Keep an Eye On: Liz Sklar by / Sam Hurwitt

It’s become a rueful joke among local actors: If you want to get cast in the Bay Area, move to New York. That’s what happened to Liz Sklar—but not through New York casting for the larger regional theatres. Shortly after the Marin-bred actress got her MFA from American Conservatory Theater in 2009 and went off to Brooklyn, she started to get offered parts on visits home, leading to her playing a magnetic Masha in Marin Theatre Company’s "Seagull" in February and giving a stunning performance in E. Hunter Spreen’s "Care of Trees" for Shotgun Players in May.

"'Seagull' was a complete coincidence," Sklar says in the lobby at Marin, where she returned in October to perform in Steve Yockey’s "Bellwether." "I was visiting my parents at the time that they were doing callbacks, and [artistic director] Jasson [Minadakis] was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you come in for this?’ And then Susannah Martin, who I’d worked with in graduate school—she was doing 'Care of Trees.' She’d found out I was going to be here and she called me up."

Now Sklar’s local again. She and her husband, Matthew Purdon, moved to San Francisco a few months ago, and after "Bellwether" she’ll be back at MTC in March to play Emilia in "Othello."

"We moved to New York because I had just graduated from ACT and there was an agency interested in me there," Sklar says. "And my husband’s company had just sold, so we were both like, 'Well, let’s go see what happens.' So we went off and had a fabulous time. But I had been getting cast out here, and my husband got a job in the area, so we decided to come back. My parents also live here in Marin, so that was another draw."

Sklar was born in Denver but her parents moved to Marin County when she was one, so she counts herself a native. She grew up in Lucas Valley and Kentfield, and since she was a little kid all she wanted to do was act.

"I was about 10 years old and had been watching all the plays at my school, and you weren’t allowed to audition until you were in fourth grade," she recalls. "So I was desperate; I did a horrible audition. You had to do a nursery rhyme, and I whispered, I was shrunken, I was a mess. And so I got a mess of a part. I was an alien at the bar in 'Revenge of the Space Pandas,' and I was in one scene. The night of the performance the curtains didn’t work, so they never actually opened to reveal me. I was very upset about this, having waited to be in a play this whole time."

Not to be deterred, Sklar came right back for the next audition. "I was a very determined girl, and I decided that obviously I didn’t do the right thing in the last audition, so this time I was going to do the opposite," she says. "So I yelled my nursery rhyme as loud as I could: 'MY NAME IS LIZ SKLAR, AND I WILL TAKE ANY PART! MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB...' Then I got two parts. My teacher was really amazing and inspired us to make really big choices, which was fabulous for a kid who was a little shy."

Sklar’s first performance at MTC was at 13, in a summer program with that same instructor, Peter Meyer. She was also in ACT’s Young Conservatory. But mostly, she says, "I was in every single play in school. I just decided this is all I want to do. I don’t care what else happens; I’m taking every drama class, doing every play and figuring out every way that I can make this my career."

She got her BA from Brown University, and met her husband when both were cast in the first show she did when she came back to the Bay Area, "The Foreigner" at Ross Valley Players. After a few years around the Bay Area teaching, acting and waiting tables, she went into the MFA program at ACT. "I expected to go get a lot of tools that I would have in my back pocket," she says. "And I left there knowing myself and knowing that the tools were already there." While at ACT, she moonlighted in a 2009 film by Rob Nilsson called "Imbued" with Stacy Keach. "I would get up at 7 in the morning, go to class until 5 or 6, and then I’d go to the set and film until 4 or 5 in the morning, and then wake up the next day and do it all over again," she says.

In her two years in New York, Sklar did a lot of Shakespeare with small companies, plum roles like Titania, Lady Macbeth and Casca in an all-female "Julius Caesar." Now she’s teaching Shakespeare to middle school students in Marin City through an MTC artist-in-residence program that will lead to the kids seeing her in "Othello" in the spring. In the meantime she’s featured in "Becky Shaw" at SF Playhouse, opening in late January. After "Othello" her dance card’s currently open, she says, because "I’d been assuming I would be in New York and that I wouldn’t be available for lots of things. So I’m just now starting to put my feelers out."

Sam Hurwitt is editor-in-chief for Theatre Bay Area. He is also the author of The Idiolect, a blog about theater, movies, comics, media and the decline and fall of Western civilization.