Brick gets mojo back, making exit
In 2011, Jennie Brick was an “aging white lady” who worked up the nerve to try acting for the first time in about two decades, thanks to a little theater in Mexico where she could see if she could still act without any of her Bay Area friends finding out.
Today, at 59, she’s a cardcarrying union actor who can do introspective monologues, matronly nononsense and trailertrash vacuity with equal aplomb. Her acute intelligence, twinkly wit, unflappable confidence and saltoftheearth clarity have enlivened stages from Marin Theatre Company to TheatreFirst to San Francisco Playhouse.
But now, when she’s so in demand she did five shows in 2018 alone, she’s taking her success to St. Louis right after she’s done playing Fräulein Schneider in San Francisco Playhouse’s “Cabaret,” which runs through Sept. 14. She gives credit to the Bay Area theater community that created her, to hardwon life lessons — and to Hugh Jackman.
Brick’s story isn’t the one you usually hear about theater artists leaving the Bay Area. She’s not heading to Los Angeles or New York. She’s not driven out by high rents, though unshackling herself from her mortgage was a big factor in her decision. In St. Louis, where she was born, she can keep doing regional theater, while also being within easy distance of many other cities’ theater scenes — Chicago, Memphis, Kansas City. She and her husband, Brian, can live on his pension from his job in state government and use their IRAs to travel. She won’t have to devote so much
time to a day job, which means more time for acting.
She leaves with no feelings of resentment or disappointment, only gratitude and joy. The Bay Area was the place where “my dreams came true.” After she’d lost all her confidence as an actor, now she brims with it.
Though Brick had performed when she was younger, growing up in Pasadena, by her 40s she’d settled into a career in theater management and financial consulting for nonprofits, long neglecting her artistic side.
A voiceover workshop with Taylor Korobow, at the nowdefunct Voice Factory, felt like a safe way back into performing: No lines to memorize, and Brick was hidden behind a mike. But then Korobow, who’d started a small theater company in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, kept trying to entice Brick back to the stage.
“She said, ‘Come to Mexico. I’ll direct you in a play. No one will know you. So if you suck, it won’t matter, but you’ll know how it feels.’ ”
In 2011, Brick heeded the call south of the border, taking six weeks off her life to perform in Marsha Norman’s “‘night, Mother.” “My ass was on fire. It was like, ‘Oh, OK, no matter what, this is where I live. This is where I’m happiest.’ It’s a horribly sad, tragic play, and I would leave the theater every night just so happy and elated because I had just poured my soul out on this stage.”
When she returned to the Bay Area, “I was just naively fearless,” auditioning first for TheatreWorks, the thirdlargest nonprofit theater in the region. She had better luck with Castro Valley’s Chanticleers Theatre, where she got a part in “Dixie Swim Club.”
This is where Hugh Jackman has a part in her story. That same year, she saw his oneman show at the Curran, and the next day, happening to be near the theater, she got the idea to see if he was at the stage door. “I never do this,” Brick says. “I never celebritystalk. I’m not into the autographs or the photographs or anything like that.” But sure enough, Jackman was outside, greeting his fans. “Our eyes meet, and I say, ‘Can I just shake your hand?’ and he reaches over to me, and he says, ‘Of course you can, darling.’
“And all of a sudden, those five words became my mantra for my theater path: ‘Of course you can, darling.’ And so, on every set that I’m on, I write on a piece of set, backstage, ‘OCYCD,’ wherever I’m going to go on first. That’s my little talisman that I touch before I go onstage.” As she kept auditioning, she referred to her mantra whenever she got discouraged.
“There’s something magical about coming back to theater in your 50s, because you really just don’t give a s—. It’s like, you know what? This is who I am. This is what I have to offer. If it doesn’t fit your puzzle, it doesn’t fit your puzzle, but it’s not about ‘You’ve rejected me.’ ”
As she got more and more work, Brick found other sources of confidence. She remembers a time bombing a dress rehearsal, for a project she won’t name, and how the creative team immediately lost all confidence in her, despite all the strong work they’d seen her do in the rest of the process. “It was such an epiphany for me, not to just buy into the ‘Oh my God, I’ve lost it all. I can’t get it back,’ but to be able to go, ‘No, I know I can do this.’ “As hurtful as it was at the time, “it was actually the best thing that has ever happened to me.” She felt freed.
She’s learned to approach an audition as a partnership, rather than give all the power to the folks on the other side of the table. She tries to “give them a little bit of a break” when she’s in the room, showing them that she’s not nervous and they don’t have to worry about making her comfortable.
“I told myself, I only want to do a project — and this is going to sound incredibly sappy, but it’s actually very true — that’s going to make me a better human and a better artist. When that stops happening, I want to stop.”
Brick recalls one show where others got more praise, more attention from the director, and she felt jealous, so she took a break from performing. Inspired by Lauren English, San Francisco Playhouse’s artistic associate, she started to focus on turning envy into gratitude. Each time she felt bitter, she praised someone else. “When I start focusing on praising other people, I don’t have to get praised.”
She’s learned to seek out collaborators who are going to bring out her best, to seek out companies that made her feel like family, to see her identity, as a plussize woman over 50, not as an obstacle but as “a superpower.”
“I’m kind of in love with the person that I’ve become as a result of being in the Bay Area, and I’m excited to take that person someplace else.”