Page 33 - The Hunt - Fall 2024

STAGE SAVVY
Career actors and directors bring professional experience to the region’s theaters.
BY ROGER MORRIS | PHOTOS BY JIM GRAHAM
It’s a sunny Friday afternoon in late April, and the University of Delaware students on the sidewalks outside a Newark coffee shop have already mothballed their heavy winter clothing for something much lighter and considerably briefer. Inside, Elizabeth Heflin and Lee Ernst are assessing their lengthy acting careers, which will soon come to a pause for the summer as they wrap up the final performance in the UD Resident Ensemble Players production of Ira Levin’s Deathtrap. The two are playing husband and wife Sidney and Myra Bruhl.
“Lee and I were in grad school together at UD in the professional theater training program,” says Heflin of her early-’90s tenure as a student there.
Each went their separate ways to become a resident professional actor elsewhere—she at the Alley Theatre in Houston and he at the American Players Theatre in Wisconsin, among others. Both returned to campus years later to join the newly formed REP.
“Sandy Robins, who headed the program when we were at Delaware, had just started the REP
at the university and began contacting former
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