Child Actors Who Made Quite an Entrance
Max Talisman And Mollie Clement Have Talent, Poise -- And High Hopes

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 6, 2006

Epiphanies come early in the lives of the stage-struck. When Max Talisman was 3, he traveled through a blizzard to see "Cats" at Washington's National Theatre. One exposure to Rum Tum Tugger and Grizabella the Glamour Cat and his fate was sealed.

"I fell in love with the excitement, the happy faces of the dancers," he says. "I wanted to be part of that."

The gotta-do-it thunderbolt also zapped Mollie Clement at 3. Her mother, Laura, took her to a puppet show, and instead of dissolving in giggles, the little girl burst into tears. Not out of fear -- out of frustration.

"I was upset," Mollie says.

"She wanted to be holding a puppet," her mother explains.

The dreams of Max, now 13 and a Bethesda seventh-grader, and Mollie, a Fairfax sixth-grader who is about to turn 11, were kindled as orchestras swelled and unseen hands wove their magic in the dark.

Unlike most kids, though, Max and Mollie moved out of the theater shadows and into the follow spot. And not just in school plays. Both have accomplished what many drama-conservatory graduates twice their ages are pining for: paying gigs as actors. Max recently finished a well-received turn as one of the leads in Studio Theatre's production of the vocally demanding musical "Caroline, or Change." Mollie completed an equally formidable job of pretending, playing the pint-size boy-hero in Imagination Stage's sweet version of "Seussical," a musical based on the works of Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel.

It's one thing to be an aspiring child actor in New York or Los Angeles, where the showbiz urge is a genetic imperative. But can a kid with professional-stage fever find a reliable cure here? Washington has a strong theater scene and a lot of training programs for young actors, but it is not a particularly rich environment for children with the bug. Agents, who can be useful in helping find work for the youngest performers, have not figured prominently in the theater universe here. And the opportunities for work in such naturally child actor-hungry spheres as film and TV are practically nil.

As Joy Zinoman, Studio's artistic director, puts it: "There's no truly good way to cast children in Washington. It's about luck, obviously, as all casting is to some extent, and about really keeping your ears open. And then you've got to see many, many, many, to pick a few."

Max's parents, Alisa and Jon Talisman, and Mollie's, Laura and Richard Clement, watch with pride as their ambitious children find validation in an adult world of rehearsals, applause and reviews. Professionals who have worked with them speak admiringly of Max and Mollie's maturity and ability to apply themselves.

"She's a beautiful kid, but she's more than that," Kathryn Chase Bryer, associate artistic director of Imagination Stage and director of "Seussical," says of Mollie. Adds Kathi Gollwitzer, a longtime acting teacher and artistic director of Firebelly Productions, a theater company in Arlington, "There is nothing about the craft she doesn't understand."

The effusive words come equally easily about Max. "The thing about him is that he's such a smart, passionate, crafty performer," says Greg Ganakas, director of "Caroline." His voice teacher, John Marlowe, says his vocal quality is unusually supple. "I think it is very rare for somebody his age to have as big and well focused a voice as he has."

A friend or relative, hearing this level of praise, might wonder why these kids don't have their own Broadway shows already. (Max, you should know, is hard at work on a plan to address this goal, at the computer in his room.) Keeping it real may be one of the most difficult aspects of living with a child who has talent, for there is exposure to things potentially more perplexing for young people: backstage intrigue, bruised egos, raised hopes. Can all the attention nourish unrealistic expectations along with the gifts?

It seems clear that the Talismans and Clements are being more than a little vigilant on this score. Laura Clement, a stay-at-home mother of four who home-schooled Mollie and her brother James for several years, says she's glad that Mollie pursues acting with such gusto, but the day she tires of it is the day it's over.

This summer, Mollie is going to camp and "just being a kid."

"It's good to have the time off," her mother says.

Alisa Talisman, another stay-at-homer with three children and a theater degree from Northwestern, maneuvers just as protectively around Max's endearing wall of self-confidence. "Some people might think, 'Oh gosh, we've got to move to New York,' " says Max's mom, whose husband is a tax lawyer. "I don't think that would help him. I think we have to pause and think what this has meant to his life."

Max sits across from his mother in their living room in Bethesda, drinking in her cautionary words.

"I do think there aren't that many parts like that for children," she says.

"I agree," Max interjects. "But as long as there's one!"

Both the garrulous Max, who's small for his age, and Mollie, fair-haired and well-spoken, have been acting for years. Mollie, who'll be a student at Immanuel Christian School in Springfield this year, has also played serious parts: She was in local productions of "The Children's Hour" and "The Miracle Worker," appearing as Helen Keller in the latter. Max, entering seventh grade at Green Acres School in Rockville, is more intensively focused on musicals and has acted in student productions of "Annie Get Your Gun" and "Bye Bye Birdie," and was recruited for a production of "Pippin" at Montgomery College.

The Talismans were curious enough about what the entertainment future might hold for Max to seek a meeting with Zinoman after "Caroline" closed last month. She counseled them, essentially, to sit tight, because the business is just too uncertain and other aspects of childhood too crucial to ignore. "I think having a life is more important," Zinoman says, "and you never know what's going to change when a person grows up."

You might say Max had been training for years for the serendipitous moment when "Caroline" entered his life. At the behest of the Rockville children's acting program, Musical Theater Center, in which he was enrolled, Max was recruited to sing at a Washington dinner last year. Zinoman was there, and all she could see was the top of Max's head. But the voice! She and Ganakas were in the early throes of worrying how in heaven's name they would find a boy to portray Noah Gellman, a part requiring a young actor to hold his own in an emotionally and musically complex piece about the relationship between a 10-year-old Jewish boy and the African American woman who cleans his house.

And there Noah was. "I couldn't believe his singing, and he was singing full out," Zinoman recalls. "I came back from the dinner and said, 'That's that.' " He was cast months before the first rehearsal, which gave the Talismans time to reorganize their lives. He'd be missing more than a little school, and there was the question of how to get him to the theater downtown; his parents decided to hire a driver, Mike, who became a member of the family.

So "Caroline" became the first major credit on Max's résumé. It's hard to imagine it as the last. He and his friend Hunter Kieserman are writing musicals. (The Talisman-Kieserman score-in-progress is "The Drive to Paris"; the twist is it's the Paris casino in Vegas.) At a vocal recital, Max sang "This Is the Moment," "What Kind of Fool Am I?" and, more appropriately than he may have intended, "Nothing Can Stop Me Now."

Max is also perhaps the only 13-year-old in greater Bethesda to draw up his own complete list of Tony Award predictions. Not winners. Nominees. "That," he says of the Tony ceremonies, "is one of my favorite days of the year."

Mollie is a little younger than Max, but her conversation is nonetheless peppered with some of the same precociousness. Asked about her ballet and tap dancing, Mollie says she's not bad. "Sort of like Julie Andrews," she says, surprisingly. "You don't have to be an amazing dancer, but you have to be good at it."

Sitting in her living room in Fairfax, Mollie comes across as unaffected and remarkably poised, and apparently those qualities are communicated onstage, too. Mollie's mother received an e-mail about "Seussical" auditions, and Bryer, the show's director, was instantly taken with her.

"I didn't make any accommodations for her backstage," Bryer says. "Her mother very quietly stepped into that role. You've got to know that in the dressing room every day with three other women, they have their moments, and Mollie was subjected to that. I always felt that her mother helped her work through that in a really good, positive way."

Where kids are concerned, accommodations do sometimes have to work both ways. During the run of "Caroline," for instance, Max not only had to become Noah but also a man. His bar mitzvah -- or rather b'nai mitzvah with his twin sister, Lita -- came smack-dab in the middle of the performance schedule, and Studio had to be flexible enough to give him time off.

Max, you won't be shocked to learn, was not thrilled about leaving the production for a few days. But the old maxim applies. The show -- even when it's in a synagogue -- must go on.