a huge following, she went on the air, at times with therapist Alegra Kastens, to talk about what was on her mind, which usually boiled down to whatever TV show or role she was doing, books and mental health.

“Minding mental health is important for an actor,” Kommor says. “It’s a hard career.

“When you’re in a show, it’s great, and you feel happy, but there are still challenges. When I go to back from this break, we’ll be chugging along with tech rehearsals (rehearsals just before the dress rehearsal and show opening when lights, costumes, props, effects, etc. are examinedand perfected). That means 10 hours of rehearsal, two or three days of it.

“It’s great, but you have to stay grounded during it. You have to stay even more grounded when you’re not in a show, especially if you’re between shows.

“Then, there’s effect of playing emotions. When you cry for a scene, your brain may know you’re acting, but your body doesn’t. It produces the same chemical reaction as if you were crying for real. You have to learn how to cope with that.

“Actors need help dealing with matters like these, the ups of performance and the reaction to down time and your body not realizing you’re playing a role, and it’s your character who is in a rage, not you.

“I talk about these things and also about yoga and breath exercises I do to relax and work against the mental wear and tear of an actor’s life.”

Kommor says there’s always interest in what’s happening as an actor rehearses or does a show. She is also an avid reader with a preference for mysteries and romances.

Kommor and Kastens did a podcast called “Sad Girls Who Read” in which they discussed the novels and nonfiction books they read. Konnor’s favorite book was Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life,” a book I also found engrossing.

In fact, Kommor and I found a lot we had in common, including our experiences at two restaurants, one unfortunately now closed, in Louisville.

(I was drinking tea from a mug I got at the closed restaurant as we spoke. Pure coincidence, but an interesting one.)

Kommor, due at rehearsal, and I parted with her talking once more about the joy she gets from playing a happy, if oblivious, character like Frenchy.

She likes that Frenchy is funny. “Laughter,” Kommor says, “is the best medicine.”

Eagles broadcasts

The Eagles pre-season continues at 7 p.m. Thursday when the Birds play the New England Patriots in Foxboro, Mass., in a game that airs on Channel 10.

The third and final pre-season contest is 1 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 24, at home against the Minnesota Vikings. That game can also be seen on Channel 10.

Saquon Barkley of the Philadelphia Eagles before the preseason game against the Baltimore Ravens at M&T Bank Stadium on Aug. 9, in Baltimore. (Greg Fiume/Getty Images)

The radio outlet for both games is WIP (94.1 FM) where Merrill Reese and Mike Quick once again do play-by-play and analysis. Any simultaneous Phillies game will be heard on WPHT (1210 AM).

I listen to both ‘IP and ‘PHT on a regular basis, and I was taken aback by the difference in the way Scott Franzke and Kevin Stocker sounded on the AM station.

The Eagles season opener against the Green Bay Packers will be played at Corinthians Arena in São Paulo, Brazil at 8:15 p.m. Friday, Sept. 6 on Peacock.

Playing Emmy catchup

The 2024 Emmy nominations have caused a scramble to catch up with shows missed during the last television season.

Curiosity about whether NBA superstar Steph Curry could act led to a binge stream.

Netflix’s “3 Body Problem,” named after an Isaac Newton theory about gravitation, was immediately engrossing, even to me, who tends to resist series that rely on aliens for their premise.

John Bradley’s Jack examines an advanced virtual-reality headset that’s been given to Jess Hong’s Jin in “3 Body Problem.” (Courtesy of Netflix)

Peacock’s “Mr. Throwback” seemed a little too slick and self-consciously satirical when it began. It remains cooler-than-thou throughout, but enough of the plot twists are genuinely funny enough, and Steph Curry is such a natural, the mockumentary sustains interest and earns legitimate LOL’s as it proceeds.

“3 Body Problem” begins provocatively in ’80s Red China.

There an internationally acclaimed physicist, donning a dunce cap and a sign around his neck stating his “crimes,” is hauled in front of an audience of Communist youth and other “faithful” and asked to renounce his beliefs and teachings in public.

He doesn’t disavow them. He affirms them, they being his acceptance of Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Big Bang theory, and that science has not proven either way whether there is a deity.

The zealous interrogators destroy the physicist while wife, also a physicist, who testified against him, and his distraught daughter, watch.

Nefarious doings in China, not to my mind overstated, pepper the more contemporary narrative of “3 Body Problem.”

That contemporary story is fascinating on its own. Five young physicists — well 30ish — who studied at Oxford under the slaughtered physicist’s daughter, Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao), mourn their teacher, one of a series of suicides among scientists, but recurring throughout the series.

One of those students, Augie (Eiza Gonzalez), has visions of waves that form into numbers then form into a digital countdown clock. She encounters them everywhere, in nightclubs, on trains, just walking down the street.

We know the suicides have also seen those waves and numbers. Following Ye Wenjie’s funeral, Augie is greeted by a young woman, who sits with her and tells her to watch for a sign from the universe at midnight the following evening and to be careful not to let the clock she sees get to zero.

“Nothing good happens at zero,” she warns.

What ensues keeps you on the edge of your chair (or sinking deeper into your lounger).

Augie, with one of her colleagues, Saul (Jovan Adepo), goes on a journey of discovery that entails a broader, more organized universe than most science fiction stories posit.

“3 Body Problem” comes from David Benioff and D.B. Weiss from “Game of Thrones,” so the detail in plotting and writing is tight, germane and intense.

Aliens become involved in ways that again differ from the usual science fiction yarn.

I have not finished streaming “3 Body Problem,” but I look forward to continuing with it and see why it garnered Emmy attention.

“Mr. Throwback” is fun, even when you see the gears and belts working to create its plot twists, jokes and satire.

Adam Pally as Danny, left, and Stephen Curry as himself in “Mr. Throwback.” (David Moir/Peacock/TNS)

Golden State Warrior great Steph Curry shows decent acting ability as he stars as himself in a rockumentary in which he is reunited with a boyhood friend and junior high teammate, Dan (Adam Pally), who is down on his luck and looking to Curry, unbeknownst to Curry, to bail him out of financial woes that involve Chicago’s Polish Mafia.

Curry buys Dan’s spate of evolving lies to an extent he plans a mega-special event to change Dan’s life.

Another childhood friend, Kimberly (Ego Nwodim), is the counterpoint to Curry’s “Why not me?” attitude and firm “no” to being “small” and “everyday.”

She is the delightful cynic who sees through Dan’s con but does all she can as the head of Curry’s media company, “Curry Up and Wait,” to make Steph’s plans for Dan a reality.

The show’s ideas are often funnier in concept that they are in landing, but there is enough variety and twists upon twists to make the series enjoyable.

It becomes sort of like a mockumentary “Shameless” with Curry as the ultimate optimist, Kimberly as the world’s most competent, and Dan as a mess who enjoys all that Curry’s wealth and lifestyle offer even though he has occasional pangs of conscience about duping.

Though not a total success, “Mr. Throwback,” with its skein of characters surrounding both Curry and Dan, entertains.

I may have watched it with more of a smirk than a smile, but I also laughed a lot at both good jokes and absurdities.