The Year of Tami Workentin

One Of Milwaukee’s Busiest Artists Talks Acting, Playwrighting And Other Creative Endeavors

Tami Workentin returns to Next Act as the character Marty in CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg: in the 2025-26 season, she will appear in Next Act’s production of SWING STATE, and alongside her husband James Pickering in her self-written GEORGE & GRACIE: A LOVE STORY at Milwaukee Rep (among other projects!) We sat down with Tami to see how she’s getting ready for a busy year of theatre.

What excites you about CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION?

[Playwright Annie Baker] has a style to her. CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION has pauses, and silences, and long pauses – you’re given rules for how that applies. You have to log where silences or pauses are, and you also have to take the pearls with you – “what is your storytelling in that area?” We often sit in a circle, so who’s going to see what? So, as an audience member, you may walk away with different takes on the individual stories.

What’s also important is that it’s not a movie. You’ve got to know what’s going on in my head. There’s got to be a tell theatrically.

What I love about this play is that everybody comes with a need. Marty comes with a need because she’s wanted to do this course for years. I can imagine her looking up her Viola Spolin games. Then, she’s going to have an expectation for how she thinks it goes over, so she’s going to have successes and disappointments along the way. But then you have these other characters walk in, only one of which really has any theatre experience, because it’s in a community center with adult actors. And adults stepping into an education setting is always scary because you wonder if you can still learn something, and you have no idea what’s going to be asked of you. You have all these different people discover something about themselves. What I love is that they come in, and they change when they leave. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

It’s also a really smart, creative group of people. It’s going to be something very different than what I’ve ever done in my career. It’s not for the faint of heart. What will look very simple will have had a lot of talking and thought process going through it. It’s truly an ensemble piece; I love that. It’s Marty’s play insomuch that she teaches the class, but it’s a story about everybody.

I loved the premise of a woman teaching an adult drama class at a community center: when you say that to me, my little brain goes, “how fun would that be!?”

And then you’re back at Next Act next season playing Peg in SWING STATE. What drew you to that project?

What I love about it is that the title suggested something different than what the play turns out to be. I love the idea of this woman at a hinge moment in her life – that’s when the best playwriting happens. She’s really questioning what her lineage is going to be. She’s lost her husband, she has no children, and their relationship to the land in the Driftless region is about keeping all of the native plants there. That’s cool. The Driftless region is such an interesting area in Wisconsin. There are a lot of artists out there.

I love that she was an educator and that she is looking to pass on [her knowledge] to this guy who hasn’t found his landing yet. How that has become an important relationship to her. The young cop comes into the show and they realize that they’d been teacher and student. She has an adversarial relationship with the other cop because [that cop is part of] the farm family that’s threatening [my character’s] land. We’re all feeling different things that way. I come from a family of farmers. It’s fascinating.

I also love that this play takes off in another direction that you don’t expect it to go. It will surprise you. It’s fun. Rebecca Gilman’s a great playwright, and she lives in the Driftless region, so how wonderful that this play would be done in Wisconsin.

You’re doing both CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION and SWING STATE with Elyse Edelman. Have you worked much with her otherwise?

We knew each other in passing. We kind of decided we needed to get to know one another, so I went to her house for cocktails and hula hooping. And I would like to say that I am the key to how she has conquered the hula hoop. I would like that in print.

Tell us about GEORGE & GRACIE: A LOVE STORY. How did that come to be?

I looked at Jim and I, and I thought, “we are like George [Burns] and Gracie [Allen].” I really felt like I wanted to write something for us. Certainly as you get older, those roles diminish, particularly for women. I watched other people take a hold of that. It’s interesting, because when you’re 63, you decide at a point whether to settle into what you know and let that be, or do you say to yourself, “why don’t I try something that might scare me?” My idea in my head wasn’t that I would fail, my idea in my head was that I would succeed.

I have a colleague named Wolfe Bowart from SpoonTree Productions. He is a physical comedian. And I reached out to him, and I said, “I have this idea.” I’ve always wanted to find a way to work together.

GEORGE & GRACIE is about words. Wolfe’s work is about not using words. [I wondered] how can these marry? He said, “if you had to do an elevator pitch, how would you do an elevator pitch to, say, a 7-year-old, a 20-year-old, a 40-year-old and a 70-year-old?” Because the 7-year-old won’t know who Gracie is, neither will the 20-year-old and maybe [not] a lot of 40-year-olds.

When you write about biographies, you can be stuck in the world of biography. And you’re tethered too tightly to it, feeling as if you can only tell that story. You can’t go off on “what-ifs.” I thought, what if I write about the perspective of George going on stage the first time after Gracie died as a single performer? Now, historically, he went on to perform with other people while she was still alive. Doesn’t matter. Now, I can make this shit up. Very little is written about Gracie’s inner monologue, what she thinks, outside of what George writes about her. So, I have to make some of that up.

I wanted to write a love story because I’m involved in a love story. My marriage is the second time around for both of us. It’s a celebration of partnership. How do you make a marriage last? Not only did [George and Gracie] make a marriage last, they also worked together. And when the question is, “how did they make a marriage last?” George says, “it was about, ‘is the soup hot?’ We said please and thank you. We liked one another. We respected one another.” If it’s too much work, then it becomes a job. Who wants that? I want to celebrate marriage. I want to celebrate it.

This is an event on a night that doesn’t ask a lot of you. It’s sweet. It’s funny.

Tickets are now on sale for CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION by Annie Baker. Call (414) 278-0765 or buy online now!

For more Tami, check out Next Act Theatre’s and the Milwaukee Rep’s 2025-26 seasons!