Sarah Day has always been fascinated by history. So it’s not especially surprising that she’s spent her life bringing the stories of the people who made it to life.
For more than three decades, Day, a 1980 Department of History graduate, has been one of the cornerstone actors with American Players Theatre, a classical theater troupe in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Day helped APT earn its well-deserved national reputation by inhabiting the lives of everyone from Ophelia and Mary, Queen of Scots to author Joan Didion on stage. This past summer, she stole scenes in plays like She Stoops to Conquer and The Book of Will.
Her lifelong love of history--and acting--springs from her parents. Day is the only child of former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Roland B. Day. Before he embarked on his long and successful career in politics and law, Day’s father was a child performer who traveled the state, reciting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and performing Will Rogers routines. Day’s mother was also a UW-Madison graduate. She earned a master’s degree and taught history at American University and across Wisconsin through UW Extension.
“She really loved the idea of what I love about history, which is the story aspect of it,” says Day, who grew up at a dinner table routinely seasoned with discussion of politics, law and history. “There's an art to it. And understanding that is a way to understand people's lives and where history is going. It isn't just memorizing dates.”
Day’s as quintessentially Wisconsin as it gets. She was born and schooled in the Badger State and has spent her entire career here. She keenly recalls the spark she felt attending classes taught by history professor Harvey Goldberg, whose legendary lectures routinely packed halls in the Mosse Humanities Building.
“Maybe 100 people would be signed up for the class, but there’d be 400 people in the lecture hall who came to hear Harvey,” says Day. “He was brilliant, and it was exhilarating.” Professor Jane Schulenburg ignited Day’s love of medieval history, one of several ways Day’s undergraduate experience has informed her life’s work.
A few years ago, she began giving some of the magic back. Day was invited to Holding History, an interdisciplinary program hosted by the Division of Arts. She met one of the organizers, Joshua Calhoun, an associate professor of English who teaches poetry and Shakespeare classes on campus. Calhoun began inviting Day to his classes, where, in an “Office Hours”-style interview session, she would answer students' questions about her career. Including revealing the Shakespeare character she would pick as President: Theseus, the mortal king from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“Here was this king who had beaten Hippolyta, the warrior queen,” says Day. “And he wanted to woo her and win her. I loved that. I still get weepy thinking about it.”
Calhoun says having an actor like Day willing to speak to his students adds a critical dimension to the classroom experience.
“The best way to pinpoint it for me is that when she’s talking to my students, it’s not a performance,” he says. “When Sarah comes in, she brings the experience of having performed most roles, but also of having listened to all the roles hundreds of times in rehearsal and performances. I think she could quote whole plays—and it makes me better understand the theories of memorial reconstruction.”
For Day, it’s less about the lines and more about the history behind them.
“One of the things you learn about in acting is that people are pretty similar,” says Day, “It’s their circumstances that determine what goes on. And learning about human beings’ circumstances within history is what I love. Both as someone who reads history and someone who performs as an actor.”
Day is currently starring in APT’s production of A Doll’s House, Part 2, the modern sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s classic drama about Nora Helmer, a traditional upper-middle class Scandinavian housewife who abandons her family at the end of the play. Day is playing the role of the Helmers’ nanny, a character who was forced by circumstances to give up her own child as a younger woman. Day can’t help but see some interesting parallels to her own family history. Her grandfather was born in Norway at the time period in which the play is set— and he was fortunate that his parents, Day’s great-grandparents, made the decision to marry and stay together.
“For working-class people at that time, you knew it was time to get married when your girlfriend was pregnant,” says Day. “And I think the thing with my character, who winds up working as the Helmers’ domestic, is that her boyfriend didn’t follow through.”
Day is back on the UW-Madison campus a little more often these days, since Calhoun recruited her to the advisory board of the Friends of the UW-Madison Library. And while moving into directing plays, as several of her fellow APT actors have, isn’t something that’s on her bucket list, taking some improv classes and acting for as long as she possibly can certainly are.
“This isn’t a job you want to quit,” she says. “I’ve never had any desire to be a star. I really do believe in company. So, I’m happy to play the doctor in Macbeth, or wield an ax as I slowly run up the hill. I’m happy to do that as long as I can.”