Standing at a mere 4 feet 1 inch, with arms and legs about the diameter of a sapling, 11-year-old Kara Doherty, in pig tails, with a slightly upturned nose dusted with freckles, could easily fit into the cute, in a Pippi-Longstocking-kind-of-way, category. She could. But she somehow wriggles free from the stereotype.
Taken in total, she’s more fully formed Roald Dahl character than cardboard cutout Pippi.
It may be the open, oval face, dominated by brown eyes that grow and shrink depending on expression.
Or maybe it’s her expressions. Doherty’s face can explode in smile one moment and can compress her lips pensively the next, as she ponders a question.
Or maybe it’s the personality. She radiates an ease with herself and what comes her way that belies her age. She considers questions and delivers answers, practical, sensible and insightful.
Or maybe it’s the combination of it all that’s put the Beverly elementary school student in a movie, “Evening,” in which she acted alongside Vanessa Redgrave, Claire Danes and Meryl Streep. You may have heard of them. Doherty also plays Pamela Cork on the Showtime TV show, “Brotherhood.” She’s also done numerous TV commercials.
With such early and sudden success, Doherty might feel pressure to follow up with bigger and better roles, more movies, more TV.
“I see each thing as an opportunity,” said Doherty. “I hope things come my way because I really enjoy it.”
So, she approaches her ensemble appearance and role as young Kim in the North Shore Music Theatre’s production of Show Boat, with a sense of excitement and opportunity.
“This is my first time on the big stage,” said Doherty, genuinely looking forward to the chance. “I was in a production of “Goodnight Moon,” but that was in the youth theater.”
Doherty says acting on stage is different from acting in movies and TV.
“On the live stage you have to have a big personality. In a commercial or movie, you’re not as big,” she said, blowing past the lights, attention and cameras, or the chance to erase mistakes with multiple takes, to concentrate on her job and how it changes by the medium.
“Live doesn’t really make too much of a difference,” said Doherty. “Live you play off mistakes. Someone can pick it up and somehow work things back. Someone always messes up. You just get used to it by the time of the show.”
Not that Doherty has a prodigious amount of dialog in “Show Boat.” And not that it matters a whole heck of a lot to her. She concentrates equally on each role.
Doherty, as young Kim, has several spoken lines — she can’t really sing, she admits — with her father, Gaylord Ravenal, played by Ron Bohmer. It’s a short, pivotal and poignant scene. In it, Bohmer must convey his love for his daughter, even as he’s leaving her in a convent school and abandoning his wife and child, running from the pain of broken dreams.
For her part, Doherty must be vulnerable and bewildered, not grasping fully what Ravenal’s goodbye really means for her character, only that she knows she loves her father and senses something is going wrong.
Bohmer and Doherty pull off the short scene nicely, humanizing an action that on its surface is despicable and cowardly.
As part of the ensemble, Doherty has no lines, but the fact only shifts her imagination into overtime.
“I pretend my character has a whole life,” said Doherty. “She not used to everything that’s going on and she’s really excited to see the show.”
It’s that chance to imagine that attracted Doherty to the stage in the first place, following in the footsteps of her 15-year-old brother, Connor, who’s been in several big-stage NSMT productions including “High School Musical,” “Cinderella” and “West Side Story.”
On stage or screen, “I like to pretend to be something different,” said Doherty.
“My friends don’t treat me different now,” said Doherty. “I had them as friends before all this happened. I know they like me for me, not because I was in a movie.”
