Lawrence Neumeister

I was born in the rusty shadow of the Lackawanna Steel plant in Western New York and grew up in various bucolic villages at the trailing end of economically depressed Appalachia and near the rambling wilderness of the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Seneca Nation. An early dream of acting drew me to the theater department at the local college and ultimately to a leading role in the musical Marat/Sade with a curtain-call draft notice followed by a tour of duty in Vietnam. As they often do, the rip currents of life interceded and I was ultimately driven from the Buffalo Southtowns by the "White Death" snowstorm of 1977. However, a half-century later I found myself in Los Angeles with the need to resurrect my dream of acting. Between takes, I've created a feature-length screenplay from my novel Glue Pit that placed in the 2016 quarter finals of Scriptapalooza. While making the rounds in Hollywood, I'm always on the lookout for actors to play the quirky characters, feisty older women, and Native Americans in my script about adult bullies, bigotry, power, and personal discovery. When possible I spend time painting. My works have been included in two exhibits at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (ARSG) through the Emerging Artists program. My style varies from gestural abstraction to a fascination with peering into the darkened windows of European street-scapes. Nightlife magazine has described these urban-landscape paintings as "nostalgically romantic" and "softly stylistic." My aim whether acting, writing, or painting is to prove that life can be filled with adventure and fulfillment even for someone with silver-white hair and the dreams of a twenty-year-old.