Asa Leininger - Actor, writer, and educator.
- Isobel Arden
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
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Meet Asa Leininger, an actor, writer, and teacher for theatre, language and history.
Some lives take the shape of a straight line, predictable as graph paper. Asa Leininger’s life, on the other hand, is an overlap of callings ... actor, educator, writer, researcher, interpreter, all inked with a ferocity for truth and self-discovery.
Listen to or watch Asa's interview where we created his fantasy cultural year.
Asa graduated from Missouri State University with a Magna Cum Laude in theatre and history, both degrees in tow, not as trophies, but as tools. He does not believe in idle knowledge. For him, every gesture on stage and every line of text is an excavation site for empathy, ethics, and dialogue.
The Actor as Alchemist
Asa's theatrical journey spans more than a decade and over 30 productions, musicals, operas, cabarets, and straight plays alike. A creature of both chorus and soliloquy, he has sung, danced, and acted on regional stages and screen.
Rooted in Stanislavski's realism and trained in Linklater voice and movement techniques, Asa delivers performances not for ovation, but for revelation.
At Springfield Little Theatre, his work earned multiple performance awards, not for playing to the crowd, but for confronting them. Whether embodying Joe Mitchell in “Waiting for Lefty” or Achilles in “An Iliad,” he wields brutal honesty like a scalpel.
The Writer as Archaeologist
Asa writes as he acts, unsparingly. His published poetry and award-winning short fiction walk a tightrope between lyricism and bleak introspection.
His dramatic work has graced fringe festivals; his research in medieval socio-political upheaval has earned academic accolades. From exploring PTSD to tracing the theological underpinnings of Baltic economic structures, his writing mines human fallibility for rare minerals of meaning.
The Educator as Provocateur
Teaching, for Asa, is less about instruction and more about ignition. In his five years across classrooms, camps, and studios, he has taught dance, dialects, history, and Hamlet, sometimes all at once.
His curriculum favours Cooperative and Active Learning, empowering students to build with their bodies as much as their minds. Wherever he is, he engineers safe spaces that demand emotional and intellectual risk.
He doesn't ask for students to be "better"; he asks them to be braver.
The Citizen of Elsewhere
From the rehearsal room to rural Dominican villages, Asa has refused to limit art to stages. As a Peace Corps volunteer, he designed youth programmes to foster employability and health literacy through theatre and communication.
With fluency in intercultural dialogue and behavioural psychology (including work as a Registered Behaviour Technician), he builds more than communities, he builds bridges. At COSI’s Titanic exhibit, he became history in motion; as a murder mystery actor, he let improvisation reveal social truth with a smirk.
Crafted, Not Manufactured
Asa doesn’t just perform art he constructs it. He is a seasoned stage carpenter, costume librarian, and production problem-solver.
He has been a house manager, a camp inclusion specialist, and a language assistant in Catalonia. His toolkit is literal and metaphorical: power drills and Linklater warm-ups, behavioural data charts and Shakespeare monologues.
Whether building a set or a syllabus, his fingerprint is unmistakable ... curious, unafraid, and unsatisfied with surface answers.
"…in its sacred profanity..."
Asa once wrote, "What I love most about the theatre is that, in its sacred profanity, it allows for the profoundly truthful and present expression of that which is so often labeled as inexplicable." That sentence encapsulates the through-line of his career: to take what society renders unspeakable and give it breath, body, and sound.
Asa Leininger's Fantasy Cultural Year
In the interview above Mark created Asa's Fantasy Cultural Year from the answers to a few questions. There are no wrong answers ;-)
Armed with a magic wand, a time machine, and a Star Trek transporter, their conversation was filled with humour, anecdotes, and playful exchanges. Here is a summary:
Asa's fantasy cultural year began outside his favourite building, Queen Mary's Hospital in Wandsworth, and its nostalgic value due to Asa's time studying abroad in Roehampton.
Mark and Asa then imagined a scenario where Asa was enjoying a drink at a cafe across the road from the hospital. Asa chose an espresso, and a book, which turned out to be the complete works of William Shakespeare.
In a hypothetical scenario, Asa was taken on a year-long global theatre research tour by a factitious wealthy Surrey-based family foundation. The foundation offered a book deal, a Ted Talk, a global university lecture tour, and a TV series in exchange for exploring the comparative importance of theatre in different countries.
Asa agreed to start the tour in Athens, the birthplace of theatre, and when challenged to, chose to limit his musical intake to classical music for the duration of the trip. Upon arrival in Athens, Asa was greeted by theatre enthusiasts who took him to a dance performance and dinner.
In Athens, Asa would try local Greek cuisine like a gyros.
In Rome, Asa expresses interest in watching a Victorian-style martial art that combines jujitsu, boxing, tai chi, and cane fighting.
In Tokyo, Asa would explore the artwork of Edvard Munch using a VR headset that allows viewers to step into famous paintings.
His evenings would be rich with experiences:
attending Gustav Mahler's first performance of one of his symphonies with the New York Philharmonic in 1907 or 1909
watching the first performance of Shakespeare's King Lear at the Globe Theatre
experiencing the original 1957 Broadway production of West Side Story at the Winter Garden Theatre
watching the Green Knight, a David Lowry film from 2019
Mark invited Asa to a leisurely two-hour lunch in York and asked who Asa would like to invite as a guest, living or not, famous or otherwise. Asa considers several options, including Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Peter Brook, and a friend named Emma, but ultimately chooses Shakespeare. Mark then asks who Asa thought Shakespeare would invite in this place, and Asa suggests the Roman poet Seneca, who was a contemporary of Emperor Nero.
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Mark Walmsley FRSA FCIM AGSM
Chief Culture Vulture
Arts & Culture Network
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