O’side alum now with Hasty Pudding troupe

Actor David Sheynberg, 2012 graduate and Valedictorian at Oceanside High School is now a member of Harvard University’s famed Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which performed at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College Mar. 11h and 12.

The Pudding continued its 168-year-old all-male student drag comedy tradition with That 1770s Show, a campy Boston-themed historical farce.

Sheynberg said Hasty is a big change from theatre in Oceanside where they did two shows. “Now I do 40,” he said, “I have had a chance to meet celebrities, and work with such high production values, but at the core it is still the work I loved when I began in Oceanside.”

Saying this is a new side of acting Sheynberg had the opportunity to appear in a dozen productions since he left high school, including Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.

The next project is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales based on a 1985 book by neurologist Oliver Sacks. Sheynberg added, “I have been spoiled here, the theatre experience is so unbelievably diverse.”

He finds comedy harder than anything else. “As an actor you are waiting for something from the audience, that [comedy] aspect of it is way harder, you have to make a connection, [the audience has] to be awake and engaged, unlike some other art forms that are not predicated on that.”

Sheynberg credited his success, in part, to his Oceanside experience. “I was supported and appreciated for making art. I was told ‘You have something and you have to keep working at it,’ how valuable is that? It helped me find a process I relish and allowed me to continue to be part of that process.”

In That 1770s Show spoiled little brat Anne Heritance demanded that her pushover father Governor Bucky Hampalace raise taxes yet again, and the colonists are Yankee Doodle done with British rule. With the help of the governor’s new gold-digging wife Mae Flower and hunky French fur-trapper Seymour Beavers, the colonists plot to kidnap Anne and send her back to England for a permanent

tea-time-out.