Sunmark's Laura Darling: Closings and Curtain Calls

At the tender age of four, Laura Darling climbed onstage and has never looked back.

“My mom took me to Sesame Street World,” she remembers, “and at the end of the day everyone gathered in the amphitheater to watch the characters dance and sing. Mom looked down to see if I was having a good time and I was missing. Then my father looked up to the stage and saw my little four-year-old self, only in my bathing suit, dancing on stage with Big Bird. They tried to get me off the stage, but I didn’t want to!”

In the years since then, Laura has established a reputation for doing just about everything in local and regional theater, both onstage and behind the scenes. In front of an audience she has done live and musical theatre, comedy, drama, classical Shakespeare, and everything in between.

Backstage she has worked in directing, lighting, costume and production design, sound engineering, props management, and more, and her creative resume includes work with almost every theater company in the Capital Region. As if that wasn’t enough, she has also acted in several short films, a

48 Hour Film Project film festival and used to sing in a rock band.

By day Laura is the Mortgage Closing Attorney here at Sunmark, where she arrived in December, 2018, after running her own law firm for seven years. She acts as settlement agent for all the credit union’s residential mortgages and refinancing and represents borrowers who have Sunmark loans.

But when that daytime work is done, she goes straight to the theater and works until 9:00 or sometimes later.

“Later on show days, definitely,” she admits. Only after that does she head home for a bit of relaxation.

Recently Laura has directed a portion of the “One Act Festival 2020” at the Sand Lake Center for the Arts. The festival presented eight one-act plays by local playwrights, including Laura’s production, “Technology SOCKS!!#@%” by Julie Demers.

Laura explains that the short play is about a man who has a fight with a sentient ATM machine at a bank. She laughs before making sure to add that it’s not a Sunmark ATM.

Laura’s next role will also involve directing. But this time it will be a full length, 90-minute production of “Eurydice” at the Confetti Stage at Albany Masonic Hall February 7-16. Playwright Sarah Ruhl created the production about the loss of her father, using the Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice as a backdrop.

“It’s my big, big show,” Laura says. “It’s very strange, about love, loss, and grief. Ruhl is very artistic so some of the things that happen on stage are very cerebral—nothing that you’d see in your regular theater.”

Laura says she appreciates how lucky she is to have her family’s support for her theater efforts.

“They’re not big theater fans, but they will always show up and clap for me even if they don’t understand the production.”

She also appreciates the support she has gotten from her Sunmark coworkers.

“The friendliness and the openness everyone has about me doing it is so great,” she says. “On opening night for my role in Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ a few months ago, I had four closings here and I was just so nervous all day! (My colleagues) Colleen and Janet were so supportive of me.”

With a resume like hers, Laura says she has inevitably been asked why she doesn’t go into professional acting. Her answer explains why she stays local and why she became a lawyer.

“I like doing it for myself and these small things, but at the same time I wanted to help people more than I wanted to act. Helping people is very important to me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have this little side gig of having fun onstage.”