Lisa Buch

What is your favorite role you’ve ever done?

I’m sure that there’s one to come. There have always been things that I’ve gotten out of every role for different reasons. But I always like the roles where they seem to be serving this really great purpose of informing the audience of this story. … This fusion of acting and purpose.

How long have you been acting?

On and off since I was eight. I’m 28 now. Probably, with the intention of wanting to do it as a career, seriously for seven years — studying it seriously and learning what the craft is.

What do you enjoy most about acting?

There’s a spiritual thing that happens … I had a teacher once say, as an actor you’re a vessel and you open yourself up to let it come through you. … Acting is a mysterious thing and very spiritual. … There’s something sort of out of this world that happens to you when you’re on a stage and you’re cued in to what other people on stage are doing and the audience is with you.

Why did you choose to come to the graduate program at OU?

I like to say OU chose me. I didn’t even really know about OU before I was applying. … So many times, I go into situations and I know what I want – picking a guy or picking a school and something else emerges and you go, ‘Oh this is so right for me!’ I got a callback, and Ohio was the only one to give me an offer. I didn’t visit and I only met Shelley. Shelley took a chance on me and trusted her instincts in terms of picking a class, and I’m going to trust it too. I was coming in, going all right, I hope they know what they were doing when they picked me. Now, we’re going on week three of class, and I can’t imagine being anywhere else now. The glove fits. 

What are you hoping to get out of the program after three years?

A deeper understanding of when it “works on stage” and why it works. Before, when things work, … it’s like throwing paint on a wall. You have these moments of brilliance. Coming and doing a deeper training program and understand how things work, why things work, what contributes to it, how everything works together: body, voice, emotion … Also I haven’t done any Shakespeare, and it’s a major goal to have that training and I’m going to be in Much Ado … Shakespeare is done more than anything in the world, so I have to know how to do that. Besides the training, which is so important, the business connections, which an MFA can provide for you. All of those things combined are what I’m looking forward to. … And also a community of artists has been my favorite thing so far. We’re already working with the playwrights, and it’s so much fun and we’re going to have these relationships, hopefully, for the rest of our careers.

What’s a fun fact about you?

I’m a beer geek … When the possibility of me going to OU was a thing, I looked up Jackie O’s … I probably talked to the administrator at Jackie O’s more than the other people in my class … I’m not huge drinker but I appreciate that culture … The culture of down time … and it tells a lot about a town. So when I saw a really active, craft beer culture, that made me excited about the town too.

See her as Margaret in Much Ado About Nothing Nov. 11-14, 18-21