The devil she knows

HOOP DREAMS Schreck takes a break at Circle Mirror Transformation.

Photo: Joan Marcus

It’s hard enough to make it as an actor, much less as a hyphenate talent. Take Heidi Schreck. She’s been a longtime TONY favorite for appearances in shows by Anne Washburn, Jordan Harrison and the group Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf. Finally, the vivacious downtown performer is getting her Off Broadway break in Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation at Playwrights Horizons. You’d think that capitalizing on the higher-profile gig would be Schreck’s priority: getting film and TV producers’ asses in seats. Instead, she’s spending days at rehearsals for Creature, her New York debut as a dramatist. The spooky-funny, medieval-set work starts previews Tuesday at the Ohio Theatre.

Understandably, when Schreck slides into a booth at the West Bank Cafe between matinee and evening performances of Circle, she cops to fatigue. “I’m exhausted. Plus I got sick last week, which I didn’t really plan for,” she says. “But [Creature producer] New Georges got me a personal assistant, which is great.” She pauses for effect, squinting nastily. “I’m being really mean to her.”

Don’t believe it for a second. Schreck has a reputation for being one of the most even-tempered and supportive artists out there. Donning her journalist cap, she has written several well-informed playwright profiles for the Brooklyn Rail, and she radiates a plucky, girl-next-door wholesomeness that seems at odds with the starvation economy of Off-Off Broadway. In fact, Schreck is originally a small-towner. She grew up in rural Washington State, spent a couple of years in Russia (first Siberia, then St. Petersburg) and went on to found the theater troupe Printer’s Devil in Seattle. She moved here in 2003, after getting over her fear of the big city. Yes, folks, she was scared of New York, but lived in Siberia for 18 months.

In the past six years, Schreck has earned admiration for her sly and thoughtful turns in formally complex work. In Circle Mirror Transformation—Annie Baker’s seriocomic behavioral study of five flawed, lonely people taking an acting class in rural Vermont—Schreck plays Theresa. Outwardly confident and optimistic, the hula-hooping Theresa gradually reveals herself as an emotional mess with deep commitment problems.

“It’s interesting because I feel like I’m playing Annie Baker—I’m her stand-in,” Schreck says about Theresa. “And actually, Annie is the one who found Sofia Jean Gomez, who stars in Creature. We called Sofia in for an audition and she was amazing. So now Sofia is my stand-in, found by Annie Baker.”

And what sort of character does Schreck consider her stand-in? Creature’s subject is the extraordinary Margery Kempe (1373–1438), an Englishwoman whose bourgeois existence as the wife of a beer brewer was marked by a series of intense mystical revelations. Kempe bore 14 children and made several pilgrimages to the Holy Land, eventually dictating her ecstatic visions to two clerks. Her Book of Margery Kempe is considered by some to be the first autobiography in English.

“I totally fell in love with her,” Schreck says about her first contact with Kempe’s book in college. “She’s a very unreliable narrator, so the book is hilarious. You’re watching her talk about how she’s so pious and God’s chosen, but you can tell she’s so far from the mark; she’s really flawed and vain and prideful—just really human.”

Creature focuses on Kempe in 1401, after the birth of her first child, when she begins having visions of demons and a touchy-feely Christ. “She was somebody in this era trying to define her identity,” Schreck explains. “The one way she could do it was by religious experience.”

Although Schreck belongs to the experimental writers’ collective Machiqq, Creature (coproduced by New Georges and Page 73) is fairly accessible stuff. The script is linear and episodic, mixing whimsy, relationship drama and surreal sequences, creating a vision of 15th-century England that is neither romanticized nor presented with stodgy historical “accuracy,” but one in which everyday speech can be banal and unpredictable. Schreck, who has been tinkering with the script, is aware of the pitfalls of period drama. “I think there’s some silliness,” she concedes about her take on Merrie Olde England. “It is a fine line. I never want it to become Monty Python. But all the actors are so wonderful at playing it genuinely and not commenting. I like the sense that it acknowledges that we’re looking at this time from our time, but I don’t want to make fun of that time either.” If Schreck turns out to be as successful a writer as she is an actor, the distinction should be crystal clear.

Creature starts previews Tue 27 at the Ohio Theatre. Circle Mirror Transformation is at Playwrights Horizons.

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