The Invention of Sonya

I first met Sonya Robinson the way most people in Chicago probably did—by watching her completely command the stage. It was Cock, and she was playing “W.” I didn’t know her personally then, but I’d followed her on Twitter for years. Mutuals in the way so many creatives in this city are—orbiting each other online, vaguely aware of one another’s work, but never having crossed paths in real life. That night, though, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was too busy being completely entranced.

It wasn’t just her performance—though that was staggering. It was her. The way she carried herself, the way she seemed so alive in every moment. The second she stepped offstage, I knew I had to meet the person behind that presence. When I did, I realized something: Sonya Robinson is just as compelling offstage as she is on it.

She’s been waiting for this moment since she was six years old, sitting in a Broadway theater, eyes wide, heart pounding, utterly mesmerized by A Chorus Line. “Life-changing,” she calls it. She begged her mother—an actress herself—for the cast album, played it until the grooves wore thin, and declared she was going to follow in the family business. Her mother, knowing all too well how unforgiving the industry could be, wasn’t exactly thrilled. Sonya didn’t care. She was all in.

At eight, she fell under Shakespeare’s spell after watching a local production of The Tempest. By eleven, she was in her first acting class. By fourteen, she was auditioning for performing arts high schools, landing at New York’s legendary LaGuardia—a school famous for churning out stars, but also, as Sonya bluntly puts it, a “pressure cooker.”

“LaGuardia was not your typical high school,” she says. “The teachers were relentless, the competition was suffocating, and the boys were given every advantage while the girls had to claw for their place. I was told I’d never work consistently until I was middle-aged. That I’d be the ‘funny single friend’ forever.”

The critiques were brutal. The pressure was relentless. But Sonya? She wasn’t going anywhere. Next came Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, an experience she describes as “depressing—like most people find rural Massachusetts.”

The winters dragged. The isolation was suffocating. Something was missing. The artistic spark, the feeling of being part of something bigger than herself. After a year, she knew she had to leave. She packed up her life and moved to Chicago.

Columbia College changed everything. “The second I got there, it was like I could finally breathe again,” she says. Her professors weren’t just academics; they were working actors, directors, playwrights. They didn’t just teach; they prepared her for survival.

Breaking into Chicago’s theater scene was a whole different challenge. “It’s a city overflowing with talent, and there’s no clear roadmap,” she says. “You just have to keep showing up.” And she did. Auditioning relentlessly, taking on small roles, working backstage, making connections wherever she could. “I was lucky if I booked one show a year,” she admits.

And then came Cock. The show that changed everything.

A friend spotted the audition notice. They both tried out. They both got cast. From the first table read, Sonya knew. “It just clicked,” she says. “I had this instinctive connection to the character. I knew this was going to be something special.”

Her role as “W” hit painfully close to home. She tapped into her own exhausting experience in a polyamorous relationship—“Listen, it works for some people, it does not work for me!”—and channeled all that raw, tangled emotion into her performance. “It was the easiest and hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “I didn’t have to hurt a real person’s feelings, but I had to live in that emotional space night after night. It was… a lot.”

That Jeff Award nomination?

“Psychotic,” she calls it, still laughing. She had hoped the show itself would get recognition. A personal nomination? Not even on her radar. “I was so excited for the show to get nominated. I had zero expectation that I’d get a nomination myself.” The news hit like a freight train. “I always thought award nominations were bullshit,” she admits. “But… turns out, it’s actually an enormous honor.”

The Jeffs—Chicago’s answer to the Tonys—aren’t just shiny trophies. They’re a signal. They open doors, raise visibility, put your name in rooms you didn’t even know existed.

Now, those doors are creaking open. More auditions. More meetings. More possibilities. But Sonya? She’s keeping her head down. “I’m trying not to let it mess with my head,” she says. “At the end of the day, I just want to keep doing work that excites me.”