Brenneman Embraces a Sacred Role

Amy Brenneman wants you to know she loves theatre.

Given her numerous TV credits, you probably know her for “Judging Amy,” which ran for six well-received seasons on CBS. Or you may know her as Faye Moskowitz, Frasier Crane’s girlfriend, on “Frasier.” Or from her breakout role as Officer Janice Licalsi on “NYPD Blue,” which earned her two Emmy nominations.

But Brenneman thrives in theatre. The immediacy, the communal nature of bonding with your fellow actors every day and every night, the audience—to her, there’s nothing like it.

“In theatre, you have to be in a community setting, sitting next to people you don’t know and listening to something for a few hours. And I think that’s sacred,” she said.

When it comes to “sacred,” Brenneman currently finds herself in the perfect role. She makes her SCR debut as Miriam of Nazareth in Galilee, 34 by Eleanor Burgess, running through May 12 on the Julianne Argyros Stage. The role brings her back to the stage, where she starred in such productions as the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Rapture Blister Burn at Playwrights Horizon and the Geffen Playhouse and Power of Sail opposite Bryan Cranston at the Geffen.

In fact, Brenneman’s early acting roots grew on the stage. She was a founding member of the Cornerstone Theater Company, which specializes in site-specific community-based theatre featuring themes of social justice.

Cornerstone took her to small theatres from Maine to Nevada, where she would join local ensembles. Brenneman found herself drafting off the energy and immediacy of every theatre, thriving on the unique experience each evening’s performance delivered.

“I love all my art forms evenly,” she said. “Comparing watercolors and sculptures, they’re two different art forms. You can compare them, but it’s dopey. There’s intimacy and freedom, a reach, a record of it all—all sorts of things you can do with each form.

“But theatre is my mother tongue.”

Which, in more ways than one, makes her a natural to play Miriam—more widely known as the Virgin Mary. Portraying the original Jewish mother on stage provided Brenneman an opportunity she couldn’t turn down. Even as she continues work on her Hulu series, “The Old Man” with Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow, necessitating trips between the San Fernando Valley and Costa Mesa.

After doing a few readings of Burgess’ play, The Niceties, on Martha’s Vineyard, Brenneman was familiar with the playwright’s work, which spans a spectrum of topics, but provides an intelligent, I-did-not-know-that element in each. Burgess’ phrase-turning, character-developing versatility is such that her agent has begged her to “pick a lane and stay in it.” Brenneman found Burgess’ work in this lane so engaging, she wrote the playwright a fan letter.

“I think this writer is a knockout. It’s a really, really hard thing to do to have every character’s point of view be valid,” she said. “The sign of a good play is you get convinced by either side. There’s not a clear-cut winner. … I wanted this writer to know her words are really affecting people. After I wrote her a letter, we got into a conversation.”

This led to Brenneman’s theatre agent getting an early script of Galilee, 34. The moment Brenneman read it, she was hooked. This was artistic catnip to a person who was Comparative Religion major at Harvard and immediately relatable to a person who grew up with a Jewish mother and Episcopalian father in a non-religious—but heavily service-oriented—household.

After reading the part of Miriam in a January workshop at SCR, Brenneman was offered the role.

“This play is amazing. I thought it was breathtakingly bold, both in its imaginative vision, but also Eleanor is my kind of gal. She writes this with humanity. The confidence of her scholarship and the confidence of her love for the character is very grounded. When I do this play, I’m right where I should be.

“When I read the script last fall, I thought it was a knockout. First of all, my brain exploded with things like James the Just and understanding what Miri says at the beginning of Scene 2. I read noted religion scholar and author Reza Aslan’s book, Zealot, which illustrates that Jesus didn’t come out of nowhere. He was born into a time and place and knowing that time and place is super helpful. This play is not a treatise. It’s not a soapbox. It’s a family play.”

That’s how Burgess wrote Galilee, 34. But en route to getting her arms around the role and give herself a refresher, so to speak, Brenneman spent her time driving from the Valley to SCR listening to religious podcasts.

“The things I found were, for me, upsetting. They were talking about how Miriam embodies the total submission to the will of her father,” Brenneman said. “I saw this as one reason women don’t have autonomy over their bodies. I found myself weeping in the car.

“There are two archetypes here. You have Mary Magdalene, a prostitute and Mary, the Mother, who is a virgin. I think the concept of reclamation is such a powerful idea—what Jesus, himself, embodied in his life—this beautiful uneasiness between divinity and humanity.”

It’s that “beautiful uneasiness” that Brenneman channels throughout. C.P. Smith in the Orange County Register described Brenneman’s portrayal as “thoughtfully developed.” Joel Beers in Stage Raw wrote that Brenneman plays Miriam with “equal parts world-weary grief and balls of steel.”

It’s not easy playing the subject of paintings, mosaics, tapestries and statues, taking her down from her perch and bringing that “beautiful uneasiness between divinity and humanity” to the stage nightly. But Brenneman loves the humanity of portraying a woman who embodied service, sacrifice and selflessness. That she gets to do it on stage, in her “mother tongue” of theatre, makes the experience more rewarding on every level.

“I think about my parents a lot. I don’t think of Jewish traditions, but my parents both embodied what divine will looks like in the world,” she said, talking about her mother as the second female judge in the state of Connecticut and her father as an environmental lawyer. “Usually, it looks like helping out. When I became an actress, I thought, ‘How can my vocation do good in the world—or not do harm.’ Miriam is a clear line for that.”