Through her work as an actress, Sophie C. Kargman ’08—the recipient of this year’s Jonathan Levy Award in Drama—has really learned how to connect with people, and not just the directors, mentors, and other actors she’s worked with. Kargman also finds earnest ways to relate to her fictional characters.

“I felt a lot for her,” Kargman says of Theresa, the central character of Rebecca Gilman’s “Boy Gets Girl” and a role that has won Kargman national recognition and success in tough auditions. “I mean, she’s just totally independent and focused and charismatic and just someone that a normal person can really empathize with.”

Kargman has been a performer since her youth, and her ability to build complex characters springs from both her self-described “wild imagination” and her determined, artistic drive. She approached Harvard fresh from four years on the competitive forensics team at Milton Academy, where she was able to spend a year getting to know the characters she portrayed. When playing Teresa, for example, Kargman filled a notebook with personal details about the character’s life.

“It was such a great foundation for me, in terms of learning to be able to create an entire world on your own,” Kargman says. “It taught me about rehearsal process and being able to work on character backgrounds.”

But aside from her technical abilities with dramatic interpretation, Kargman’s life-long drive to be an actress has propelled her through her time at Harvard. The fall of her freshman year, a naïve Kargman phoned American Repertory Theatre teacher Marcus Stern about studying in his elite advanced acting class, a course primarily for talented senior actors.

“I didn’t know that this was not a thing to do,” Kargman says. Despite receiving a “total rebuff,” Kargman auditioned and was admitted. “It was me and the senior crew,” she says of the influential semester.

Similarly, Kargman has been intent on pursuing a special concentration since her first week on campus. With the help of mentors Robert Scanlon and Deborah Foster, Kargman has crafted Theater Studies, which uses the lens of theater to study English and psychology—a combination Kargman calls “pre-med for acting.”

“The ideas of consciousness and the inner monologue and the human psyche, those are all so important to develop a full, complex character,” Kargman says.

Kargman has also applied her summer experiences in theater to dramatic life at Harvard. The summer after her freshman year, Kargman worked with the Atlantic Theater Company in New York, a group founded by David Mamet and William H. Macy. After learning their technique of Practical Aesthetics, Kargman petitioned to create a Harvard course on the subject taught by expert Practical Aesthetics technician and ART instructor Scott Zigler. The course began this fall, after two years of work from Kargman.

The summer after her sophomore year, Kargman participated in the prestigious Williamstown Theater Festival, where she discovered and, for the first time, performed a reading of the work “Manuscript.” Kargman loved the play so much that she recommended it to Mia P. Walker ’10, who subsequently directed it this past fall in the Loeb Ex, casting Kargman as the female lead.

In addition to “Manuscript,” Kargman’s favorite theatrical performances at Harvard have been Chekhov’s “The Seagull” on the Loeb Mainstage and Kopit’s “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You In the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad,” the inaugural production on the New College Theatre stage.

Kargman has also acted in nine student films and is the co-student liaison of the Harvardwood program. Her liaison partner is also her roommate, artistic soul mate, and “mother,” Estelle L. Eonnet ’08.

After being signed by the Gersh Agency last summer through connections made during the Harvardwood 101 trip she took intersession of her junior year, Kargman has taken her senior spring off of theater at Harvard to pursue professional film, television, and theater auditions in New York, a process she will continue full-time after graduation. Eonnet’s talents as a filmmaker have particularly aided Kargman in juggling student life with professional auditions.

“We go down to the Adams K-Space when I can’t go to New York or when I have a callback that I can’t make,” Kargman says. “She’ll film me, and then I’ll send it. So luckily she has the equipment.”

In recent auditions, Kargman has collected both amusing anecdotes and valuable professional experience. As a newcomer, she approaches every opportunity with an earnest confidence in her craft. “You don’t know me for now,” she says of her mindset when interacting with famous casting directors, “but hopefully I can show you that I know this character.”

—Mollie K. Wright