Behind The Successful Career of Actress and Playwright Kirsten Jones

What do you call someone who has performed in three plays this year and written a play that is debuting in January? Well, that’s three plays in seven months, plus the enormous amount of time and concentrated effort to write a play when she’s not on stage…one might call her Super Woman. Or, perhaps, she might just be seen as being totally immersed in her acting career, which she obviously is.

Kirsten Jones the professional actress and playwright originally from South Africa, devotes almost all of her time to her acting career. She is very serious about it. In fact, she wanted to be an actor since she was four years old. At that same age she distinctly remembers the morning she was balancing herself on a tree stump outside her house and was frustrated because she realized in that moment that more than anything she wanted to be an actor — and she wanted to start immediately.

Fast forward eleven years and Kirsten, age 15, immigrated to England to attend an acting school, Redroofs Theatre School. At sixteen she was awarded an acting scholarship to Ashbourne College and she moved to London by herself to attend. While in London she wrote a play, Case Number, which was taken to the famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Her love of playwriting earned her a BA (Hons) in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.

She then moved to San Francisco, California to begin a marketing career at an art gallery. She realized almost instantly that she wasn’t cut out for that and she also discovered that she didn’t want to be a writer full time. She missed acting and she knew that she would be unhappy until she got back into acting again. So, she gave up her gallery job and got a scholarship to the oldest and arguably the most prestigious acting school in the United States, American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Los Angeles, where she plunged into acting once again. She has been a working actor since then. She has been focusing on theater for the past year and has been performing at the Hudson and the Loft Ensemble.

Currently, she is playing Matilda Dembowski in Greer DuBois’ The Year Without a Summer at the Loft Ensemble. The play is set in 1816 and it beautifully normalizes trans and non-heterosexual stories in a historical context.

In February she played a British butler, Edgar Teese, in Murder at Memory Manor at the Hudson Theaters. Getting that role was a big achievement for her as the directors originally wanted a man to play Edgar. Kirsten was the only woman in the second round of auditions; the room was full of men who also hoped to get the role.

Kirsten co-wrote a play this year with Dani True called Something You Don’t Know. It is being produced for Season 12 of the Loft Ensemble. Over 500 plays were submitted, and our play was chosen as 1 of 8. She has been cast to portray Sophie, and she is extremely excited to see it brought to life.