By Christopher Piatt
Issue No. 204,
January 22 - January 28, 2009
In the late ’70s at a dinner theater in Kansas City, Janet Ulrich Brooks was scheduled to cover a two-week stint in the comedy Lovers and Other Strangers as mistress to a man played by Tony Dow. (In case you weren’t watching either 1950s TV or 1970s Kansas City dinner theater, Tony Dow played Wally on Leave It to Beaver.)
Two days before the show opened, panicky producers decided their wholesome audiences wouldn’t tolerate a character with a mistress, and Brooks’s only scene was cut.
“All my family had driven in from Warrensburg, Missouri, to see me kiss Tony Dow,” Brooks recalls with an amusingly resigned sigh. To this day, she still has the never-used lobby placard in her home that reads, “The role of Cathy will be played by Janet Brooks.”
Rather than just a gag souvenir from an anecdotal war story, the sign represents a long series of incidents that scuttled Brooks’s professional acting career for decades. It was only in 2003 that this now 52-year-old actor stepped back onto the adult stage (though she had long stretches as a dancing-saloon girl and children’s performer). In the five and a half years that she’s been back in the game, this thin but sturdy-framed dame with salt-and-pepper hair and dark saucer eyes has quickly become one of the city’s busiest and most valued non-Equity talents.
Having taken a largely circuitous route to leading-lady status—this weekend she plays Sophie Treadwell, the expressionistic playwright of 1928’s Machinal in the world premiere of the bio play Not Enough Air at TimeLine Theatre—Brooks is proof that one need not play an acting-training game or make political moves to advance in the scene. Her down-home modesty is the opposite of an on-the-make actor’s hustle.
Instead, she lays her career cards on the table with disarming candor: “How do you put ten seasons at Silver Dollar City on your résumé?” she asks, referencing the many years she spent in a cancan dress at Branson’s famous theme park. But Brooks knows what other actors sometimes forget: Such gigs should carry no shame. “I loved working there,” she says. “I love entertaining and making people happy.” From an actor who in recent years came to Chicago prominence playing cruel Sam Shepard women and real-life figures like Lillian Hellman and Golda Meir in biographical solo plays, these aren’t words you might expect to hear.
In fact, her love of entertaining led her to another gig at which others might turn up their noses—children’s theater—and which she speaks of with no bitterness, even though it meant another decade-plus snooze button on prime-time acting. Following her years knocking around the Midwest in between Silver Dollar gigs and a short-lived marriage to a hippie musician, Brooks settled in Chicago to work as a nanny for her sister and ended up acting by day for the Child’s Play Touring Theatre. After a few years with the company, which, like Barrel of Monkeys, performed material written not just for but by children, Brooks was preparing to re-enter proper theater. That’s when the company’s 41-year-old artistic director, Victor Podagrosi, died from a heart attack during the company’s annual board meeting. George Bailey–style, Brooks stepped into an administrative role to help keep her friend Podagrosi’s vision alive. Those temporary duties lasted 13 years.
When middle-aged Brooks finally began dipping her toes back in the water with bit roles at theaters like Pegasus, Strawdog and TimeLine (where she’s now a company member), her non-union status immediately led to bountiful opportunities to play mature roles in non-Equity houses where mature actors are in short supply. (Having scored her Equity card early on, she eventually dropped it. “What good does that do a character actress at age 26?”) Brooks has never married her partner of 20 years, Peter Roeder, and she openly credits the relief of menopause for allowing her to pursue acting more aggressively. “The burden of not having children is gone. You can do what you want.”
Terry Hamilton, her Not Enough Air costar and fellow company member, credits Brooks’s textured performances to her time spent not chasing a career. “It’s to her advantage that she went after it later in life,” Hamilton says. “It adds maturity to your work to step into life instead for a while. As an actor, her B.S. radar is extremely accurate."
