Melanie Neilan Featured in Classic Chicago Magazine

Women to Watch

With a key role in “Domesticated” (now playing at Steppenwolf Theatre), two films currently screening on the festival circuit, and an audition for a Tracy Letts play, Melanie Neilan has 2016 at her feet.

“In "Domesticated," a drama with a ton of comedy, I play an über-smart, extremely acidic, sarcastic teenager. One of my favorite scenes is when I impulsively throw a bowl of oranges off the table to express my anger at my dad,” she said. “I have learned so much from writer/director Bruce Norris.

Melanie Neilan in "Domesticated," by Joel Moorman.

Melanie Neilan in "Domesticated," by Joel Moorman.

“I am currently attached to three film projects, one, a short film that deals with a hard-hitting and relevant social issue that the filmmakers want to develop into a full-length feature. My manager, Nancy Scanlon, is developing, under the banner of her company Au Courant, a biopic set in the Victorian era, and I will play a starlet. My current films include My First Love, in which my character transfers her love notes on Hostess Cup Cakes.”

A purple belt in karate, Melanie has studied since childhood at the Irina Makkai Classical Ballet & Dance School in Highland Park. Dividing her time between Chicago and Los Angeles, she trains in ballet in Santa Monica. Melanie was a founding ensemble member of A Red Orchid Youth Ensemble. “I look up to Michael Shannon, who is a founding father of A Red Orchid Theatre, as he has always been one of my longtime acting heroes, and I admire so much his current work in ‘Boardwalk Empire,’” she shared.

Her greatest hero of all and lifelong mentor, however, is her grandmother Merle Reskin, beloved Chicago arts patron, actress, and singer. Merle, an actress and singer who, along with her husband Harold, saved the historic Blackstone Theatre, which is now a part of DePaul University and bears her name.

She was in attendance at the opening night of “Domesticated,” with her daughter, Melanie’s mother Leslie Neilan.

Leslie, Melanie, and Merle by Joshua Aaron Weinstein.

Leslie, Melanie, and Merle by Joshua Aaron Weinstein.

“Merle played the role of Ensign Janet MacGregor in the original Broadway cast of ‘South Pacific.’” This wasn’t a road show either; it was the real deal,” Leslie said. “I remember when Melanie was five, my mom was being presented with an award for philanthropy and she brought Melanie up onstage, too. Melanie looked at the audience and gave a royal wave. I knew then that she loved being in front of audiences.”

Melanie says there’s something particularly terrific about this strong bond between the women in her family. She cites her grandmother as “the potent force driving my love of the craft; without her stories and passion for the arts, I would not have discovered the world of theatre in quite the same way. And her humor always keeps me laughing.”

She is similarly influenced by mom, Leslie: “My mother’s turn headlong into the field of producing is one of the most inspirational things I have ever seen. She has a real gift for storytelling and [is] unbelievably insightful. I hope to be a part of a horror film she and my agent Nancy Scanlon hope to produce.”

Leslie Neilan will be producing her first feature film this year based on a story she has written called The Book of Leah. She and Alan Roth, recipient of an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences fellowship, are the screenwriters. She has two other children, Sean and Spencer, who are both engineers.

Looking forward to 2016, Melanie hopes to spend more time in Los Angeles, particularly during pilot season. “I want to continue to work in theatre and film, and break into television. I’d love to find more ways to express my love for languages, singing, dancing, unicycling and yodeling.” Yodeling? “Most of my friends know I yodel, so if I see them across the street, I yodel, and they know it could be no one else but me,” Melanie said. “Yodeling is a random and surprising thing. When I do it, it gives me great joy.”

Read more at Classic Chicago Magazine

Check out Melanie Neilan in Steppenwolf's Domesticated!

Written and directed by ensemble member Bruce Norris and featuring ensemble member Tom Irwin. For tix and info: https://www.steppenwolf.org/Plays-Eve...

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Russian Transport’ swoops into Steppenwolf, delivering dark cargo of corruption and terror

Review: “Russian Transport” by Erika Sheffer, at Steppenwolf Theatre through May 11. ★★★★

By Lawrence B. Johnson

The young playwright Erika Sheffer’s stark and chilling tragedy-as-morality play “Russian Transport,” just opened in a hard-edged production at Steppenwolf Theatre, offers an unvarnished look at the immigrant experience recalling Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.”

Like Miller’s “View,” Sheffer’s 2012 drama – her first play — is set in the Brooklyn underbelly where life is hardscrabble, you do whatever it takes to get by and you extend a hand to family coming behind you. But where “View” centers on the obsessive and destructive impulses of one troubled soul, “Russian Transport” serves up an overtly corrupt and dangerous man prepared to exploit, even subjugate his own kin in pursuit of his horrific business.

Sheffer’s taut, concise play begins as family comedy, broad and earthy, in a Russian-American household ramrodded by the willful Diana (Mariann Mayberry in a performance as outrageously brassy as her mop of red hair). She gets little more than humorous pushback from husband Misha (Alan Wilder), who runs a taxi service out of a back room. Wilder lends Misha has a distinct aspect of anonymity.

It is a spunky tribe, rounded out by two teenage children — Alex (Aaron Himelstein), who somehow makes more money than his job selling cell phones actually pays, and Mira (Melanie Neilan), who’s constantly at war with her mother and desperate to visit Italy. The parents are from Russia and often speak the mother tongue; the kids, thoroughly Americanized, understand the old language but stick to the parlance of their time and place.

Into this happily combative scene comes Diana’s brother Boris, a tall, strong, imposing man in his late thirties just arrived from the homeland. Diana, who hasn’t seen him in 20 years, says Boris always exuded virility. Even when he was young, she says, he could make a girl pregnant just by looking at her.

At first the new family addition is quiet and retiring, all gratitude and deference. But the truth is that Boris is into some serious – what’s the word? – stuff. You could call him the title character: the Russian transporter. And very soon he loops nephew Alex into his insidious game.
 
Tim Hopper is downright frightening as Boris. No one, not even his accommodating sister, is safe around him. No one dares cross him or fail him. When young Alex loses his stomach for the job and leaves Boris in the lurch, the importuned uncle recounts an anecdote about a relative of Alex’s, back in the motherland, who once made a similar judgment error. In graphic detail, Boris spells out the amending lesson that poor fellow got.

It is Alex who stands at the moral wall of this very dark tale, and in Aaron Himelstein’s nuanced portrait of a potential criminal as a young man, he seems the unlikeliest such bulwark. He gets sucked in, overwhelmed, sickened. But in Boris’ world, there is no door marked Exit. You’re in for the long haul. And yet, when you look in the rear-view mirror and see your own humanity looking back at you — what then?

Moving on a parallel plane is the play’s most intriguing character and Erika Sheffer’s most imaginative structural component – daughter Mira. Young, beautiful and restive, she wants so much to travel, see the world beyond Brooklyn. Nyet, her mother replies, singularly and just as loudly as Mira pleads.

Melanie Neilan’s Mira is a girl of many faces, headstrong and narcissistic and naïve. But also determined to prevail, as eventually she appears to do. There’s mother Diana, in half light, helping the girl into a warm jacket and sending her off. When a bright-eyed kid wants something that badly, how long can a mom say no?

Director Yasen Peyankov paces the play with an impeccable sense of flow and rest, urgency and tension. The reunion of sister and brother at the family’s welcoming dinner is expansive in its cheer, disturbing in its edge. Boris’ transformation from mellow uncle to terrifying criminal progresses by deftly measured steps.

Set designer Joey Wade has provided a homey environment that brings the viewer directly into Sheffer’s harrowing narrative. And costumer Ana Kuzmanic hits the peak of cool with a suit for Boris that says crime pays, and well.

Reposted From Chicago on the Aisle