Spotlight on ‘The Girl’ in ‘Veronica’s Room,’ Kate Dirrigl
How do you follow cult classics such as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane: A Parody of the Horror and Sordid Lives. If you’re Lab Theater, you get dark, dirty and downright disturbing. So on October 20, The Lab brings to the stage Veronica’s Room, a nasty little mystery thriller by Rosemary’s Baby author Ira Levin that explores the thin line between fantasy and reality, madness and murder. And playing the part of The Girl is Kate Dirrigl.
Kate made her Lab Theater debut in its 2016 production of Jeff Goode’s highly-satirical The Eight: Reindeer Monologues, in 
which she played Dancer, a ditzy, adorably clueless Jewish ex-ballerina who found refuge at the North Pole after it became illegal and unsafe for reindeer to dance the Nutcracker, Swan Lake and the other classics back in the day. Then she returned to The Lab as a blond-haired, blue-eyed shiksa girlfriend in Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews. The stage direction included in Harmon’s script describes Melody as “like someone who would have been abducted when she was nine but returned to her parents unharmed.” Vacuous to a fault, when asked what type of a name Melody is, she answers, “Oh, I don’t know, Caucasian?”
D
irrigl then appeared in Wings, where she reprised the role of Amy, a miraculously patient, uber-competent therapist who establishes a close rapport with stroke veteran Emily Stilson and members of her speech therapy group. She really shined in last season’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo, where she portrayed sweetly soft-spoken Wellesley student Sunny Freitag.
Kate has a B.A. degree in theater performance from the University of Texas Pan American, where she was involved in numerous plays, including Arsenic and Old Lace (in which she played Elaine Harper), Les Liaisons Dangereuses (in 
which she played Cecile Volanges) and Peter Pan (where she was both Captain Hook and Mrs. Darling). When she is not center stage, she’s still at Lab working full-time as its Artistic Associate.
October 9, 2017.
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About the Author
Tom Hall is both an amateur artist and aspiring novelist who writes art quest thrillers. He is in the final stages of completing his debut novel titled "Art Detective," a story that fictionalizes the discovery of the fabled billion-dollar Impressionist collection of Parisian art dealer Josse Bernheim-Jeune, thought by many to have perished during World War II when the collection's hiding place, Castle de Rastignac in southern France, was destroyed by the Wehrmacht in reprisal for attacks made by members of the Resistance operating in the area. A former tax attorney, Tom holds a bachelor's degree as well as both a juris doctorate and masters of laws in taxation from the University of Florida. Tom lives in Estero, Florida with his fiancee, Connie, and their four cats.