Interview: Greta Oglesby of FANNIE: THE MUSIC AND LIFE OF FANNIE LOU HAMER at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley Has Clearly Found Her Calling

Much like the civil rights activist she portrays in the title role of Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, actor Greta Oglesby knows what it's like to have a calling. Years ago, while happily working as an accountant in what she thought was her "dream job," she happened to see a casting notice for a local theatre company. She auditioned on a lark, was promptly given a role in the show, and suddenly found herself immersed in a whole new world. Once she discovered theatre's ability to change people's lives, she knew she had her calling. She has since played countless roles at top theaters all over the country, including her acclaimed performance in the title role of Caroline, or Change at the Guthrie Theatre, several seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Aunt Esther in August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean last year at TheatreWorks.

Fannie reunites Oglesby with Gem's director Tim Bond in this stirring musical play about the famed civil rights activist. Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer was written by award-winning playwright Cheryl L. West, known for Akeelah and the Bee, Before It Hits Home and Jar the Floor. It traces Hamer's inspiring gospel journey to justice, from sharecropper to co-founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and becoming an outspoken voice for African American voting rights. Featuring songs such as "This Little Light of Mine" and "We Shall Not Be Moved," it is also intended to serve as a rousing call to action that invites audiences to rise up and do their part to fight for what's right.

I caught up with Oglesby by phone earlier this week just hours before she was to perform Fannie before an invited audience for the first time. If the Minneapolis-based actor was at all nervous about that, she certainly didn't show it. We talked about the life of Fannie Lou Hamer, Oglesby's unlikely path to becoming an actor, why she believes theatre is her true calling, and the roles she holds dearest to her heart. Oglesby is the easiest person in the world to talk to - warm, open, down-to-earth and with an infectious laugh. I got the impression she is someone who very much knows who she is in this world and loves nothing more than the opportunity to connect with other people. The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I'm familiar with the name Fannie Lou Hamer as a civil rights icon, but I don't really know much about the woman herself. How much did you know about her before you were cast in the role?

I'm gonna have to say the same thing. I knew the name Fannie Lou Hamer, I knew she did something for civil rights, but I didn't really know her story. Once I got cast in this, I started doing research and I was like "Wow! Why didn't I know more about this amazing woman?" I think what happened in the civil rights era is that the men were lifted up. Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers, we knew those names and what they did for their life's work, but women like Fannie Lou Hamer? You kind of knew their name, but you didn't know much about them.

But she was so instrumental in getting voting rights passed in this country and she was a real warrior. She was a civil rights worker, but she really just did so much for human rights. I was just floored when I started doing the research by her courageousness and what she went through as an individual. It's not easy work, it's not fun work, but this woman had a calling on her life, and a calling is different than just having a job that you go to every day. There has to be something about the work that you cannot not get up and do it the next day.

And she was relentless about it. There were threats on her life and on her family's lives, but she never let that stop her. Until the day she died, she was doing this work, and I have fallen in love with this woman, I really have. When audiences come out to see it, I think they'll fall in love with her, too, and then go home and do their own research about her. I just think that everybody needs to know who Fannie Lou Hamer was.

As an actor, it can be a challenge to find the human being behind the icon. What she was like just as a person?

She was really charismatic, a person you were just kind of drawn to. She reminds me of my aunts. I grew up around these Black women who were all from the South, from Arkansas, but the family migrated to Chicago. She reminds me of every one of my aunts, so she was someone very familiar to me, and familial in a way. She had that warmth about her and a strength about her. So I think that folks will really be drawn in by her and her story.

But like you said, she was an icon and those characters are tough to play. You've really got to do your research because you don't want to portray her in a way that is inauthentic. This play is being done all over the country and her family members have been coming to see the show, so you don't want to get it wrong. I want to be true to her and who she was, to honor her in the way she needs to be honored.

The play includes a lot of music. How does Cheryl L. West incorporate that into her script?

Yes, it's got a lot of the civil rights and freedom songs - there's maybe 13 or 14 of them infused into this script, and Cheryl has done such a great job with that. They have a really great documentary right now on PBS about Fannie Lou Hamer that I watched, and so much of it is exactly the words that I'm saying. Cheryl took some artistic license, but a lot of it is just straight from transcripts, and she's done a beautiful job with that and weaving in these songs that are so soul-stirring. I was telling someone yesterday, "I think when audiences leave, they will feel like they've been to church." They really will because some of those songs are so life-giving. I think people will also leave inspired, and I hope they'll think "What can I do to make a difference?"

You did a run of this show at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival last fall. What is it like to have a chance to have another go at the role?

It's great - the show is so different for me now. At Oregon Shakes, I did it on their huge Elizabethan Stage and I had to fill that stage. What Cheryl West wrote includes a lot of projections and on that outside stage we couldn't have any projections, so I didn't have them as a backdrop to help immerse the audience in the story. I'm just so glad, this [run] is inside in the Lucie Stern, and you get to experience the projections. It adds so much to the story and really helps to immerse the audience inside the world of this woman, so it's a richer, deeper experience for me now.

I'm always glad when I can come back to a character a second, or even a third, time. I approach it like it's a new piece and it's a fresh experience, and I get another opportunity to go deeper and peel back some of the layers on who the character is.

This show is not the first time you've been directed by Tim Bond, who also serves at TheatreWorks' Artistic Director.

No, Tim and I go way back! Oh my gosh, Tim and I met in, I think it was probably 2003. He was in my city, Minneapolis, casting a show called Crowns, and I ended up getting cast in the show. At that time, he was the Associate Artistic Director at Oregon Shakes and they were doing Ma Rainey's Black Bottom the next season. Somewhere in the rehearsal process [for Crowns], He said, "Would you be interested in coming out to do Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at Oregon Shakes?" And I said, "Absolutely!" That was my first time out at Oregon Shakes in 2005, and I've been back and forth ever since. I love, love, love Oregon Shakes, love working there. It's another place that feels like home to me.

So, yeah, so that's how far Tim and I go back. And I did some work also for him when he was Artistic Director up in Syracuse [at Syracuse Stage], so I've just been following him all around the country. [laughs] I'm so happy when he calls. I come running; I just do.

How would you describe your process for working together?

Well, I trust him so much. Tim has such an eye for detail, and to me it's the little things that really make something beautiful and exquisite. Tim just has an eagle eye and we were laughing about it the other day in rehearsal. There was a couple of tiny things that I missed that nobody else even picked up on, but Tim was like "Oh, Greta, the little blah-blah-blah..." and I was like "I can't believe you saw that!" [laughs] He's just very meticulous and lifting things up and bringing things off of the page that sometimes even as actors we don't see, and we go "Oh, right! Absolutely that's what that should be."

I did Gem of the Ocean with him last season and - oh my gosh! - it was a show I just wanted to buy a ticket and come to see. But of course, I couldn't. [laughs] It was such an extraordinary piece of work, thanks to Tim Bond who has just a Midas touch with bringing plays alive.

What is currently your own personal favorite moment in the show?

Well, I think maybe my most favorite moment is when they are on a bus and she starts this rousing number. Cause everywhere she went, at every one of her rallies, there was always singing, and she'd let you know "Now I hope you guys don't mind, but I always sing at my rallies so you might as well get ready to sing along with me."

But they were on a bus and she started singing her favorite song, "This Little Light of Mine," and she says somewhere in the show, "Honey, we rocked that bus." So that's probably my favorite moment in the show. She gets everybody on the bus singing and a lot of times the audience starts to sing with her, because it's a song that everybody kind of knows.

You understudied the role of Lena Younger in A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway in that amazing 2004 revival with Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald and Sean Combs. Did you ever get to go on?

I never got to go on, and that's the way I wanted it. Because when you're on Broadway and you've got a big name in the show, those people were coming to see Phylicia Rashad, they were not coming to see Greta Oglesby. Sean Combs - he was Puff Daddy at the time - was playing Walter Lee Younger, and the first night the audience found out Sean wasn't on and they announced his understudy, oh my God did those people boo, and some people got up and walked out. So I was just tickled pink that I could be there to watch Phylicia every night, and she was incredible every night. When she got the Tony, I thought "well deserved." You do have some understudies who are chomping at the bit to go on, but I never wanted to get that call saying "Hey, Phylicia's out tonight. You're on - suit up!"

Your most acclaimed performance to date is possibly the title role in Caroline, or Change at the Guthrie. That's one of my all-time favorite roles, and shows, in the musical theatre, but it's a really tricky part because Caroline is, shall we say, not the most instantly likable person.

This is true, this is true.

She doesn't have a charm song at the beginning to get the audience on her side, she's not sweet-natured. What was it like to actually play her and go through that journey night after night?

It was really incredible. When I first got the role, I thought "Oh my God, can I really do this? Do I have what it takes to do this every single night?" [laughs] But I fell in love with Caroline. Not a lot of roles I just fall in love with, but Caroline was one. I loved making the journey every night because you can tell the audience is on the ride with you. At the beginning you kind of have no idea if you even like her, but she wins you over. She has a breakthrough and the audience sees that and feels it, and then she has them in the palm of her hand after that. It's a really tough but beautiful journey for an actor to go through and to take that ride every night was just one of the most delicious roles that I have ever had.

That was a role that I also did with Tim. He asked me to come up to Syracuse and do it there as well, and it was just as delicious with a different cast and everything. And about six months after that, a box arrived to my house in Minneapolis and I was like "What is this?" Anyway, there was a note inside saying I had won Actress of the Year award for whatever their awards are out there, I was like "Oh - my - God!" [laughs] Just icing on the cake for that show I loved so much.

As a working actor in the theatre, what is the best part of your job? Like what are those moments when you think "I can't believe I get to do this for a living?"

You know, it's really just kind of all of it. And I tell this to people all the time. Like in the summer I head up this theatre camp called Camp Capri, a 5-week immersive theatre camp for inner-city kids. The kids always say, "What advice can you give me about being an actor?" And I say, "Well, first you've gotta love it. You can't get into it for any other reason than that. You can't get into theatre thinking 'I want to be famous.' Or 'I want to live in Hollywood.' You have to love it."

I mean, my husband always says that I'm really married to theatre and not him. [laughs] Because he says for me it's all consuming. (It's not!) [laughs]) But you know I think I just love all of it. My husband is a pastor in the United Methodist Church, has been for 32 years now, so he's got a calling on his life. And I have a calling on my life. Theatre is my sanctuary.

I was an accountant before I started doing theatre and I just kind of stumbled into this by reading an audition notice on break sitting in city hall. The Chicago Theatre Company was looking for six African-American women who could sing gospel, and I thought "Well, I'(M) Black and I sing gospel so I should go for this." I went to the audition, got this part and - Lord a'mercy! - I just thought "Where has this been all my life?" Here I was living my dream, because I always wanted to be an accountant, went away and got my finance degree and was working for the City of Chicago as an accountant, and stumbled into acting and found it to be something that I just could not live without. I started doing it full-time after about 15 years because my husband got an appointment in Minneapolis and I had to quit my day job. It's been one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

I just love everything about theatre. I love all of it. And I tell kids if you find something in life that you love to do and somebody pays you to do it, most days it doesn't feel like work. This almost never feels like work to me. People ask me, "When are you gonna retire?" and I'm like "Retire from what?" If I were an accountant I would be retired by now, because that was a grind, you know gettin' up at 6:00, tryin' to get downtown by 8:00. But this? I say the day I stop loving this is when I'll retire.

You have such an eclectic resume as an actor. You've done a ton of Shakespeare, lots of August Wilson, lots of contemporary theatre, even some Neil Simon. Out of all the roles you've played onstage, which one do you hold closest to your heart?

[replies instantly] OK, there's two. Can I give you two?

Sure! And I love that you had an answer right away.

It is Caroline from Caroline, or Change and it is Aunt Esther from Gem of the Ocean. Those two, top.

Can you explain why?

Well, Caroline was such a phenomenal experience. Again, this is a calling for me so I love to be in a production where somebody is moved or changed in some way. I can't tell you how many people I ran into or waited for me after a Caroline show and said, "Thank you for changing my life." I cannot tell you how many times I heard that, and I just thought "Oh, my God." So it was just that kind of experience for me. And I've had that as well with Gem of the Ocean. People would wait for me after the show to say how much they were moved. I mean, they were weeping.

I love being a part of theatre like that. That's what keeps me comin' back, when I know I'm a part of something that is that life-giving.

(photos by Meika Ejiasi)

Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer runs through April 2, 2023 at Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. For tickets and more information, visit TheatreWorks.org or call (877)-662-8978.