“You have to do what speaks to you as an artist”— Carene Rose Mekertichyan
The actress/playwright/storyteller talks about taking on the LA theatre world.
Carene Rose Mekertichyan does it all, and she does it well. An actress, singer, playwright, model, teaching artist (and more, to be sure), Mekertichyan and her work have appeared on stages both in the States and abroad — her original play Number 12 Looks Just Like the Sunken Place was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The Dartmouth graduate sat down with me to talk about that first year out of school, the importance of knowing your worth, and why art is such a powerful tool for social change.
Who are you, and how did you get to where you are today?
I grew up in Silverlake, and I think being here gave me an appreciation for film and TV performance because I was always surrounded by it. I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be an actor. I was doing theater in high school, and for college, I found Dartmouth students got to study abroad at LAMDA in London. [Dartmouth] also offers an internship with New York Theater Workshop, which is how I got intern on the first workshop of Hadestown. I was able to do an honors thesis production on For Colored Girls, which is something I’d always wanted to do, and it was close enough to New York that we would go over there senior year and work…
