Suddenly Seeing Sarah

Sarah Agnew is a mystery of sorts. The lithe actor with wild blond ringlets gives the impression of being both utterly composed and charmingly disheveled—a disarming paradox of characteristics that, onstage, she easily uses to make people laugh even as she’s twisting the knife of tragedy.

A Guthrie-audience favorite who ventures into smaller, more idiosyncratic theaters when she’s so inclined, Agnew is a fearless performer with a pronounced physicality and a tightly pitched voice capable of both grace and grit. Last year was a big one for her. She played lead roles in the Guthrie’s Major Barbara, The Home Place, and The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, and gave both critics and audiences reason to rave with her one-woman show at The Jungle Theater, The Syringa Tree. But as she sits in a coffee shop drinking tea and politely answering questions about her craft, it’s apparent she’d be more comfortable stomping around a rehearsal space with a script tucked into the back of her jeans.

Her restlessness is understandable. After all, it’s September, about three weeks before her new show, archy & mehitabel . . . life in lower case, opens at Open Eye Figure Theatre, and she and cocreator Jim Lichtscheidl don’t have a script yet. Newspaper columnist Don Marquis created the characters in 1916. “A free-verse poet dies and gets reincarnated as a cockroach,” grins Agnew. “So this cockroach finds its way into the basement of the newsroom and finds a typewriter, and, of course, he has the need to express himself so he starts banging away on the typewriter. He can’t hit the shift [key] so everything is in lowercase . . . and he meets an alley cat named Mehitabel, who claims that in a previous life she was Cleopatra. I sort of equate her to Courtney Love without the celebrity. She’s always getting into these tough spots and having litters and then losing the cats.” The postcard of the play shows Agnew, who plays Mehitabel, with a real sardine hanging out of her mouth. “I take the work very seriously,” she says wryly, “but the moment I start to take myself seriously, I think there might be a problem.”

Agnew believes in taking risks in real life as well as onstage. She strongly believes in “doing the thing that scares the pants off of you,” she says. “It’s cliché, but it’s true: The most challenging things are the most satisfying.” She’s not talking only about theater. She’s run a marathon, just to see if she could do it. And last year, she flitted off to a women’s-only surfing camp in Costa Rica to reward herself for a role well done. “It might be a kind of arrogance on my part,” muses Agnew. “You know, ‘Why can’t I? Why shouldn’t I try?’ If that didn’t exist within me, I don’t think I could continue in this profession.”

When asked what she would do if she wasn’t an actor, she looks puzzled. Finally, she replies: “A docent. I’d be a guide at Zion National Park, that’s what I’d be.” In other words, she could never not be an actor.

On December 15, Agnew will reprise her role as a demon in Open Eye’s annual Holiday Pageant, and then she’s off to play the lead in Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production of the Sarah Ruhl play Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Agnew will be playing the role originated off-Broadway by Mary–Louise Parker.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone is about a wallflower named Jean (Agnew) whose life is forever changed when she answers a dead man’s mobile phone. Jean begins inventing stories about how she knew him and the things he said before he died, ingratiating herself into his family, and consequently giving her own life a sense of purpose.

Bill Rauch, artistic director of OSF, met Agnew when he directed her in the 2003 production of Nickel and Dimed at the Guthrie Lab. “I was just blown away by her,” remembers Rauch. “The combination of humor, intelligence, and heart in her work is such a rare combination. Sarah’s incredible mastery of tone will really be an asset to the production. I think about what a wonderful person she is in real life, and you sense that onstage. She’s somebody who’s smart, somebody you can trust, someone you can go on an emotional journey with.”

Locally, Agnew’s flashiest role to date is her aforementioned virtuoso one-woman performance in The Syringa Tree. For those who missed it last winter, a recap: It’s a memory play about growing up during apartheid in South Africa. For a crisp ninety minutes, she played more than twenty characters—men and women, black and white, small and large, ranging in age from newborn to eighty-three. If anyone ever had doubts about Agnew’s technical abilities—her facility with dialects, the exquisiteness with which she blends psychology, emotionality, and physicality—this was the show to see. The Jungle is remounting it this summer.

Says Syringa Tree director Joel Sass, “I’d known Sarah socially for about twelve years. She was working at Dudley Riggs with people I knew better and was collaborating with. I’d seen her in her early days at Jeune Lune when she just started to work there, and I thought, ‘Oh, she’s interesting. It’ll be cool to see how far she goes over the next few years.’ When I read The Syringa Tree, I thought it was the perfect thing for her, and I asked her to do it.

“I don’t know if this will make sense,” says Sass. “There’s sort of a performer personality that actors have that is their hallmark, and hers is very fearless, bright, open, and spontaneous, and that’s a very attractive and intriguing combination for a director and for an audience. She really has a strong combination of physically inventive skills.” Her artistic imagination is one of her big strengths, says Sass. “Some people can emote out the wazoo, but they can’t walk across the stage without tripping over a chair. Sarah [is delightful] because she’s someone you can suggest to enter from a scuba tank in the floor and she’d be all over that and find twenty-five different ways to do it. She’s exemplary of the caliber of artistic collaborators one can find in the Twin Cities and we’re lucky to have people like her.”

Agnew grew up in Duluth and went to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, originally intending to major in geology. Halfway through, she joined a theater group and got hooked on improvisation. For eight consecutive weekends, she and her friends bussed two and a half hours to Chicago to take classes at Second City. Even though she found improv in front of a live audience completely terrifying, she kept at it. After graduating, she apprenticed at Actors Theatre of Louisville, then came to Minneapolis to work with Dudley Riggs’ Brave New Workshop. “I loved what they were doing,” says Agnew, “but it was too formulaic for me. I wanted to do something different.”

In 1994, actor Luverne Seifert told her about an upcoming audition for Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s adaptation of Don Juan Giovanni. Agnew’s entire body lights up as she recalls that first audition with Jeune Lune. “I had no idea what I was getting into. If I’d seen [any of Jeune Lune’s shows] before we’d started rehearsing, I would have been so intimidated. Looking back, that was really my graduate program. Being introduced to Jeune Lune and the way they worked tapped into my core sense of playfulness.” She became a company member in 1995.

Influenced by the work she was doing at Jeune Lune, she decided to go to Ecole Philippe Gaulier in London, where she studied physical theater. (She partially paid for her tuition by winning a Halloween–costume contest sponsored by City Pages, dressed as a beheaded Statue of Liberty.) The training emphasized finding an actor’s “core beauty” and ability to engage with an audience, she explains. At the school “there was no room for bullshit . . . no soft-pedaling . . . . You’re told, ‘You’re so boring, sit down.’ It was hard, but so good because you [eventually] learn that tragedy doesn’t have to be painful.” In 2000, she went to Switzerland, where she continued her studies with clowning teacher Pierre Byland.

From 1995 until 2001, Agnew worked almost exclusively with Jeune Lune, touring with the company—most notably with Tartuffe and The Miser—which took her to the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and American Repertory Theatre. She also was briefly on Broadway in Jeune Lune’s critically lauded production of Hamlet (The New York Times called her Ophelia “terrific.”) But it was her decision to step back from the company that has given even more people a chance to see her shine.

Until she branched out from Jeune Lune, she says, she’d had very little contact with other actors in the Cities. “I wanted to have experiences outside the company and pursue film and work with other theaters,” she explains. In 2003, she did Detective Fiction, which was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival, and then she went to Los Angeles, where the casting directors at MADtv deemed her too young. “I remember it was really about ‘being sexy,’ presenting a ‘sexier’ side of myself in my headshots or when I went into meetings or castings. It was sort of cheesy that way,” she laughs.

Jeune Leune cofounder Dominique Serrand, whom Agnew married in 1999, is effusive when talking about her. (As of presstime, they were in the process of getting divorced. The split is amicable.) “Quite frankly, she’s one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with in my life,” he says. “One of the top three. She’s a very developed performer. The range of her disciplines is amazing.”

Agnew is unusual in another sense, notes Serrand. She’s not afraid to make fun of herself or look ugly (or, in Agnew’s own gleeful verbiage, “stupid”). Her character in The Miser, for example, is traditionally played as an ingénue. Serrand and Agnew decided early on that her Élise would have a receding hairline, nasty teeth, and a whiny, almost juvenile voice. “It was just beautiful,” recalls Serrand fondly.

It’s clear that Agnew’s career is taking a major leap forward, as is her sense of responsibility to the next generation of theater artists. “We’re becoming like the people we used to look up to,” she says thoughtfully, referring to her peers and collaborators. “We have to be definitive about what we do and the stories we tell.”

With that, she finishes her tea, bounces out of her chair, and directs her energy to her bicycle. With archy opening in less than a month, she has a lot of work to do—and with any luck, it will be definitive Sarah Agnew.