With apologies to Neil Diamond, Erin Schmidt is about to become a Kentucky woman.
Schmidt, an Emporia State University theater graduate, will begin acting with the Kentucky Repertory Theatre this August. The 31-year-old theater company is based out of Horse Cave, Ky., and is considered to be a significant tourist attraction for the town and the area.
Not bad for a girl who didn’t even think about acting until high school.
“We had a really great teacher named Les Burns,” said Schmidt, who attended Ottawa High School before coming to ESU. “I learned a lot from him and decided that when I got to college, I wanted to keep on doing it. ... I just enjoyed it so much I couldn’t imagine not doing it.”
She decided to declare a theater major at ESU. And then the questions started coming, mostly from family. Questions like “What do you think you’re going to do with that?” and “Where will you go when you give up and get a job?”
Schmidt didn’t really have an answer. Not least because she still couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
“When you say you’re a theater major, everyone assumes you want to be a big star, all that sort of thing,” she said. “You can find jobs. You may not be making millions with a Broadway production, but if you want to work, there are jobs.”
Schmidt got a crash course in that when going to the Midwest Theatre Auditions last February. They’re held each year in St. Louis, a gigantic open audition attended by a number of regional theater companies. It’s a great opportunity for a young actor to break in and find a job.
As it happened, Schmidt found two. She recently wrapped up the first one, a month-long run with the Great Plains Theater Festival in Abilene, performing the comedy “Noises Off.”
Job number two, of course, was Kentucky. The KRT’s artistic director, Robert Brock, liked what he saw and signed her up for the next season, running from August through Dec. 23.
“It was really exciting and kind of surreal, too,” Schmidt said. “I didn’t know if he was serious.”
As a repertory theater, the KRT uses the same company to put on a rapid-fire series of shows. This year, it includes productions such as George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” an adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” and the Holocaust drama “And Then They Came for Me.”
Schmidt’s first familiar part with the company comes in “And Then They Came For Me,” where she plays Anne Frank. The show runs Aug. 31 through Oct. 26.
But it’s not exactly a life of ease and line readings. In addition to research and rehearsals, Schmidt said she will probably be working in the costume shop, the box office and just about everywhere else. She gets Mondays off, but the rest of the week is all work.
“It’s similar to what we did at college,” she said. “You do a little bit of everything.”
ESU was excellent training for this, she said, not least because of the faculty. Schmidt started to name theater professors that had been mentors, then found herself naming virtually everyone: Theresa Mitchell, Jim Bartruff, Jim Ryan and more.
Now that she’s got her first season in Kentucky nailed down, she’s really hoping for a second one.
“I’m young and if I’m going to do something like this, I might as well do it now,” she said. “If worse comes to worse, I can be a waitress for a while.”
Details of the Kentucky Repertory Theatre’s season can be found at www.kentuckyrep.org. The box office can be reached by calling 1-800-342-2177.