Tonyanna Borkovi is the real fucking thing.
She’s got the credentials, an actual medical doctor, which means she’s already put in more hours of disciplined study than most artists log in their entire careers. But that’s just the baseline. That’s just what she does when she’s not creating work that rewires how you think about space, about presence, about what theater can actually do to a person.
What absolutely destroys any cynicism I might bring to the table, is how she moves between worlds. Medicine demands precision, rigor, an almost brutal adherence to protocol. Art demands the opposite: risk, instinct, the willingness to fail spectacularly in front of strangers. Most people can’t hold both. Most people wouldn’t even try. Tonyanna does it like it’s breathing.
She’s just one of those people. You know the type. The ones you actually look forward to seeing. Not in that obligatory, calendar-appointment way, but in that real way, where you find yourself checking if she’ll be at the thing, because if she is, the whole evening just got better. Where a rehearsal stops being work and becomes the place you want to be.
She’s playful in the way great artists are playful, not frivolous, but genuinely experimental. Curious. She’ll take a Greek tragedy and make it feel like it’s happening for the first time, like Sophocles just handed her the manuscript yesterday and she’s still figuring out what it means. There’s no dust on anything she touches. No museum-quality preservation. Just living, breathing work that demands you pay attention.
And here’s the thing that matters: she makes everyone around her better. That’s not hyperbole. That’s not empty praise. When you work with someone who brings that level of intelligence, that combination of discipline and creative fearlessness, it raises the stakes. It raises the game. You can’t phone it in. You wouldn’t want to.
It’s not just about the work, though the work is exceptional. It’s that she brings something into the room, an energy, a generosity, a sense that we’re all in this together and it might actually be fun. You don’t find that often. You hold onto it when you do.
Tonyanna Borkovi is proof that you don’t have to choose between rigor and imagination, between expertise and experimentation. You can be both. You can be all of it. And when you are, when you combine that with being someone people genuinely want to be around, the work shows it. Everything shows it.
