Erika Robert

Shon Middlebrooks

What is your favorite role you’ve ever done?Slide Glide the Slippery Slope by Kia Corthron about genetic engineering. In the show, the character I played was Sear and his mom wanted to genetically engineer him into perfection. I played two versions of the character: the real and the perfect version.How long have you been acting?I grew up in a military family so I feel like my entire life, but I don’t think I became aware until I was nine and got into classes. You shape-shift because you move and you don’t have friends, so you become whatever people see you as and you believe in that. What do you enjoy most about acting?Learning things that I don’t necessarily know about myself through the guise of these (characters) and growing because of it.Why did you choose to come to the graduate program at OU?I actually had a mentor who knew Shelley … I did an acting workshop with him and his wife, and I had mentioned that I was interested in going to grad school. Right that night, they were talking about me and me going to grad school, and Shelley called saying she was looking for another guy for the program. He was emphatic that I was going to be at a place I would be extremely challenged and he was definitely singing her praises as someone who could do it. I printed two and a half pages of questions and sat on the phone with her for over two hours and asked every single question on my list, and I loved how she answered it in terms of craft and her standpoint about what acting was for her … I like that it’s 10 of us for three years so there is no new class. We get a lot of attention that way. And I like that we’re sequestered away so there’s not a lot distractions and honestly that was something I was praying for — being in a place I could really just work and not have the distractions of larger cities.What are you hoping to get out of the program after three years?A deeper awareness of what affects me and my instrument. … A way I don’t know how to work. Things I know how to do now but I’m curious in seeing after three years how I’ll be working and what set of tools will be in my toolbox. … Learning more about my voice and my body. What’s a fun fact about you?I’m obsessed with Godzilla and dinosaurs. I like movies with big monsters and dinosaurs, I don’t know, they’re just the most amazing thing. They’re fire-breathing dragons that really existed. They’re the dopest thing on the planet, and I wish I could see one and be really far away.See him as Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing Nov. 11-14, 18-21