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Astraea Brown may be an actor by vocation, but she has an equally encompassing love for storytelling beyond the practical work of performing. The Atherton-based actor recently appeared as Elsa in Palo Alto Players’ production of “Frozen.” This summer, she appears in an altogether different role of Jane Doe, the mysterious and memoryless heroine of City Lights Theater Company’s “Ride the Cyclone,” whose search to piece together her lost self is all the more poignant.
It may be unsurprising that Brown found a career in musical theater. Her father was a drummer, and she’s been deeply tied to music ever since she was a child. After seeing her first musical when she was 10, Brown — as she puts it — “has not stopped singing since.” She found her passion for musical theater after performing in school shows and has since settled wholeheartedly into that career path.
“Ten-year-old me made a very big choice that I’ve stuck with,” Brown said. But as she’s continued with theater, her interests have grown into a broader appreciation of storytelling in all its forms.
“Entertainment as a whole is like an umbrella, and I love everything in it,” she said. “Theater is one of those things — it’s my favorite. But I feel like any way to tell a story is just something I adore.”
Brown is drawn to stories themselves, whether she’s performing or following her other creative interests offstage, including drawing, animation, writing and set-making. It’s storytelling, she says, that ties together those seemingly disparate interests. “Leaning into the storytelling of whatever you are doing is the way that it all smashes together for me,” she said.
Brown has a habit of “collecting” characters to make sense of their stories — it’s a rigorous process where she maps out all facets of a character, trying to understand their temperaments and how they move through the world. Preparing for a role often means filling pages with extensive notes of their imagined habits, speech patterns, postures and personal quirks.
“I like to try to figure out if there’s anything that reminds me of something else, because usually my brain loves comparing things,” Brown said. “I love finding things that match together. If I find four inspirations for a character — and that’s how I draw where I play them from — it makes it a lot easier than just hoping that something will happen as soon as I’m put on the spot.”
But when she’s mapping out characters with whom she has little in common, her process is different and more inventive. Rather than working directly from the script alone, Brown may create an entirely new character who resembles the role she’s trying to understand.
This meticulous character-mapping may seem unusual for a genre as larger-than-life and “out there” as musical theater, with its flights of spectacle and suspension of realism. But that makes its emotional groundedness even more important to Brown, whose goal is to ensure that audiences are invested.
“I feel like with musicals especially, there is a grandioseness to it,” Brown said. “You’re very much already taking people out of realism — but even though there is that magicalness and ungroundedness of bursting into song and dance, you have to make the character still feel real, and have the audience root for them and relate.”
This search to ground one’s audience emotionally is especially important in “Ride the Cyclone,” which has a premise that is anything but conventional. The musical follows six teenagers killed in a roller-coaster accident who are offered a chance to return to life. The show takes place in a limbo space in the afterlife, somewhere between life and death. Brown plays the show’s heroine, Jane Doe, the only victim whose identity cannot be determined, who remembers nothing about herself and spends the show searching for answers.
“With Jane, she’s an outlier,” Brown said. “Her whole entire thing is that she is a blank slate. It’s very much like autopilot, where it’s like she’s not fully there — she doesn’t have memories.”
That gulf between Brown’s life and Jane Doe’s would be especially difficult to bridge through experience. Instead, Brown finds common ground with the character’s yearning for self-discovery and a place among others.
“The only thing you can ground yourself in with Jane is that longing to find out who she is, that longing to fit in, and I understand that,” she said.
Beyond Jane herself, Brown describes “Ride the Cyclone” as a “cabaret of styles” and says she is enthusiastic about the production’s eclectic structure. The show moves rapidly between genres, musical influences and performance styles, and demands remarkable versatility from its cast. That variety has produced some of Brown’s favorite moments in rehearsal, across the musical’s versatility and ability to evoke the feel of total complete immersion.
“We were doing a music rehearsal and there were full chills up my arm, where I was like, ‘I cannot believe I’m here, this is awesome,’” she said. “Plus all the understudies come to music rehearsals as well, so in total there’s nine of us singing. Just all of these harmonies — it’s beautiful.”
While Brown loves the work of immersing herself fully into a character, she has a different, more personal goal as well. In the same way that she was deeply inspired by the musicals in her childhood, her hope now is to touch audiences in the same way — to capture those feelings of wonder and immersion that first drew her to the vocation and “pay it forward.”
“Just because of how much watching theater affected me and inspired me when I was younger, my goal in life is just to make an effect in someone’s life that they’ll think about,” Brown said. “It’s one thing if I feel proud about my performance, but if someone comes up to me and is like, ‘You made me feel,’ that’s all I really want. There are shows that I saw 10 years ago I still think about to this day, and I’m hoping that maybe one day I can be that for someone.”
“Ride the Cyclone” runs through Aug. 23 at City Lights Theater, 529 S. Second St., San Jose. Single tickets are $31-$77; further details can be found at: cltc.org/cyclone
