Wisconsin native Heidi Armbruster harvests memories of her farmer father in 'Scarecrow'

Milwaukee audiences have already met Heidi Armbruster the actor.

Now it's time to meet Heidi, the Wisconsin farmer's daughter.

"The thing about manure is you can’t ever really wash the smell out from clothes," Armbruster's namesake declares in "Scarecrow," a gut-punching comedy shot through with grief.

In "Scarecrow," Armbruster relives the last 33 days of her cancer-stricken father's life — with occasional escapes into fantasies about related Hallmark movies she could be cast in (such as the one where she meets Sexy Cancer Dude).

It's a one-actor show, but Armbruster plays a variety of characters, including her sometimes challenging father and two of his late-life girlfriends, whom Heidi has to keep separate from each other.

Next Act Theatre's production of "Scarecrow," directed by Laura Gordon, runs from Feb. 21 through March 17.

'I forget to eat when I'm acting'

Milwaukee theatergoers met Armbruster last season, when she played major roles in Milwaukee Repertory Theater's "Wife of a Salesman" and "God of Carnage." Her substantial acting career also includes performing in the off-Broadway production of "Disgraced," Brookfield Central graduate Ayad Akhtar's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, as well as film ("Michael Clayton") and TV ("Daredevil") roles.

"Scarecrow," which premiered in 2022 at the Dorset Theatre Festival in Vermont, is not the first play she's written. It's not even the first play she's written about a version of her father — that would be "Dairyland," which North Carolina's Playmakers Repertory Company debuted in 2019.

So, how much of "Scarecrow" is literally true?

"About 80 percent," Armbruster said in a recent interview. But as she continues to develop the play, the percentage is going down, she added.

The first year after her father's death, Armbruster resisted saying anything that was "not nice" about the father character. She used to think of "Scarecrow" as "a play about a woman who uses humor to process grief." But she has come to see it more as "a play about a woman who is trying desperately to get her father to be proud" of her, Armbruster said.

Born in 1938, James Armbruster, her father, grew up on a dairy farm in Ozaukee County and made his name in the world of cattle. From 1983 through 1997, he was dairy herd manager for the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Dairy Science department.

Heidi considers her childhood farm-adjacent. She lived in town, but went to Waunakee Community High School at a time when some people still drove their tractors to school.

She went to UW on an agricultural journalism scholarship but eventually graduated as an English major. Former UW professor Norma Saldivar stoked Armbruster's interest in theater and encouraged her on to graduate school at the American Conservatory Theater program in San Francisco.

Armbruster still half-assumed she'd go on to law school one day, but working with actors made her realize where her happiness could be found.

The clincher: "I forget to eat when I'm acting," she said.

After her mother's death in 2007, Armbruster, brimming with feelings, signed up for a weekly playwriting class, which Armbruster said "was less expensive than therapy." Writing, too, became a thing that made her forget about eating.

Wrote 'Scarecrow' on a farm outside Lodi

The COVID-19 pandemic played a role in the genesis of "Scarecrow."

Armbruster did spend the last 33 days of her father's life with him here in Wisconsin; he died Jan. 14, 2020, at age 81.

"We were so lucky," she said. "If we had been any further into the pandemic, we wouldn't have had that time."

She returned to her New York apartment. But when the pandemic began to devastate New York in March 2020, her brother urged her to return to Wisconsin for safety's sake. On April 1, 2020, she settled in temporarily on her late father's farm outside Lodi, with bulls of various sizes (a neighbor was keeping some bulls on their property) and successive litters of farm cats for company.

"I was living out my vet tech fantasies, deworming kittens on the regular and treating their hotspots," Armbruster wrote in a follow-up message.

Ensconced in rural Wisconsin, Armbruster joined an online writing group, working on essays about her connection with her father, her memories and her feelings. Then she saw how she could shape that material into a play.

In "Scarecrow," the Dad character gives Heidi plenty of grief. Introducing her to a nurse, he says, "That's my daughter Heidi. She's not married, no kids, and she doesn't have a job."

But the real-life Armbruster told a Rutland, Vermont, newspaper this about her father: "Of all the dairy farmers in the entire state of Wisconsin, maybe the whole world, that man has seen more off-Broadway theater.” The elder Armbruster drove from Wisconsin to North Carolina to see the premiere of her play "Dairyland," and drove to Vermont for another play by his daughter, "Mrs. Christie."

The Armbruster family has since sold her father's farm to a neighbor. For the time being, Heidi is living in Milwaukee.

If you go

Next Act Theatre performs Heidi Armbruster's "Scarecrow" Feb. 21-March 17 at 255 S. Water St. For tickets, visit nextact.org or call (414) 278-0765.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Heidi Armbruster portrays Wisconsin farmer's daughter in 'Scarecrow'