San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The Artist’s Life
This week we profile actor Katrina McGraw.
For San Francisco performer Katrina McGraw, there’s never been a better time to be a plus-size actor of color. “This is a time of inclusion,” she says, “when people are actively looking for different skin colors and body types.”
McGraw, 29, sees barriers falling everywhere: in the box office hits “Black Panther” and “Crazy Rich Asians,” which have predominantly black and Asian casts, respectively; in “Hamilton,” with its Latino and African American actors playing the founding fathers; and in the Broadway musical “Head Over Heels,” which stars plus-size actress Bonnie Milligan in the ingénue role.
“Representation matters,” McGraw says. “I always say, ‘It’s a very good time to be me.’ ”
A San Francisco native, McGraw grew up in the Inner Richmond and fell in love with acting at Presidio Middle School, where she played the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz.” After high school she trained at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria on the Central California coast, and spent three years as a struggling New York actor before returning to San Francisco in 2016.
During an afternoon chat in the San Francisco Playhouse lobby on Post Street, McGraw said she used to fight for roles that were deemed inappropriate because of her height (she’s 5-foot-10) or her skin color (her mother was white, her father African American).
Today, most Bay Area theaters practice raceconscious casting and, accordingly, McGraw has worked steadily. In the past two years, she has appeared in “She Loves Me” and “A Christmas Story” for San Francisco Playhouse, “Little Shop of Horrors” for Ray of Light Theatre, “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” for 42nd Street Moon, “Rocky Horror Show” for ACT Conservatory, “Hair” and “Seussical” for Bay Area Musicals, “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” for Town Hall Theatre in Lafayette and “Freaky Friday” for Center Rep in Walnut Creek.
Sadly, most of those gigs didn’t pay much. Until August, McGraw wasn’t a member of Actors’ Equity, the theatrical actors’ labor union. Salaries for nonEquity actors, she says, can be paltry. “You’re doing really good theater, but you’re maybe getting a $200 stipend for three months of work.”
It’s a tough life. “When I moved back from New York,” McGraw says, “I was working at a children’s fitness center 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., nannying from 1:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., and in rehearsal from 6 to 10 p.m. And still barely making enough to survive.”
Recently, McGraw had to find a new place to live, “and it was the worst experience of my life trying to find a
room in the city for under $1,000. There are only a handful of rooms for that price still. Also, it seems no one wants an artist in their house. Everyone wants techies with a solid 9-to-5 schedule.”
Eventually, she found something: the upper level of an Ingleside district house that she shares with three others. “I pay $800 for my room, which is pennies in San Francisco. But I have to walk through my roommate’s room to get to my room. And share the bathroom with three other people.”
When she’s not in a show, McGraw scrambles for work. “I pick up babysitting gigs, work the box office or some other short-term gig to substitute the income I’m not making from a show. I’ve worked in retail, food service, teaching, child care, street marketing, you name it.” McGraw has a parttime job at San Francisco Playhouse as the company’s outreach coordinator, coordinating free show tickets for Bay Area high school students. She’s assisting a former teacher, Anne Marie Ullman, as associate director for “Daughters of Atreus” at Lowell High School, and in August debuted a solo cabaret act at Martuni’s, singing Sondheim, Rodgers and Hart, and Sara Bareilles. Ullman remembers the first time she saw McGraw on stage: “When Katrina was a sophomore in high school, I saw her sing ‘As If We Never Said Goodbye.’ I was stunned by her interpretation. I mean, with young high schoolers, it is major to get them to a point where they can stand confidently onstage and sing words, on key, with meaning. Katrina’s performance not only had meaning but layers of meaning. She didn’t even have to move. It was clear to me at that moment that she was going to go far.”
Given her family background, it’s remarkable that McGraw found her niche in the world and succeeded in a competitive field. Her father, a onetime drummer in a goth band, was barely around when she was growing up, and her mother was an addict. When McGraw was 14, her mother’s situation became so volatile that McGraw and her younger brother, Nigel, moved into their grandmother’s apartment in the same building. In 2014, McGraw’s mother died of liver failure, at 49. Her brother, also an addict, is in prison; her father lives in Albuquerque, “but I am not in communication with him.”
With such a troubled background, how does McGraw function as well as she does in the world?
“Honestly, I’m lucky,” she says, “I think I was just born with a mind that was able to see what was happening around me fairly clearly. My mom was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder much later in life, and I think as a child I picked up on that and somehow disconnected from her. My grandma gained custody of me and my younger brother when I was in high school. So she’s my parent.”
In high school, moreover, “I had an amazing group of friends who all mostly had less-thanperfect home lives. So we didn’t have to hide what was going on from each other. I met my best friend and helped her get over a pretty bad eating disorder. I think we saved each other, in a way.”
McGraw’s love for theater was the other factor in her survival. “Right around the time I was starting to heavily deal with the stuff with my mom at home, I had this family and this thing to do after school. It held me accountable when all my friends were smoking pot and partying. Otherwise, I could have easily just spiraled and gone who knows where.”
Keith Carames, who taught McGraw at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, agrees: “Having a home away from home, feeling love and support and a sense of being a member of a tribe, an ensemble — that was a good thing for Katrina. Having borne witness to such turbulence at home … forced her to navigate her own ship into harbor.”
With her Equity card, McGraw plans to move back to New York in June. “I’ll be auditioning against a lot of women who’ve been doing it for years and probably have Broadway credits. But you can’t let those things stop you.”
It comes down to that unassailable love for performing. In the days immediately following the election of President Trump in November 2016, McGraw remembers doing the musical “Seussical”: “Every day you’re like, ‘What’s the point?’ You’d be down, you’d be spiraling, you’d be depressed. And then you get onstage at that Saturday matinee where the whole audience is kids.
“And they’re laughing and talking back to you and they’re excited. And you’re like, ‘Oh, right. This is why I do this!’ ”