For a man who has spent his entire adult life in America, between New York and Los Angeles, David Hay still sounds like an Australian. He attributes it to being tone-deaf. (I guess it’s a good thing he’s a writer and not a singer!)

Hay’s dad was an Ambassador for the UN, so he grew up traveling the world and spending a good amount of time in New York, having “all these great New York experiences”. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he was pretty much inundated in culture: “I saw all these great plays and whatever. I was taken to everything… my parents had all this access to great culture.”

With an M.F.A. from the UCLA film school, Hay now finds himself spending all of his time writing. He is a playwright, working on revising his second full-length play, “A Perfect Future” and about to begin a new one. He also writes about architecture for magazines, he mentions as a side note.

“Writing is hard. You just gotta get up and start and do the work. Obviously you think about whether something’s good enough or whether it’s developed enough, but you can’t get bogged down by that. When you’re actually doing it, you’re not worried about all those other issues, you’re just dealing with the issues at hand. It really all depends on your own ability not to get distracted. It always starts off sort of agonizingly slow. You have some ideas, and then you go through all the typical procrastination things. Sometimes, I’ll just sit and do nothing. Or, like, clean all the tiles in the kitchen. And then, suddenly, you get going and you just write and write and write. You forget about everything else: you lose track of time, you forget to eat or shower. There’s really nothing else you can do but write.”

Cassie Newman | Aspiring Actress

I was meant to be a performer.  While other kids were playing softball or watching TV, I grew up dancing around ballet studios, leaving school early to go to piano lessons, and setting up stages in my backyard where I would spend hours singing to myself.  There was never any question that I would leave my small mountain town in Colorado and pursue an education and a career as an actress.  So here I am, seven years later, with a B.F.A. in Drama to show for it, in New York City.  Talk about moving from being a big fish in a small pond to a… well, a minnow in the Atlantic Ocean.  Every so often that little voice of skepticism and fear pops up and says, maybe you should take your 3.96 GPA and go be a Financial Analyst or a Lawyer… but I just can’t do it!  That would never be enough for me:  I believe in the power of the theater.  It is a place where ideas and emotions are not only bred and inspired but also shared and celebrated.  It is a lesson in history, a hypothesis for the future, and when done well, a reality check for the present.  It is the most frightening, challenging and yet satisfying thing I could ever imagine being a part of and there is nothing else I would rather fight for, long for and dedicate myself to.  So I’ll stick it out, right along with the 100,000 or so other aspiring actors pounding the pavement in this concrete jungle.