Doug Peruski says that he has no regrets.
He is about to pull up stakes and relocate
to New York, the heart of the theatre world in the United States. As an actor,
he says that is where he needs to be in order to grow as an artist.
Doug Peruski is a graduate of the
University of Georgia, where he received degrees in Theatre Arts and Computer
Science. "At first I did what was expected of me," he recalls.
"I followed the usual career path. Used my Computer Science degree and got
a job at NCR." He stayed at NCR for three years but says he was never
happy there. "In fact, I was downright miserable."
Finally, Doug Peruski says he decided that
if he was going to be at all happy he would have to do the thing that he most loved in life, acting. So
he resigned from NCR, found work as a waiter at a popular Greek restaurant
called Achilles, and started looking for acting jobs. He managed to make a
little money from his acting, appearing in several regional TV commercials and
even landing a few guest roles in two popular TV series, Breaking Bad and The
Big Bang Theory.
He also started The Square Peg Players with
his friend, the playwright Thomas Forsythe. Peruski and Forsythe build The
Square Peg Players into a popular Duluth attraction, most memorably with their
weekly Improv Night. On Improv Nights, the renovated barn that served as the
Square Peg headquarters and theatre was turned into a dinner theatre
But now Doug Peruski says that he and the
Squares, as he calls them, have become a big fish in a small pond, and the time
has come to move on. But he has no
regrets. He expects to relocate to New York no later than the spring of 2015.
He is also realizing a lifelong dream at that time by appearing in a new,
off-off-Broadway production of West Side Story.