Meet the Actors and Characters of A Walk on the Moon

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By Taylor Steinbeck

In just a few weeks, A.C.T.'s world-premiere musical, A Walk on the Moon, will land on the Geary stage, and with it comes fresh faces, original characters, and new songs for San Francisco audiences to enjoy for the very first time. We caught up with some of the actors in Moon to get to know their characters.

The cast of A.C.T.'s 2018 production of A Walk on the Moon at the first rehearsal. Photo by Taylor Steinbeck.
Brigid O’Brien (Alison Kantrowitz): Alison is a fiery teenager. She's fun to portray because she has a lot of emotions—anger, excitement, passion—I feel like I can relate to her in that way. Also, she’s close to my age, which helps. Sometimes in stories with young people, writers try to dumb them down, but I think our book writer, Pamela Gray, has done an amazing job of creating honest human emotions for this character. Teenage angst is so real!

Jonah Platt (Marty Kantrowitz): Marty is the patriarch of the Kantrowitz family. He’s a hardworking TV repair man who lives for his family. His relationship with Pearl is very complicated. They got pregnant on their first date when they were teenagers and have been together ever since. He had dreams, she had dreams, but everything became about their family. They did what they needed to do.

Katie Brayben (Pearl Kantrowitz): Pearl is a wife and mother who is in the midst of a lot of change. She’s in her early thirties, but she gave birth very young, so her journey is a coming-of-age story at an older age. Pearl has a pretty typical mother-daughter relationship with Alison. Her daughter is a politically aware modern young woman and Pearl can see that, but it’s difficult for them to understand each other because she never had the possibilities that Alison had.

Nick Sacks (Ross), Brigid O'Brien (Alison), Jeffrey Brian Adams (Neil), and Kerry O'Malley (Lillian)
at the first rehearsal of A.C.T.'s 2018 production A Walk on the Moon. Photo by Taylor Steinbeck.
Zak Resnick (Walker Jerome): Walker is a free spirit. I think he’s someone who participates in free love. He is empathetic and caring; he wants what’s best for everyone. Walker is the one person in the story who doesn’t really belong in the world of the play—he’s the outsider. He goes to the bungalow colony to sell blouses and then his whole world is changed in an instant when he meets Pearl.

Kerry O’Malley (Lillian Kantrowitz): Lillian is Marty’s mother, and like Pearl, she was also young when she got married and had her child. Her husband left her, so she hopes that Pearl will make the choice to keep her family together. You can see from Lillian to Pearl to Alison the trajectory of women in America and how their opportunities have changed according to the time they lived in. This is a very female-centered story about a woman finding her own power and making decisions about what she wants to do in her life.

A Walk on the Moon begins at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater June 9. Click here to purchase tickets. Want to learn more about A.C.T.’s production of Moon? Order a copy of Words on Plays, A.C.T.'s in-depth performance guide series.

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