Germantown sisters embrace twinship in ‘Comedy of Errors’
WMILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL hen sisters Alex and Sydney Salter joined First Stage’s advanced Young Company as high school freshmen, actress and teacher Marcella Kearns foresaw their destiny.
While you are here, Alex remembers Kearns telling them, we have to do “The Comedy of Errors.” Back then, the Salters had yet to read Shakespeare’s play.
But now, as high school seniors in their final months as Young Company members, these twin sisters are thrilled to be playing the knuckleheaded Dromio twins in Shakespeare’s slapstick comedy of mistaken identities.
“The show is all about misunderstanding and confusion,” Alex said. “That’s kind of what we go through on a regular basis. I’m with a group of people and people think I’m Sydney. Or she’s with a group of people and people think she’s Alex.”
Young Company director John Maclay, who has mentored the Salters for almost a decade, said he didn’t cast them just because they’re twins, noting that a second set of twin characters in the production is played by unrelated teens. “My identical twins made it clear that they deserved the role on their merits, not on their parents,” he said.
Speaking of their merits, both Salters won acting awards this past summer at a Utah Shakespeare Festival competition for young performers.
Their parents, Eric and Heidi, met doing theater, Sydney explained. When the twins were eight, Mom and Dad started the Imagination Theatre of Germantown. Not long after that, Alex and Sydney auditioned for the critical role of a young Jewish girl in First Stage’s production of “Witness,” a drama about a Vermont town’s response to the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
Because First Stage double-casts its child roles, Maclay was looking for two girls among the 30-some called back to audition.
The Salters, whom he hadn’t met before, were clearly the best two choices. But could he ask a family from Germantown to bear the burden of schlepping a girl to Milwaukee every day? “Look, they’re amazing, I can’t pick one of them,” Maclay told Mama Salter. IF YOU GO First Stage’s Young Company performs “The Comedy of Errors” Dec. 9-18 at the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center, 325 W. Walnut St. For ticket information, visit firststage.org or call (414) 267-2961. This Is Us is a recurring feature in the Journal Sentinel Green Sheet, with stories on the people, places and things reflecting the spirit and heart of our community.
Fortunately, the Salters were able to make it work, beginning a long artistic relationship. “They’re consummate joyful professionals,” Maclay said of the sisters.
Now Germantown High School seniors, Alex and Sydney are applying and auditioning for high-level college theater programs. While their looks have diverged a bit (Alex has the blonde locks), people can still mix them up, so they try to schedule their college auditions on different days.
They’re unabashed fans of each other and of each other’s work. “We’re like best friends,” Alex said. “I never really get sick of her.”
“She’s really good with comedy,” Sydney said of Alex. “She’s really good at getting down to the deep part of (a) character … “
“She’s a very spontaneous actor,” Alex said of Sydney. “She’s very creative and she makes big choices.”
Maclay has joked with Sydney and Alex about the stereotypes they’ve endured, but the Salters are not above a good twin prank. In second grade, their separate classes traveled together to First Stage to watch a production that included the younger Salter sister, Kayla. At intermission, Alex and Sydney swapped clothes in the bathroom and joined each other’s classroom groups. “They had no idea until the end of the show, when we told them,” Alex said. ABOUT THIS FEATURE