Jennifer Grace on Being the Toast of the Town as Emily Webb

Age: “Slightly older than Emily.”

Hometown: Herington, Kansas

Currently: Entering her second year as feisty Emily Webb in the acclaimed off-Broadway revival of Our Town.

Small-Town Girl: A military kid, Grace spent her high school years in a Kansas town much like Thornton Wilder’s fictional village. “The population is almost the same as Grover’s Corners, and the town is quite similar,” she says. At 14, she won her first acting role: Cleopatra in a high school extravaganza called When Shakespeare’s Ladies Meet. “Oh gosh, it was terrible!” she says with a laugh. “All of Shakespeare’s heroines were sitting around giving Juliet advice about Romeo. My mother made a toga costume for me out of a yellow satin sheet, with gold party hats on the breastplate. Awful!” And yet as Grace stood backstage listening to Cleopatra’s sexy entrance music, she remembers thinking, “This is a great way to live.”

Windy City Interlude: After earning a theater degree from Kansas State, Grace headed to Chicago, where she joined the Hypocrites, one of the city’s thriving small theater companies. “Sometimes I have regrets about not trying to go to school in New York,” she says now, “but knowing how shy I was, I think the city would have eaten me alive.” Chicago proved to be the perfect place to “fall in love with the work and not worry about the business. I’m so proud of everything I did there.” Her roles at Hypocrites ranged from the Angel in Angels in America to Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, then director David Cromer asked her tackle an icon of the American theater: Emily in Our Town.

Emily Invincible: “You’re crazy!” That, says Grace, was her reaction to being cast as Emily Webb, who goes from senior class secretary/treasurer to newlywed to the Grover’s Corners cemetery in less than 10 years. “I thought of the play as a sepia-toned, folksy piece of Americana that wasn’t applicable to my experience,” she says of Our Town. “But everything I thought is not in the text.” Cromer’s unsentimental production allows Emily to emerge as a super-bright young woman, “maybe a feminist before the word existed,” Grace says. “She talks about wanting to be a speechwriter and a speechmaker, and she’s interested in math and science and history. The scenes she has with her father, the one person she knows who had a life outside this little town, are really interesting to me. But the fact that she fell in love and changed her idea of who she would grow up to be is not necessarily bad.”

Love & Marriage, Onstage and Off: Our Town won raves in Chicago, which quickly led to a transfer to NYC’s Barrow Street Theatre, where James McMenamin joined the cast as Emily’s true love George Gibbs. “James and I are similar to our characters, which makes our approach to falling in love interesting because he and I are so different,” she says with a laugh. “I see James as a guy who would never have given me a second look in high school. He’s tall and athletic and good looking, and I was more bookish and weird. That dance of two people who didn’t think they had common ground—then realize they’re attracted to each other—is fun to play.” In real life, Grace married actor Tom Bateman just before moving to New York and spent most of her newlywed year traveling back and forth from Chicago, where he had a day job. “He was the first to say, ‘You have to go to New York [with Our Town]. We’ll figure it out.’” And they did: Bateman relocated last fall to launch his career anew in NYC.

A Helluva Town: Though she adored Chicago, Grace says New York is the place to be “if you want to make a living at acting,” and she revels in the city’s 24/7 street life. “I’m a small-town kid from Kansas, where diversity was being able to drive to Wichita and go to the Mexican restaurant,” she jokes. “Chicago is diverse, but it has nothing on New York. I love the vibrancy and colliding of cultures here. There’s not a day when I don’t see a person or interaction that’s completely fascinating. And you don’t have to spend money to be wildly entertained in Manhattan; you just have to go out the door.” While moonlighting in an improv group at the Upright Citizens’ Brigade theater, Grace is perfectly content to continue her run in Our Town. “I’ll stay until I stop loving it—and right now, I love it a lot.”