Artist Spotlight: Miriam Schwartz
- 56 minutes ago
- 6 min read
by Pedro Juan Fonseca, an actor, writer, filmmaker,
and Manager of Marketing and Communications at Six Points Theater
Miriam Schwartz is the exact same height she was when we met in college. It makes it easy for me, more than a decade later, to part the velvet curtains at the entrance of the café and let her through into the glowing, bohemian jewel tones of Barbette in Minneapolis. Colored lamps, mosaic tiles, bentwood chairs, and big front windows keep out the cold but let in the hard winter light. It is a setting set designer Michael Hoover would approve of.
Schwartz is back in Minneapolis to star in Six Points Theater’s world premiere production of Vienna, Vienna, Vienna, by Carey Perloff. Three generations of Jewish women, played by Laura Esping, Nancy Marcy, and Miriam Schwartz, travel to the Austrian capital when the family matriarch, a refugee who fled the Nazis in 1938, returns to receive an award from the Austrian government. In Perloff’s play, Gabriele wants to give a thank-you speech, take in the beauty, and eat traditional Viennese pastries. Elizabeth, her daughter, is preoccupied with the collapse of the theater industry back home, relatable. And Natasha keeps poking at the part everyone would rather leave untouched: the old apartment at the center of their buried family tensions, much like Vienna itself, a city that paved over its atrocities with gorgeous architecture. “On the surface everything’s perfect,” Natasha says. “But when you look down at the sidewalk there are plaques telling you who got deported and which camp they were gassed in.”
David Winitsky praised Carey Perloff’s Vienna, Vienna, Vienna for “unearthing something vital, generationally, and as a people.” The play went on to become a finalist for the 12th Jewish Plays Project, received a First Look presentation at The Studios of Key West in March 2025, and now Perloff’s new work is set to debut in the Twin Cities at Six Points Theater, opening March 28 and running through April 12, 2026.
Despite the decade gone by, we fall into chatting just as we did as students, a steady stream of “Do you remember,” “Did you hear,” “What’s up with them,” and “Can’t believe how long it’s been,” none of it fit to print here. But Schwartz is warm, expressive, and quick. She has spent the last several years in Portland, Oregon, where she has worked with Artists Repertory Theatre, Profile Theatre, Portland Shakespeare Project, and Third Rail Repertory Theatre, after a decade-long run in Minneapolis that took her through the Guthrie, Mixed Blood, Artistry, the Playwrights’ Center, and, again and again, Six Points. Indecent, Actually, Bad Jews, Handle With Care, Jericho, DAI, and Awake and Sing! list less than half of her résumé. It is a body of work carefully selected for range and intelligence. But résumés flatten people. Schwartz, sipping coffee behind the tulip garnishing our table, keeps flowering.
Her parallel life in a support career as a digital marketer has its own odd appeal. There, work leads to visible progress. “I put in work and then I get better,” she says, describing the satisfaction of beginner energy in a field outside acting. But she still draws a sharper distinction. “It’s collaborative, but not playful.” Acting, she says, feels “non-linear.” Every role is a first time. Every room resets her mental equation for what it means to connect deeply to her instincts.
She is describing the current architecture of an artist’s life. Artists who juggle two or more careers at a time, who love to create as well as teach, who’ve earned their Equity card but not enough health weeks, who feel just as alive at home cooking dinner as they do under the spotlight, and who are acutely aware of the luck and absurdity involved in making art during a military occupation. Artists who are no longer twenty-two, or forty-two, or sixty-two, who are no longer fueled by credits, caffeine, and the idea that sacrifice proves you’re serious.
Schwartz is wearing several hats at once: artist, mom, office warrior. Some seasons one gets watered. Some seasons another gets neglected. “I have to make peace with the fact that acting isn’t central to my life right now,” she says, and she’s not worried about that. She has already tried the guilt spiral and found it useless. This production of Vienna, Vienna, Vienna is her first full production since becoming a mother. The last one, she notes, happened while she was pregnant with her son Jonah. Since then there have been workshops, developmental readings, one-week intensives, enough contact with the work to keep the light on. But this is her full return. “This was a real test,” she says, “both for me and for our family.” What does it mean for mom to leave for three weeks? What support is required? What does that ask of her husband Adam, of their son, of the extended family system that makes this kind of labor possible? Schwartz came back to Minneapolis to find out whether this version of her life can actually play out. Minneapolis, she says, still feels like home. And so does Six Points.
She has worked with the company ten times. When I ask what keeps bringing her back, she deadpans, “It’s written into my contract. ‘You must come back.’” Then she gets serious. “I feel pulled back here.” She says Producing Artistic Director Barbara Brooks has pushed her toward work she might not have chosen for herself. At twenty-six, Schwartz was convinced she had no business playing Dr. Ruth in Mark St. Germain’s play Becoming Dr. Ruth, but Brooks saw something timeless in her that helped her create a character audiences continue to talk about. Later, she nudged her into directing The Mikvah Monologues. Schwartz says Six Points audiences are tuned in, ready to engage, kind, and appreciative. “It’s a dreamy place to work.”
“One of the reasons why it’s important to have a Jewish theater,” she says, “is that there are Jewish characters in plays all the time, but a lot of the time it’s a Holocaust play or something like that. But through my work at Six Points Theater, I’ve gotten to play a lot of different kinds of Jews, across age, temperament, history, and style.” That breadth, she says, is not guaranteed. It depends on institutions with enough imagination to know Jewish life contains more than trauma pageantry.
That point matters in Vienna, Vienna, Vienna, too. The Holocaust is present, but Perloff’s play is not a memorial service. It is a funny gab-fest about a family trying to understand each other. The women snipe, dodge, caretake, provoke, and push. Natasha wants to know who the women who raised her really are, what they gave up, what they are still hiding, and whether her own future is supposed to follow some inherited script.
Schwartz knows that question well. One of the strangest and richest things about playing Natasha now, she says, is that she is revisiting a version of herself she has already moved through. Natasha is still trying to determine whether she wants children, whether she will find the right partner, and whether the “traditional path” and “my path” can ever be the same path. Schwartz now has the husband and the toddler waiting on the other side of the curtain, cheering her on. “It will be funny,” she says, “to be in performances of that and then, like, go back home to a two-year-old.” But the connection is real. “I’ve been there with Natasha. I’ve so been there.”
Motherhood, in her telling, has not made her any less hungry as an artist. It has made her more judicious about what it’s worth. She talks about sitting backstage during tech for Mary Jane in Portland, feeling her son Jonah kicking in her stomach for the first time while she was doing the work she loves most. “I am a superhero,” she remembers thinking. After her son was born, the recalibration was less glamorous. Newborn life consumed everything. The surprise was that she did not find herself pining for rehearsals. She was too busy being in the moment. What changed later, as Jonah got older, was not her love of acting but the volume of certain old actor torments. “Will they like me? Am I good enough?” Those voices, she says, “melt away a little bit.” What matters more is trusting that what she has always brought into a rehearsal room will still be there when she returns.
That’s the new engine of Schwartz’s artistry in this season: less fear, more hope for what’s on the horizon. She looks to her Vienna castmates, Laura Esping and Nancy Marvy, and aspires to the depth of their experience. Schwartz marvels that Nancy Marvy, recently celebrating her eightieth birthday, can do the splits, rehearse late into the night, and turn in moving performances. “The longevity is more important to me than feeling like every year I gotta do a show,” she says. “In order to stay relevant. Relevant to who, exactly?” Schwartz shrugs, thinking about her son. “I’m everything to this guy.”
TALENT: Miriam Schwartz
WRITING / DESIGN / PHOTOS: Pedro Juan Fonseca
EDITORS: Barbara Brooks & Jennie Ward