“I’ve always admired the people who have the guts to create their own work,” said actor Kristin Devine, a Yardley Hunt native, who recently returned to Bucks County where she and her fiancé, actor Kevin Dejesus-Jones, have co-founded a new theater production company, the Quantum Theater Group.
A 2010 graduate of the Lawrenceville School, Devine earned a BFA in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, where she met Dejesus-Jones. In 2017, after a brief stint pursuing acting work in New York City, the couple bought a house in Morrisville.
While in New York, Dejesus-Jones performed the role of the Hero Flyer in the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”
“Yes, I was the one who was swinging out over the audience dressed as Spider Man,” he answered, when asked if his was the role in which the original actor was famously injured in a 30-foot fall during a performance.
“He re-joined the show shortly after his injury and stayed with the production for another year, and then left for unrelated reasons. And that’s when I took over the role,” Dejesus-Jones explained. “Kristin was always a little nervous when I was performing in that show.”
Devine has worked primarily with Philadelphia-area theater troupes, including Quintessence Theater Group, Delaware Shakespeare, 11th Hour Theater Company and Newtown Arts Company.
“New York was a really hard town to be in as an actor,” she said. “In Philly there’s a theater community that’s really invested in their actors. Many theaters hire the same actors over and over again and there’s a unity, a family feeling. I feel so much more support here than I did in New York.”
Because they are continuing to develop their acting careers, Devine described the couple’s new producing venture as simply “adding another ‘hat’ to our costume box.”
She said, “So many of the performers I admire today are ‘multi-hyphenates.’ They’re actor-singer-dancer-choreographer-directors, and they do lights and this and that and the other, including working on the business side of things, so that as much of their time as possible is spent working in the theater, rather than having a ‘survival job.’ They create their own projects and produce work they really care about, which is what we are now trying to do.”
Quantum’s inaugural outing, a production of the Nick Payne play “Constellations,” runs Aug. 2 to 17 at Philadelphia’s Mayfair Theater, a brand-new, black-box space that opened in March. Devine and Dejesus-Jones perform the play’s two leading roles.
“We chose this play because it has in it everything that really excites me about theater,” said Devine. “The dialogue is full and honest and hyper-concise, and the structure is unique. It follows the normal progression of a relationship – you meet, you go on a date, maybe there’s a proposal, maybe there’s not, maybe someone gets sick, maybe they don’t – but what’s different is that each of those events happens several times. The play takes place in parallel universes.”
Explaining why they chose the name Quantum Theater Group, Devine continued, “In this play there’s a theoretical physicist, who talks about quantum mechanics and the idea of the smallest possible entity holding all of the properties of the whole, which is very much what we’re doing.
“Our production’s budget is only $7,500, and almost everyone on our creative team does more than one role. Our set designer is also building, our sound designer is doing all of the equipment work, our stage manager is also the artistic director and the lighting designer, and we, the producers, are also acting. It’s the idea of making the very most out of the least possible resources.”
