‘Scarecrow’ Is All About Wisconsin

Heidi Armbruster. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

Consider the one-person play. Leaving aside collections of Shakespeare’s speeches or Dickens’ phrases, one-person plays fall into two categories. The first builds on a celebrity’s own words and/or actions, be they poet Emily Dickinson or President Harry Truman.

The more difficult second option explores the fabric of personal tragedy or life experience of an unknown person that speaks to all of us, either representing the playwrights themselves or an alter-ego moving from the personal to the almost mystical lessons learned from life.

The second kind is the brand-new Scarecrow, now at the Next Act Theatre, deftly directed by Laura Gordon and relying on an innovative sound design (both nature and music) by Joe Cerqua, along with echoes of a Wisconsin farm and changing lighting patterns by set/lighting designer and Next Act veteran Jason Fassl.

But the central draw, based on her own memories and sense of humor amid family tragedy, is Heidi Armbruster, a veteran New York actress known to Milwaukee Rep audiences and also a playwright who relies on her own acting talents, winning personality, rapid fluidity with dialects and writer’s ear for detail that make her one-person play feel like the actor in this case is talking to herself as well as to the audience.

The play is very Wisconsin oriented, given this is the state where her father had a farm and she grew up before setting out on an acting career.

Armbruster knows well her own instrument, and has found a knowing stage agent in director Gordon, herself an acting veteran of precisely this kind of transformation.

Armbruster can flick out Wisconsin euphemisms and farmhand dialects with ease and a winning grin. With a look or a twist of her head, she can turn the minutiae of her father’s death from cancer into a portrait of the whole family and clinging friends, warts and all, as well as the Midwest ethics and attitudes that surrounded her.

What she can’t do in 90 minutes is carry us all the way with her into the surreal and poetic, when rustic life on the farm and her own sense of loss take over her personality and her wish fulfillment. This second half is not as charming as her early flirtation with and dissection of today’s TV commercials cliches and the maudlin devices of the Hallmark Channel movies (all contrivances we know that actress Armbruster has mastered and survived in her professional life).

By the last 20 minutes, the repetitive patterns of the writing could not be salvaged by some clever sound techniques and more aggressive text twisting. As Heidi the character digs deeper into the roots and vegetation of the Wisconsin farm her father left her, she wants to move the play into a deeper vein than the personal empathy she has built in the earlier going.

Opening night created mixed feelings. One was admiration for the ease and appeal of Armbruster’s acting and the other feeling was a wish the writing that had nice early runs would hook into us deeper as the journey into her soul went along.

Next Act Theatre performs “Scarecrow” through March 17 at 255 S. Water St. For tickets, visit https://nextact.org/show/scarecrow/#tickets or call (414) 278-0765.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here.