Keep an Eye on: Sarah Mitchell by / Theatre Bay Area Staff

Sarah Mitchell has been a standout comedic performer in several plays around the Bay in the last few years, from SF Playhouse to Shotgun Players to Cutting Ball Theater. But unlike other actors who may be breaking into more and more prominent projects, she doesn’t aspire to make a career of it.  

“I was one of those nerds that knew that’s what they wanted to do when they were three,” Mitchell says at a coffee shop near where she works in the Financial District. “My parents are very quiet, private British people, and I have two older sisters who are both librarians, but my parents went to see a lot of theatre, and they still do see a ton of theatre, and I’m imagining I got into it through their interest in it as audience members. But I never wanted to be an actor for a living; I just always wanted to act. And I’d say that’s true today. I don’t want to do it for a living, but I always, always, always want to act in great shows.”

She recently finished a run in Beardo with Shotgun Players, in which she was hilarious as a peasant woman giving Rasputin a fixed glare while furiously peeling a potato. That was her third Shotgun production, after playing a dog in Jon Tracy’s Animal Farm adaptation The Farm and a blasé English professional woman who can’t be bothered with her husband’s infidelities in the Alan Ayckbourn trilogy The Norman Conquests, the three parts of which played in repertory last summer.

Although many of her roles have been characterized by intense physicality and a marvelously expressive face, Mitchell says she never had formal theatre training but just learned as she went. “I feel like everything that I’ve learned has been working with people who know more than I do and just absorbing as much as I can from them,” she says.

Aside from a number of Killing My Lobster shows, local audiences may also have seen her in Cutting Ball’s ... And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi as a 10-year-old or in SF Playhouse’s world premiere of Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party.

“That was a great example of working with people who are better than I am,” she says of the latter. “I didn’t go with them to New York because it was the summer of ’09 and the economy was horrible. And I thought asking my firm for three weeks off of work to go do a show in New York was probably a job-losing move. People asked me, “Oh, are you just killing yourself that you didn’t go?” and I’m like, “No, I’m really not.” It was wonderful that they won Best of Fringe. But I also did The Farm instead that summer, and that was great. Then I wouldn’t have worked with Shotgun for the first time, and that ended up being the best thing that’s happened to me theatrewise for the last couple years. So it worked out.”

Mitchell got into theatre at a young age, but she says she really had to go looking for it while growing up in Texas. “I look around at these programs that they have for elementary school students or high school students here where you can work at the Mountain Play or work at Berkeley Playhouse,” she says. “I grew up in suburban Houston, and we didn’t have anything like that. My mother got me signed up to do some play when I was eight or nine, but the play that I was doing, I think I had to say the word ‘fuck’ in it or something, and I was really uncomfortable and she was uncomfortable, so she pulled me out. But once I got into junior high I started doing speech and drama contests, and then just did a ton of theatre in high school.”

She went to Rice University in Houston, majoring in premed and acting in student productions. After college she started working for a recruiting firm in Houston and also started a theatre company there with a group of friends called Infernal Bridegroom Productions that’s now morphed into the Catastrophic Theatre. Eventually Mitchell moved to Seattle to work for Amazon, then San Francisco to work at Pets.com as a recruiter, then rejoined her old recruiting firm in its San Francisco office.

“I started doing theatre here in about 2002,” she says. “My first show here was a one-act with Unidentified Theatre. It was looking in the back of TBA and finding an audition listing.” She joined Killing My Lobster in 2003 and remains a company member, although she hasn’t been in their shows for a few years.

“The sketch comedy stuff was such a great fit for me at a certain point, and I feel like I’m moving into this phase that Shotgun stuff feels like a really good fit for me,” she says. “I’ve been really lucky in every show that I’ve done for the last three years has felt really important, and has been really successful. It’s been a nice streak. And I don’t like to do more than two or three shows a year. Everybody says, ‘What do you have lined up next after Beardo?’ I’m like, ‘Nothing.’ I’m going to focus on my job for a little bit and then I’m going to do the next thing that feels really juicy and hard.”