Olivia Ochoa and cast performing in Pippin
Directing Center Stage
Trinity theater alumna heads to Cleveland as an artistic apprentice

As a young girl, Olivia Ochoa ’16 remembers attending plays with her mom. Entranced by the actors onstage, it was not long before she joined them herself. After a leading role in a middle school production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Ochoa knew she was hooked. Theater was her calling.

Nowadays, Ochoa is preparing to become the artistic apprentice at the Cleveland Play House through a summer job as a teaching artist at the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival. Originally from Seattle, she found herself in the Bay Area after her parents moved to San Francisco in 2014. Ochoa was looking for a summer internship at the time and became the theater’s first literary intern and the production dramaturg for the Taming of the Shrew. The director decided on a feminist interpretation of the comedy and it was Ochoa’s responsibility to research women of Shakespeare’s time, to review previous feminist takes on the play, and to learn how past audiences had received those versions.

“As a dramaturg and a director, you get to be involved in all aspects of production,” Ochoa says. “You get to lead the group to create this wonderful thing together. Once I started directing in high school, I kept doing it through my time at Trinity because it is my favorite thing to do.”

After that summer as the literary intern, Ochoa returned to the Shakespeare Festival as a teaching artist, leading summer Shakespeare camps for 7 to 13-year-olds. Ochoa will leave San Francisco in early August for her new position in Cleveland.

As a theater major at Trinity, Ochoa was able to experience “all different types of theater,” acting as a stage manager, an actor, a designer, and a director.

“I loved theater at Trinity because I was able to try a variety of roles and I really came out on top as a result,” Ochoa says. “I acted in La Tempesta and Pippin, stage managed four shows, directed several lab shows, and produced the first 24-hour play festival.”

Charting a new course in Cleveland, Ochoa says she is excited to experience the arts community of a new city and to delve into one facet of the comprehensive theater education she received at Trinity. The Cleveland Play House is working on upcoming productions of All the Way, a show about Lyndon B. Johnson’s first years in the White House, and a musical adaptation of Freaky Friday. As the artistic apprentice, Ochoa will work in the artistic direction department.

Olivia Ochoa sitting on the edge of the acequia wall

In an ideal world, Ochoa envisions herself as the artistic director or literary manager of a theater. She believes that watching or participating in theater helps to create empathy for others, and that is her daily motivation. Although she no longer acts, Ochoa knows the stage to be a place where actors can have fun, communicate with the audience, and get to be someone else “for a little bit.”

Look out, Cleveland. This Trinity alumna is coming for ya.

Carlos Anchondo '14 is an oil and gas reporter for E&E News, based in Washington D.C. A communication and international studies major at Trinity, he received his master's degree in journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

You might be interested in