Farming Is Fixing

A Conversation with Heidi Armbruster and Bree Beelow

Heidi Armbruster’s play SCARECROW has a lot to do with farming. It follows Heidi, the playwright and solo performer of the play, returning from New York to her family’s Wisconsin dairy farm after her father’s death. Next Act’s upcoming production of SCARECROW also calls on the expertise of Assistant Director Bree Beelow (previously seen in THE REVOLUTIONISTS and THE TAMING). Bree and Heidi both have farming in their backgrounds and grew up to work in theatre, so we sat them down to talk about the journey from farm to stage – and back again.

Bree Beelow: I grew up on a beef farm, and you had the dairy farm, right?

Heidi Armbruster: Yeah. But I didn’t grow up on a farm.

BB: Right! So when did the farm happen in your life?

HA: We always were very farm adjacent. I lived on a farm when I was first born, and then we moved back to Wisconsin and we lived in a house in the suburbs like normal people. My dad got a job at the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Dairy Science. You know where they have the cows and they make the ice cream? He was the “cow guy.” That’s what he said. He had a job title that was not “cow guy,” but I always just called him that. When I would go to work with my dad, I would go to the University research farms and play with the goats and the calves and the barn cats.

And then my parents got divorced, and my dad moved to one of the UW-Extension farms. When we would go to visit him, we would go to the farm. And I was always really like, “ugh, I don’t want to go to the farm.” I was thirteen. I didn’t like anything.

And then, when he retired from the University, he bought a farm right outside of Lodi, right off the interstate. I spent a lot more time with my dad after he retired, and a lot of time on the farm. And he was doing some crazy stuff. He was doing all this crazy genetics, and you would look at it and think, “you’re doing this right now with a 2X4 and some duct tape.” Does this resonate?

BB: Oh, one hundred percent. They grab what they have and figure it out, which is my entire time growing up. “Okay, let’s make this work.”

HA: Making it work! [After my dad passed,] I lived on that farm for, like, two-ish years—and I kind of always had this experience with my dad when I would go visit—but then living on it by myself, I was like, oh my God. Everything is broken all the time.

BB: [laughing] Mm hmm.

HA: You spend, like, an entire day just fixing the shit you need in order to do the thing you set out to do. I realized, “farming is fixing.”

BB: Exactly. That resonates so much with me growing up. It was always, “oh, we need this, or we need that,” and you would go get it, and it would be broken, so we gotta fix it. I grew up on a smaller farm – it wasn’t small, but…

HA: [laughing] I love “I grew up on a smaller farm – it wasn’t small.”

BB: There’s a lot of animals on the farm, and then my dad farms around 800 acres, but all over our county, so it’s not just in one spot. But he does hay, corn, beans and pumpkins. So it’s not a small operation, but it’s just my dad, and we have two people that work for us, and my mom. So, for as much as they have to do, it’s just them to get it all done.

HA: What’s the name of the farm?

BB: Beelow Farms.

HA: And it’s in Northern Illinois?

BB: Yeah, it’s in Lake County. Do you know Six Flags Great America? We’re ten minutes from that. It used to be very rural, and obviously over the years, it’s just built up around my family’s property. There used to be a huge field in the front of our farm, and about 15-20 years ago, a Target and Home Depot were put there. Not even across the street – it butts up to our land. My dad would tell us how he would have nightmares that the cow were gonna get out and be in the Target parking lot.

HA: My dad grew up on a farm, and he and his brothers had an Armbruster Brothers farm for a really long time, and still do – in fact, my cousins are operating that farm out in Muscoda on the Western edge of the state. All my cousins are married to farmers, or are farmers, or are veterinarians. So the Armbruster family has a lot of real, actual farming in it – not adjacent, like our strain of the family.

BB: So, you didn’t do 4H or FFA [Future Farmers of America] or anything like that growing up?

HA: Not a thing! I got out of all of that because I took ballet class and did theatre.

BB: Did you ever go to the county fair just to attend?

HA: All the time. And my dad would judge the shows, and we’d spend a lot of time at those. My brothers did not take ballet class and consequently had to do 4H, and so for a couple of summers there in a row, they had to raise hogs. They raised a hog for 4H, and then they showed it at the Lodi fair. And they were really excited, I remember, one of the pigs got named Chester, and it was sold – the UW Veterinary School bought the pig, and my brother was so excited because he had gotten the most money for his pig, but he didn’t realize that it was going to be pulled pork sandwiches.

BB: [laughs] Oh no, that’s not good.

HA: It’s a farming moment.

BB: It is one hundred percent a farming moment. I still have people ask me, “how can you raise these animals and know that that’s what their fate is going to be?” And I always say, I was raised that way, I just knew that was the thing that was going to happen. It doesn’t phase me like I think it phases other people.

HA: You talk about 4H too – and county fairs.

BB: I have been showing pigs since I could walk. We had big mama pigs that we would bring to the county fair every year. The first time I showed a pig, her name was Big Wilma, and she was much bigger than me. I was showing all the way up until the pandemic. It’s something that has been super ingrained in me, this farm life, but I also did theatre, and I was in show choir, and I was doing all of that. So the summers were fair time, the summers were farm time, and then during the school year, I was doing theatre.

I was always a performer. My parents’ friends would tell me stories growing up, saying, “when you were this high, even at the fair, you would get up and start singing and try to get everybody’s attention.” I distinctly remember going out to the farm and telling jokes to the cows, and singing to the cows.

I think my parents always knew that I probably was not going to take over the family business, and they were always very supportive of that. I remember my dad saying that farming does not make him money. It’s not a lucrative business. He does it because he loves it, not because it’s going to make him a millionaire. They were always so supportive of me following my dream to be an actor.

HA: That’s very cool. It’s a little different than my story. I think my dad was mostly confused and worried, especially about the money portion of it. Probably because he was a farmer and hadn’t made a whole bunch of money. Always worrying about money.

But I don’t know that there’s another farmer in the entire state of Wisconsin that has seen as many Off-Broadway plays as Jim Armbruster saw. The man would come out and see the dumbest stuff that I was in. He drove himself to see a play that I wrote in Vermont, so he drove from Wisconsin to Vermont without stopping. He was 80!

BB: Oh my gosh. My parents are very similar. They have never missed a show that I have ever done. I think that’s another thing: the support that you get. Because community is so important in the farming world, and family is so important.

HA: That makes a lot of sense. I think with my dad too, work was so important. So, when I was working, he was less confused about what I was doing. My first job out of school was at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and he came down. And you go through the rehearsal process, and you’re rehearsing a lot during the day, an eight-hour rehearsal block. And you go through tech, and those were like 12-hour days. And then you do your show, and sometimes you only have a three-hour workday… my dad was so confused. He said, “well, can’t you get a job at Starbucks?” I’m like, “I’m only here for another three weeks, Dad.” But he was up for it. He was game.

BB: [laughs] It is very different. It’s a different life that we theatre people lead. I also have friends whose parents were farmers, and none of them followed in those footsteps. They’re all doing their own thing. How did that feel leaving that, for you?

HA: I had never met an actor, and I didn’t understand that that was a job you could do. I grew up in a small town, Waunakee – at the time, it was small. I think that my idea of an artist was feast or famine – either you were a movie star or you were a starving artist. I had never encountered that middle-class craftsman before, so I didn’t know you could be an actor. I liked acting in high school, but I thought I would be a lawyer.

So I just went to school; I didn’t really know what to do or where to go. My dad worked for the University [of Wisconsin] and he knew that there was a bunch of scholarships that went unclaimed, and I had gotten good grades, so I applied, and I went to Madison on a Land O’ Lakes Butter Scholarship as an Agricultural Journalism major. So I was taking a bunch of Economics and Journalism classes, and I was pretty miserable.

And then about halfway through the five-year plan at Madison, I started doing plays again, and thought, “oh, right. I don’t know what kind of job this is going towards, but at least I’m not miserable.” Of course, on campus where my dad worked. We would have lunch every Friday. I can imagine my dad just being like, “what am I going to do with this girl?” When I started doing plays and started getting happy again, he probably thought, “great! Anything’s better than Heidi in Chemistry.”

I had this teacher, and she was new at the time, Norma Saldivar. She had just come over to Madison, and she said, “you must train. If you want to be an actor, this is a thing you must do.” And so I went to ACT in San Francisco straight out of undergrad, and that’s when I met actors. People who were doing it. I’m thinking, “oh, I’m not going to be a lawyer after all. This is something I can pursue.” But after that initial year or two of being pretty miserable as an Ag Journalism… butter lady, I never looked back.

BB: I did go back – in the heart of the pandemic. And you do just hop back into your role. I did some other stuff – we redid their kitchen, I painted their living room and all of that… but getting into the routine of, “oh, okay, we’re going to wake up, and we’re going to head over to the farm and feed the animals, or do the garden, all of that stuff.” I did love it.

Growing up, and becoming an adult now especially, I feel like there’s two sides of me: this farm side that I connect with so deeply in my bones and live for, and this acting-theatre side of me which is very much more “city girl.” It’s hard to balance both, but I want to be able to balance both, because both made me who I am today.

HA: It’s weird. I couldn’t imagine ever coming back to Wisconsin, and then similarly in the pandemic, I was in my apartment in Brooklyn by myself and it got a little scary. My father had passed away that January, and I drove back to Wisconsin on April 1. I was there in my dad’s house on the farm all by myself, no more animals except for the ones that the neighbor was keeping there.

But I’ve always thought of farming – I’ve always thoughts of my cousins this way too, a little bit – they’re all so cool. They have kind of a superpower. I’ve always been a little jealous of being an actual farm kid. Knowing that pocket of information, having that skillset, being able to talk about those things with meaning – it does feel like a superpower that I have been adjacent to.

But being on the farm myself, I got to be with my dad after he was gone. And all of these weird… like driving the skid steer. Watching YouTube videos to figure out how to drive the skid steer. That thing was fun.

BB: You feel very powerful when you’re driving a skid steer. Did you ever get to try to drive a John Deere tractor or anything like that?

HA: The John Deere lawnmower. We had a sort of giant lawnmower, and I loved that thing. I loved it. And that was another thing [where I’d] watch YouTube videos, and it was always breaking, and I always had to be ordering belts on Amazon and replacing belts, and I tipped it, and then I would have to call the neighbor, and I would just go so fast. It was a larger-than-your-average riding mower, but let’s be real, it was a go kart in the John Deere line. I never have gotten to drive a… I can’t even imagine. You must do this all the time, because… 800 acres!?

BB: My job in the summer, I didn’t really do the planting or the combine harvesting. The main thing I did was cut and bale hay, that was my job. It’s so funny, during the summer, I always ended up getting the tractor that didn’t have a [cabin] on it, and so I would be out there, I would wear my swimsuit top and my shorts and I’d be out on the cab-less tractor with my headphones in. I remember my dad would say “you know, you should be paying me, I shouldn’t be paying you.” And I would ask, “what do you mean?” And he goes: “you’re getting a free tan, you’re getting your hair lightened for free and you’re listening to music all day!” And I’m like, “yep, okay, whatever Dad.”

HA: This is my hay baling story: my mom was an elementary school teacher, so sometimes we would get these very unique punishments. I must’ve been eight or nine and I said “shit” – I probably shouted it. I was punished to do two weeks of “hard labor.” It was probably wiping mirrors and vacuuming – I had to help with chores. But I was so good that then they told me if I went to bale hay with my dad, I could cash in my second week of “hard labor.”

I remember that day – I went with my dad to my cousins and helped bale hay. It must have been a total pain in the ass for him with this little eight-year-old kid you have to make sure doesn’t fall of the back of the trailer. But I felt so special.

There is something about that. I don’t know if it’s genetic, I don’t know if it’s something where I come from a long line of farmers on both sides of my family and there’s something that’s just literally in my DNA. Or if it’s growing up around it, and seeing it, and it feeling kind of aspirational. Or if deep down, everyone’s a farmer. There really is just something where we are that close, generationally, to our agrarian forebearers. But that feeling of working outside for 10 hours and being tired, and dirty and starving is such an exciting feeling to me.

BB: It is! It’s that accomplishment, you know? It’s that feeling of, “I did something today.”

HA: There was nothing there, and now there is. I planted something, I grew it, I ate it, I kept something alive. Accomplishment.

BB: And farmers are resilient. Shit happens, things happen, and you have to keep going. You have to figure it out.

HA: That’s interesting, that idea of resiliency. That makes a lot of sense. You just go. It’s that “end of the day” feeling. I think about my dad – it’s about being 80 and coming to see a play. He never stopped evolving.

There is something about evolving, and I don’t think we think of farmers that way. We think of people as “stuck in their ways” and “not willing to change.” I think also it’s an industry that changes as quickly as any other industry does, and you adapt or die. There’s a lot of evolution and change that happens inside of it as a part of that resiliency.

SCARECROW runs February 21 – March 17, 2024 at Next Act Theatre. For tickets, click here or call (414) 278-0765.