Performer/playwright Noemí de la Puente
has her act together in the Big Apple.

A Life in the Theater

By Michael Rogers

Excluding the occasional onstage cameo by Richard Feynman, Caltech hasn’t exactly been famous for its thespians. So it may come as a surprise to learn that one graduating class has produced at least two stage performers. You may have already heard of one—Sandra Tsing Loh ’83, the Los Angeles–based radio satirist, author, and performer. But performing on the opposite coast is Noemí de la Puente ’83, a dedicated actress who is versatile enough to appear in children’s theater, soap operas, and Shakespeare.

De la Puente has been a professional actor in New York for much of the past 12 years. Like the thousands of other actors in the Big Apple, she has spent countless hours in auditions and acting classes. While she’s won a fair share of roles in musicals and dramatic productions, many of them have been on the road.

Unlike many of her peers, however, she has a steady acting gig as a member of the Society of the Educational Arts (SEA), a Hispanic/bilingual organization that includes an acting troupe that performs in SEA’s theater on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and also in schools throughout the New York area. De la Puente also has a curriculum vita that sets her apart from other actors. She’s most likely the only actor in New York, or almost anywhere for that matter, with degrees from Caltech and Princeton. And not long ago, she had a career as an environmental engineer before throwing it away to tread the boards.

Growing up in Monterey Park, just east of Los Angeles and south of Pasadena, de la Puente excelled in science and math in high school, although she downplays her academic abilities. “I grew up during a time when a woman who was not afraid of math and science was considered gifted,” she quips. It was also in high school that she first got interested in music and theater, singing and performing in several productions. Her father, a chemical engineer, encouraged her to apply to Cal-tech, even though she figured she would never be admitted. Even her guidance counselor told her not to waste her time applying.

“My dad told me to shoot for the stars, so I did,” she says. She applied to Caltech and was accepted. But first she had to pass a summer program on campus, which she described as “a cram course of calculus, physics, chemistry, and English” for students whom the Institute felt needed extra preparation to survive freshman year.

But even that didn’t entirely prepare her for what she found. Like many Institute undergrads, de la Puente says that she went from being among the top students in her high school to near the bottom of her Caltech class. The memory of the academic pressure is still painful for her. “It took until halfway through my sophomore year for me to get my mental act together and realize that you don’t have to be an overachiever to be a good person,” she recalls.

To get some release from the pressures of school, she swam competitively, played volleyball, and performed in several Institute productions, including Brigadoon, a children’s theater production of Puss ’n Boots, and a dance recital featuring music composed by Sandra Tsing Loh.

Among other acting roles in 2002,
Noemí de la Puente performed as Maria
in the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival
production of Twelfth Night.

“I eventually dropped sports and took my meager amount of free time and spent it on theatrical activity,” she recalls. Performing in shows “wasn’t as important as meeting other people in the Caltech community who shared the same love of theater. It brought us out of the woodwork and I became good friends with people whom I wouldn’t ordinarily have met. It was an important source of joy for me, because it broke up the pressure of school.” For her degree, she chose engineering and applied science as her option, with the goal of becoming an environmental engineer.

After Caltech, de la Puente studied civil engineering in graduate school at Princeton, focusing on water resources. While she was there, she met her future husband, Ron Cohen, a graduate student in mechanical and aerospace engineering. She spent three years at Princeton, got a master’s degree, and then left in 1986.

“I had done some soul searching, and was ready to leave,” she says. “I wanted to get out and work.” But her experience as an environmental engineer was disheartening. From 1986 to 1992, she worked in a series of mostly “unfulfilling” jobs, and recalls being particularly disillusioned with her experiences at a few environmental engineering companies that turned out to be more interested in making money than in cleaning up the environment.

“After my fifth job, I realized I wasn’t going to be happy doing this,” she says. “With a company’s backing, you could make a dent in a community, but you’re not going to change attitudes or touch people through engineering. Your work may change things, but you’re not going to fundamentally move people.”

Throughout much of this time, she was still doing theater, performing with community groups on weekends and at night. And one day she asked herself, “If I knew I was going to die in one year, what would I change in my life? I’d want to be more involved in theater. I’d be able to move people in theater; get them to see things in a different light. I’d have the chance to tell them an interesting story that might change them.” So she quit her job in 1992 and started taking acting classes in New York and auditioning for roles. Although she soon started getting work in productions, she decided that she needed a stronger background in theater and enrolled in the University of Iowa’s graduate theater program, graduating with a master’s degree in 2000. Along the way, she also discovered that she could write plays.

For her master’s thesis, she was required to play a lead role in a university production, but she says that none of the plays chosen by the faculty offered an interesting female role. So she decided to write, produce, and perform her own play—a drama about Dolores Ibárruri, a founder of the Spanish communist party. Also known as La Pasio-naria, the political firebrand was exiled from Spain to the Soviet Union after the Spanish Civil War, but then returned to her homeland in the 1970s and was elected to parliament.

After leaving Iowa, de la Puente began auditioning again in New York. She performed last year at the Carolinian Shakespeare Festival in New Bern, North Carolina, and was hired back for this year’s summer show, Twelfth Night, playing Maria, the devious chambermaid. She also performed last year on the soap opera One Life to Live. Such is the world of bit parts, de la Puente notes wryly, that she was cast in successive episodes of the same show as a banker, a flight attendant, and a nurse. “That last role got me my Screen Actors Guild card,” she says.

She adds that working in television has helped her to develop skills beyond those honed on the stage. “On stage, you can’t spend a lot of time with a character in thought,” she says. In theater, actors are always talking or moving to advance the plot, and they have to learn how to project their voices. “In TV or film, thought is picked up,” she says. Since there’s so much attention to close-ups, actors must find ways to convey emotions without speaking.

“What I like about film and TV is that you can do so little and it translates into so much. What I like about the stage is the immediate connection to the audience.”

De la Puente says that her most satisfying role thus far has been on stage, when she performed in 1999 in a one-woman play called The Last Lector at the Cape May Stage in New Jersey. In the drama, she played a cigar-factory worker recalling the time when a man was hired to read novels to entertain the workers while they rolled tobacco. Through his readings, he educates them and encourages them to form a union.

“The show was well written and a beautiful story,” she says. De la Puente was thrilled when, after one performance, the stage and screen actor Robert Prosky came backstage and told her he enjoyed her work. “It was nice getting feedback from someone whom I consider an exemplary member of the acting profession,” she says.

Not all her theater experiences have been so positive. De la Puente recalls one vaudeville revue at a hotel in New York’s Catskills that opened with 300 people in the audience and was down to 30 by the sixth skit. “The only people left were those who couldn’t get up without assistance,” she jokes.

Still, out of bad moments in the theater can often come a break. A woman who worked the lights for another wildly uneven show also ran a small theater company. She enjoyed de la Puente’s performance and cast her in three productions. “There are jobs you slog through and others you really love,” says de la Puente, but the idea is to keep working.

Her job with the SEA troupe began last year. She auditioned for the company on September 10. The next day, she was headed for a class in Greenwich Village, when the World Trade Center disaster occurred. It wasn’t until October that she heard back from SEA and was offered a job.

“We recognized right away that Noemí was perfect for our company,” says Richard Marino, the managing director of SEA. “She’s very disciplined, very talented, and is also very funny.”

“Working with SEA is the closest I’ve come to being part of an artistic community,” says de la Puente, sitting in the lobby of the SEA theater, part of a complex of 14 other theater groups located in a former public school.

So far, with SEA, she has performed as the smart pig in The Three Little Pigs and the grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood. While it may not be Shakespeare, the work is challenging and pays well, she says. “I’m working with a good group and it’s an important public service.” It also allows her to exercise her improvisational skills. For one performance of The Three Little Pigs, the backstage crew forgot to bring the soup pot. “So instead of cooking the wolf in the soup, I decided to barbecue him in the fireplace,” she says.

While working for SEA, de la Puente continues to audition for other theater companies and also hopes to get roles in films. She has also finished writing her first full-length play,

Generic Hispanic—a satirical drama about Latinos in advertising, whose title comes from a term that an agent once used to describe her. The plot revolves around the main character’s efforts to get the ad agency she works for to stop stereotyping Hispanics.

“I see myself moving more into writing and producing,” de la Puente says. “For women, after a certain age, there are not that many roles. I want to tell more women’s stories. There are lots of things getting written about women, but not a lot of things getting produced.

“As an actor, you have to wait to be invited in” to a production, she says. “As a writer, you begin the process, and it doesn’t exist without you. I want to show people I’m a willing collaborator, and sometimes the only way to do that is to create opportunities for yourself.”

As far as her Caltech experience goes, de la Puente says that she will occasionally blurt out something about physics or chaos theory during a rehearsal, revealing her unique past.

“Going to Caltech taught me to work really hard,” she says. “I learned about the learning process and how to ask intelligent questions. I learned how to think for myself. It’s not like I use the scientific method when I approach a play. But sometimes you can’t understand everything, and you have to accept a certain amount of mystery.”