By Dana Klosner-Wehner
At 15, she would take a trip to Manhattan everyday over the summer to take improvisation and writing courses at Second City, an actor’s workshop.
As a student at Baldwin High School, she was very involved in the Drama Club and as a senior she co-directed a show.
Loeser, now a junior at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., has already enjoyed many successes.
She was one of seven people who won a contest put on by the Chicago Dramatists to have a 10-minute play produced. There were about 60 plays submitted to the contest.
Loeser’s play, “Problem Child,” is about a middle-aged couple, she said. The wife is a foster mother for newborns.
“She has a voyeuristic pleasure in other people’s problems,” Loeser said. “Her niece who is having problems comes to live with them. She’s not really there for her niece, when all she needs is a listening ear.”
Loeser said she got the idea for the play from noticing people who read tragic stories in the newspaper and then talk about them.
The play is a dark comedy and the wife’s lines are written in broad strokes, Loeser said.
Loeser was one of 12 students chosen for the “Writing for the Media” course at school.
Students in the Writing for the Media course and graduate students anonymously wrote five to 10 minute scripts and submitted them to the film students. Four of Loeser’s scripts were selected.
Loeser has also had four screenplays produced at the school, most of them adapted by film students.
“Pretty Good Grief,” – another dark comedy, is about three friends coming back from a funeral. The friends accuse one another of having killed their friend, who had a peanut allergy, by giving her something with peanuts in it.
“Picnic,” is about a guy and a girl and the girl’s imaginary friend. The couple has to learn to accept each other’s craziness.
She also wrote two horror scripts that were produced at the school.
Loeser co-directed a performance of different people performing an old vaudeville joke known as The Aristocrats.
“It’s a really filthy joke that comedians have been telling each other since Vaudeville,” she said. “In our show the performers each tell the joke in their own way. One person sang a song version of it, some friends from Los Angeles sent in a video, there was a nursery rhyme version of it and a Power Point presentation where the actors ‘thought’ they were doing a presentation on Lincoln and behind them is the slide show of the joke.”
“The format of the joke is a family walks into a talent agency and says, ‘Have I got an act for you,’” Loeser explained. “Then they do a shocking horrible filthy act. At the end [the talent agent] says, ‘What do you call that?” and the family says, ‘The Aristocrats.’”
Loeser is a performer as well. She does stand-up routines on and off campus.
Loeser attributes her creativity to her family. Her mom, Pamela Burford, writes romance and mystery novels.
Her father, Jeff, works in sales but he is very funny, she said. He would perform funny skits at their temple for Purim and he was always coming up with funny games for the family to play on long road trips.
Loeser said she loves writing.
“It’s fun to create your own world,” she said. “Then when the actors put it on its feet it’s a whole different animal.”
Eventually, Loeser would like to write comedy for television, she said. While a move to Los Angeles may be in her future, she said she plans on coming back to
Baldwin when she graduates.
“I love that I’ve been able to go far away and meet people from all over,” she said. “But the more people I meet, the more I realize that people in Baldwin are amazing. It was great to grow up next to New York City.”
Comments about this story? MRusso@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 283.
