Courageous Acts

If you lived here in 1982, you may remember Annie Enneking. She was the darling of the Children’s Theatre Company: the sprightly ingénue in CTC’s first-ever production of Pippi Longstocking and Alice in Wonderland. By the time she was eighteen, Enneking had more than ten shows under her belt and the acting chops of a professional.

But in 1990, she disappeared from the theater world altogether, only to reemerge eleven years later in a Jeune Lune show called The Description of the World. Of her absence, Enneking says, “I became disillusioned with theater. I was self-conscious and insecure about whether or not I was doing good work.” She turned to dance to build her self-esteem. “In dance,” she says, “you can either do the turn or you can’t. It’s an objective way to measure progress, and I needed that.” After she was no longer involved with dance, she became busy making music with her band, Triangle Park (now disbanded), raising two kids, and recording a solo album.

Her professional dance career included performing with Shawn McConneloug and Her Orchestra, Paula Mann, and Danny Buraczeski’s Jazzdance ensemble. In 1998, when a knee injury put Enneking out of commission, she decided it was time to go back to her roots. She returned to the Children’s Theatre, of course.

At thirty-eight, Enneking’s body still looks and moves like a dancer’s—muscular, compact, intensely physical, ready to burst at a moment’s notice. Her physicality is well-suited for CTC, where she’s played roles as varied as the Mother in Hansel and Gretel, a dark witch in Sleeping Beauty, and a flame-haired dwarf in The Hobbit. In Anon, she played a wildly kinetic bird and a septuagenarian witch.

She’s also hooked up with Frank Theatre, the scrappy seventeen-year-old company run by artistic director Wendy Knox. Enneking first worked with Frank in 2003’s The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Her character, Kitty Oppenheimer, was a martini-swilling, feral, mordantly lonely woman—part Marlene Dietrich, part Jennifer Jason Leigh. Enneking stole the show.

After Oppenheimer, Knox cast Enneking as Helen in The Women of Troy. Helen of Troy was the woman whose ravishing beauty ignited a devastating war, and Enneking’s unorthodox interpretation was more like Madonna the pop star than Madonna the Virgin. Says Knox, “Annie took control of the whole stage. During Women of Troy, she had a song and it was a total showstopper. She’s a local treasure, a gold mine.”

Next up for Enneking is the title role in Frank Theatre’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s epic Mother Courage, which opens in October. It will be a tremendous acting challenge for Enneking who, after more than a decade out of the spotlight, is plunking herself right down in the middle of it in a notoriously complex role.

As for the play itself, Mother Courage takes place during the Thirty Years’ War. It’s an unabashedly antiwar play, in which Mother Courage, a cunning businessperson, sells goods to soldiers on both sides of the conflict with disastrous results. Brecht wasn’t the subtlest of playwrights; like Frank Theatre, he was pushing a social agenda. Knox admits that Brecht—and her company’s confrontational style—isn’t for everyone. “If someone walks out and they’re like, ‘What the hell was that about?’, we’ve done our job,” she says. “If you’re still thinking about the play two weeks later, then you’ve gotten your twenty dollars’ worth.”

Rest assured, Enneking will be worth every penny.

Oct. 20–Nov. 12. Waterbury Bldg., 1121 NE Jackson St., Mpls., 612-724-3760,  franktheatre.org