Name: Clara Grace Bell
Age & Birthday: 20 (18 January)
Gender & Sexual Identity: cis female (she/her) & heterosexual
Major: Production Track - Playwriting
Year: Junior
Faceclaim: Florence Pugh
(+sensitive, kind, bright & -anxious, insecure, perfecting)
The Bell household on the Upper East Side of Manhattan was usually quiet. Here, Clara Bell was raised to be a perfect young lady. The eldest daughter of two of Manhattan’s most high-power attorneys, Clara was expected to excel in all of her pursuits, of which there were many. Besides a rigorous academic career at New York’s most prestigious all-girl’s school, Clara partook in every extracurricular possible: swimming, painting, tennis, French,  piano, and acting, to name a few. At a very young age, Clara learned to behave in high society: sitting in corners and smiling politely. She was an all around well-mannered girl, and was often shown-off by her parents at parties and galas.
But not everything in the Bell household was as it initially seemed. As Clara grew up, Â her home became increasingly more tense. Her younger brother, Henry, was becoming a rebellious teenager, and her parents were fighting more often than not. Clara assumed the burden of their strained home. Maybe, if she was exactly who her parents wanted her to be, Clara could fix all of their problems. She studied hard and kept herself busy, striving for some sort of perfection that would create stability for her family. She was never happy with her work, and seemingly, neither were her parents.
From an early age, stories were Clara’s escape, a distraction from the pressures of her life. She liked to tell herself stories to pass the time— her characters kept her company when her parents were off at work, or events, and when the house felt most quiet. But over time, constructing other worlds became second nature to Clara. Walking down the New York City streets, she’d imagine herself in other lives, in other places, in another body. Writing felt like the one place she could really let go- as if stepping into somebody else’s shoes actually made her more like herself. She often saw herself as less of a person and more of an idea, an object that her parents could point to and justify their life, their marriage, their ideals. They both loved her a lot, she knew, but Clara was also sharp enough to know that they loved what she represented as well.
The stories Clara told herself in her head soon became stories written on paper. Clara was surprised at the positive response her work received, and in high school, she was published in a number of small journals, and staged an original play of her own. This life— seeing her words transformed into something living— was what Clara wanted. Not the life of lawyers that her parents had. By the time Clara applied to college, she had her pick of schools waiting for her. And why wouldn’t she? She was smart, hard-working, charming, beautiful. She was exactly what she was supposed to be. But, despite her parents’ protests that she study law at Yale, Clara decided to attend NYADA.
At NYADA, Clara studies playwriting, and lives with her best friend Cameron Ellis. Unlike most of the other students here, who boldly crave the spotlight, Clara works quietly and diligently. And it pays off: in her three years at school, she’s staged multiple original plays, all of which were met with praise. Her most recent play, a one-act entitled Crosswalks, about adolescence in the city, is her best work yet. Rumor has it that producers from Playwrights Horizon were even in attendance on closing night… Yet despite all of her success, Clara still feels like she has something to prove, searching for some sort of approval that she’s never fully realized.
