Peter Bisgaier was an aspiring actor working at a Manhattan restaurant in 1997 when a friend and co-worker of his returned from running an errand with some news.
“He came back and told me he met the girl that I was going to fall in love with,” Bisgaier says.
The friend also gave Bisgaier $20 in cab money so that he could go to his then-girlfriend’s apartment and end what was becoming a difficult relationship. Then that friend held a party where Peter and Corinna Bisgaier met and began their life together.
That friend’s instincts were spot-on. Today the couple lives in Windsor Chase in Princeton Junction and works together at the West Windsor Arts Center, where Corinna is program director and Peter is production manager. They have two daughters, five-year-old Jessica, who has just started half-day kindergarten at Maurice Hawk Elementary school, and spends the other half of the day at Home Again Early School with Judy Steed-Roth, and one-year-old Monica. (They arrange their schedules so that one of them is watching Monica, with the occasional help of a babysitter.)
Corinna was born in rural North Carolina, near a town called Vass. Her parents divorced when she was young and she grew up with her father, who worked in the family’s quilt factory, and her stepmother, who ran a horse farm. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in African American studies.
Peter was born in Philadelphia. His family moved to Haddonfield when he was 10. His father is a lawyer and his mother is a financial planner, working with municipalities. Peter graduated from the University of Southern California in 1994 with a degree in theater. He worked in several theaters around the country before settling in New York City, where he founded the Empire Theater Company and produced several plays, including the world premiere of the stage adaptation of Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Reservoir Dogs.”
The couple moved to Princeton Junction in 2003 because Corinna, having grown up in a rural area, started to miss nature.
“So over the years, I kind of encouraged Pete further and further from the city,” she says.
When she says “encouraged,” Peter replies, “that’s a good word.”
Corinna was familiar with the area because she had attended the Hun School. Princeton Junction was close to her former job as education director at Young Audiences of New Jersey (today she is board president of Young Audiences of Eastern Pennsylvania) and near a train station, allowing Peter to commute to Manhattan when he needed to.
“We started on 96th and Third, then Brooklyn, then right across in Jersey,” Peter says. “We just kept looking for trees and we found more and more each time. Now we have an arboretum across the street from us.”
After having run a camp at the West Windsor Arts Center this summer — Corinna was camp director and Peter taught acting — both Bisgaiers will be teaching there when classes begin in mid-September. Corinna will teach a class titled Graphic Story Adventures, for 9- to 10-year-olds. She has been volunteering for the WWAC since 2008 and became the program director about a year ago, shortly before the WWAC opened its center on Alexander Road. But this fall will mark the first time she teaches a class there.
Corinna says her class is designed to improve reading and writing skills such as visualization and story structure. Kids in the class will read the children’s novel “My Father’s Dragon” by Ruth Stiles Gannett, then create their own graphic novel based on the book. With the help of a textbook, the students will adapt the story by creating frames and bubbles for lines of dialog and thoughts. Then they will write and draw their own sequel to the book.
But have no fear if you think your child would be interested but lacks drawing talent. Corinna says the class is for everyone. “That’s actually one of the things that constantly comes up,” she says. “If they are not an artist, most people are really concerned about their drawing ability and all of a sudden they immediately apologize for not being able to draw. We stop people from apologizing.”
Peter will be teaching two Introduction to Acting classes, for kids ages 8 to 10 and 11 to 13.
As far back as he can remember, acting is the only profession he ever considered. And while his parents’ careers were not exactly steeped in creativity, they always supported him. He remembers his mother bringing him to meet an actress (he doesn’t know who she was or how famous she was), telling her that Peter wanted to be an actor. “The lady leaned down at me and looked me in the eye and said, ‘You can do it. You can do it,’” he says.
He was less enthusiastic about teaching. He says he was the kind of kid who secretly read Stephen King novels hidden behind his textbooks, so spending time in a classroom wasn’t something that interested him.
“I started teaching because I had to,” he says. “I was at a theater company in Kentucky where part of the requirement for being there was that you helped them with their week-long summer camp for kids. I was, much to my chagrin, required to teach kids a class and come up with something.”
A fellow performer helped him develop a course, and he ended up loving teaching. “That experience completely blew me away,” he says. “And I really do love teaching. I love performing but I really do enjoy watching the kids experience something they’ve never experienced or step outside of themselves in a way that they’ve never been comfortable with before, or to be the adult who looks at them says, ‘Hey, you’re OK, we’re all goofy.’”
A favorite teaching memory took place a few years after that first teaching gig and involved an exercise where students were asked to express anger using gibberish. There was one shy girl who refused to participate. “She wouldn’t move or talk, she was just a statue,” Peter says.
The teacher leading the class gave him a look that suggested he should move on, but he didn’t want to ignore the kid.
“I leaned down and whispered in her ear, ‘Have you ever been angry at anybody?’ And she looked at me, and I was, like, ‘so you have.’ I said, ‘they’re right there. And whatever you want to say to them, no one’s going to understand it.’ And she just went, ‘aarrgggh’ as loud as could be. It was such a moving moment for me.”
He says his classes at the WWAC are for students of all acting abilities and experience. “I run them through a bunch of exercises, just to get them comfortable with each other, just get them comfortable being goofy,” he says. “Honestly, that’s probably the hardest part, just getting them comfortable doing something ‘strange’ in front of other people.”
The couple have been working together, often unofficially, since they first started dating. In the summer of 1997, Peter worked with a theater company in Holyoke, Massachusetts, doing everything from acting in roles both tiny and significant, to working on children’s theater productions and building sets. Corinna came with him and did more work than some of the company members.
“We’ve worked together forever,” she says. “And I think that’s kind of the beauty of having a partner is that you can support each other in all ways. We happen to have careers where there are a lot of intersections, and we’ve been able to help each other out along the way.”
Support comes in various ways. After the first day of the end-of-summer camp at WWAC, she was thinking so much about what needed to be changed that Peter reminded her to look at the kids’ faces and notice what they’re experiencing. “He’s often reminding me to look at the good part of things,” she says. “From that point forward, I could just see what a tremendous impact we were having on the kids. Definitely what we’re doing is not something that I see anywhere in the area. It’s very different kind of work, and I think it was totally needed. And certainly the response we’ve gotten from kids and their parents throughout the week, especially at the end, was just mind-blowing. It was really tremendous. It definitely has me invigorated for the next round.”
Some people might think that living together, raising a family, and working together could lead to tension, but that’s not the case with the Bisgaiers. That’s partly because their relationships at home and at the center are somewhat different.
“It’s not necessarily that we’re seeing each other as a couple,” Corinna says of their working together. “It’s nice when we’re running around the arts center, like crazy lunatics, and I say, hey, there’s that guy, he’s pretty cool.”
The West Windsor Arts Center, 952 Alexander Road, Princeton Junction. Fall classes are available for children as young as three, adults, and special needs students. Private and semi-private classes are available. For more information, call 609-716-1931 or visit www.westwindsorartscenter.org.
