BROADWAY BOUND: CAPE NATIVE ACTING THE PART IN THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS

Jessica Hency had the prized female lead in the annual Notre Dame High School musical three straight years. She had a beautiful voice and the undefinable quality that irresistibly draws an audience's eyes to a stage performer.

Now Hency is one of 4,000 undergraduate drama students at New York University. Most of them want what she wants -- a career in the theater or in movies. In New York City, no one has the time or the willingness to provide the help and encouragement she received at Notre Dame and during enrollments at Southwest Missouri State University and Southeast Missouri State University.

Rejection and criticism are constants.

"I'm a little minnow in this pond of big fish. I've got to worry about dodging the big fish," says Hency.

But the truth about her abilities is exactly what Hency wants at this point in her education.

"The fact that a lot of people want to do it makes it a challenge. People have to love it. If they don't they'll get weeded out," she says. "Every single person that's struggling to make it is really passionate about it."

A CD calling card

Hency is spending some time at home in Cape Girardeau this summer. When she graduates from NYU a year from now with a bachelor's degree in theater, she will begin making the rounds of auditions and hopes to have an agent by then. One of the calling cards she will leave is "Alla Carte," a new CD she has recorded with her younger sister, Michelle.

It's a hometown project with a professional sheen. Their cousin, Larry Seyer, is the Grammy-winning producer for the country swing band Asleep at the Wheel. He composed the music. The Hencys' family friend Allan Maki, a Cape Girardeau resident, wrote the lyrics.

The CD was recorded over three weekends in Austin, Texas, where Oran, Mo., native Seyer now lives. Jessica flew in from New York and Michelle from the University of Wyoming, where she studies animal science.

Seyer performs on a number of instruments and brought in the fiddler from George Strait's band and the cellist who toured with Jewel.

Jessica, Michelle, Seyer and Maki call themselves Alla. The CD is called "Alla Carte" because it offers jazz, rock 'n' roll, blues, country and even a techno-club dance tune. It is available through the Web site www.hatandcrown.com or by phoning 334-3854 or 335-7720.

Michelle didn't have the high-profile performing career her sister did at Notre Dame, but her voice blends well with her sister's on the duets and has a remarkable emotional depth on her solos.

Jessica had planned to perform a concert of the songs Thursday at Academic Auditorium but had to cancel because of insurance concerns.

A sense of play

Hency has appeared in a number of student films in New York. In a "mocumentary," she played a child molester. "It was the furthest thing from what I was comfortable with," she says. She knew she could not portray the woman as a monster because child molesters gain children's confidence by being nice and acting normal. Watching the film is difficult for her now.

"It scares me," she says. "That part of me is there."

She and her fellow acting students sometimes have screenplay-reading parties that become improv sessions. After her 16-year-old brother, Jake, visited he came home complaining that all Jessica and her friends do is play all day long.

That sense of play is something Hency says she learned here.

Cynthia King, longtime director of the Notre Dame musicals, cast Hency as one of the orphans in "Annie" at age 9. A performer herself, Hency's mother -- Claudette Seyer -- brought her to the audition in her farm clothes, and King recalls her looking like an orphan. Hency didn't know what a musical was but loved belting out songs.

"From that point on I had this dream of doing this forever," she says.

Performing seemed to come naturally to her. "I was always a ham," she says. "I'm still an attention hog. I fully admit it."

In high school, Hency's roles grew. "She had very good sense of stage presence," King says, "but at times she was not real sure of herself. She had the talent. ...

"People say she's a natural talent. She worked very hard at that natural talent."

Happy to have any role

A role singing and dancing in the chorus of "Sugar" at Southeast made Hency realize she didn't have to have a big part to enjoy acting. "I said, I am so happy that I am on this stage."

It was Lori Shaffer, Hency's voice teacher at Southeast, who convinced her to try New York City. "I asked her, If I go to New York, can I make a living at this?'" Hency said. "She said, Jessica, if you want that city you can have it.' I just needed someone who had been there to tell me."

Hency has been getting experience by working as a tech for the Atlantic Theatre Company founded by playwright David Mamet and actor William H. Macy. She has been concentrating on drama so much during her year and a half in New York that the people at her studio don't know she can sing.

When she returns to school, she has been asked to read for the role of Beatrice in an Off-Off-Broadway production of "Much Ado About Nothing."

She remains starstruck. She saw Gabriel Byrne on the street in New York and says, "I gasped for my life."

Another of her relations, Roger Seyer, is the understudy for the lead of Jean Valjean in "Les Miserables" on Broadway. When she saw him perform the role, he brought her backstage.

Sharing who she is

New York is a circus of the arts. Hency goes to the Metropolitan Opera and to theatrical performances occasionally too edgy even for her wide-open mind. To her it's all "a beautiful thing to me to be part of."

Acting is a matter of giving part of yourself away, Hency says. "It's a constant process of learning who I am and sharing that."

Ironically, her peak in acting hasn't been onstage. She recalls doing a scene in class from "The Shadowbox." Hency played a wife who comes to the realization that her husband is going to die of cancer, a disease that claimed Hency's grandmother. At the end of the scene she broke down and others in the class were crying.

The scene "brought me to the next level of acting where you don't care about applause, ... to where the audience can go through an emotional experience with you," she says.

King has no doubt Hency was meant to act. "She's got it. She's going to have to make use of it," King says. "When you talk to people who really are theater people their eyes sparkle when they talk about their work. Hers do that."