In the 1990s, when Catherine Luedtke told a career counselor on Market Street that her dream was to be an actor, the response was, “You can’t make a living at that.”
“I literally took that to heart,” Luedtke (pronounced “lid-key”), 49, recalls. “I was like, ‘No, you’re right. That was a stupid idea.’ I accepted that.
“But then it just ate at me,” she continues. “I was like, ‘Why does this person get to say that?’ ”
15年后,在2013年,Luedtke不能达克e it anymore. She saved up, quit her day job at Wasteland, the secondhand retail shop in Haight-Ashbury, enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London (Luedtke is a native of Hampshire, England) and started auditioning when she returned to San Francisco.
She’s been acting ever since, working through her generalized anxiety disorder just to get on stage. In 2019, she got a union card. Now, she has an entire solo play written specifically for her.
“The Snow Walk of the Empress Matilda” follows the Holy Roman empress (1102-67) who, despite being heir to the English throne, never got crowned. Luedtke performs the show live as an Exit Theatre-staged reading on Thursday, Jan. 28; the performance will then be available on demand through Monday, Feb. 1.
Luedtke spoke to The Chronicle about her unlikely journey.
Q: You and playwright Stuart Eugene Bousel discovered a mutual fascination with Empress Matilda. How did that happen?
A:It was when I was in“The Lion in Winter”(produced by Custom Made Theatre Company, with Bousel directing, in 2017). I was doing my own research to play Eleanor of Aquitaine (when) I came across this tidbit of information about Eleanor’s mother-in-law, Matilda. It was one line that said she made this escape in the middle of the night, dressed in white, to run for her life. She walked down the frozen Thames all the way to Abingdon and then on to Wallingford. I was just like, the vision of this! As a person who used to work in fashion — that was my main job before — I just had this vision of this long cape.
I mentioned it to Stuart in rehearsal, and he was like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m obsessed.” During this lockdown, Stuart sent me a message saying he’d had a dream about Matilda and me playing Matilda. This was at 7 a.m. one morning, and we just started throwing messages back and forth, just sort of hashing it out.
Q:What have you learned about Matilda since?
A:Women in history, they just weren’t chronicled. This was the 12th century: Something pretty big had to happen for them to even make it into the books.
I learned that Matilda was shipped off to Germany when she was 8 years old to be married — sent there at 8, married at 12.
After her husband, Henry V, became emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, that made her the empress. At 16 years old she had that role. As his wife, she was allowed to stand in for him. He had to go off and do stuff in Germany, and she was running the show in Italy, making decisions, living her life as an empress.
The book “Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior” by Catherine Hanley goes into the idea that, in the civil war with her cousin Stephen of Blois over the English throne, she didn’t want to be a queen — because a queen had no power. She wanted to be a female king.
Q: In the play, Matilda is speaking to her audience as she makes her nighttime escape during her contest with Stephen. Why does she need to talk to us?
A:In the middle of the night with her life in question, she’s questioning her life: What was the point of this?
The director, Nick Trengove, put it beautifully: She’s trying to explain to her people who she is, and her nobility, and trying to get to know these people, but it’s her nobility that prevents her from being able to do that.
She’s pleading her case as a woman: I have the right and all the skills to do this, yet no matter what I do — and this is going to sound familiar with past elections — I cannot win, because it’s decided already.
Q: When you play royalty as an actor, how do you make it active, dynamic — not just a wall of hauteur?
A:It’s getting to the bottom of that 8-year-old who got sent on a ship, (who) was not an empress. We go on these journeys that we don’t expect. I wonder if she felt like (an) empress!
I’m going to focus on the things I can absolutely relate to: somebody who has worked hard, somebody who has learned all the things. She has risen to almost as far as she can go. If this is a job, she is at the top. Now she’s fighting for that last position.
I think she learned a lot from her father, from her husband Henry, just by observing, being in the room, listening, the actions, the strategies. This was her education.
But for someone who supposedly has power, she didn’t have a lot of choice.
Q: Your husband is in the U.S. Army, about to return from his sixth tour, this one a yearlong deployment to Kuwait. Does that connection to the military give you any insight into what Matilda might have gone through?
A:The isolation of being in a relationship and being separated. When Matilda did the snow walk, she was married with children. Her (second) husband was in Europe somewhere, and her children were over there, too. Her husband didn’t even send backup: “Whatever happens here, my husband is gone. That’s on me.” The resourcefulness that you have to have. The worry.
There’s a lot of fear, and sadness. There’s grief in being separated. For him to be gone this year, especially, we will never share this experience, because he wasn’t here. What happened in this country, on every level, he wasn’t here for that.
Q: I loved Bousel’s statement about the show: “Aren’t we all kind of walking up a frozen river in the middle of the night hoping we make it till morning and the next thing? Isn’t that basically everybody right now?”
Do you have your own snow walk?
A:For me the choices Matilda made were calculated risks bound in family and her future family. That’s what we have to do every day.It’s that constant reevaluating of risk and safety. What is shelter and being shut in? What are those moments when you leave the house? For what will you leave this house? For what will you leave the castle?
“The Snow Walk of the Empress Matilda”:Written by Stuart Eugene Bousel. Directed by Nick Trengove. Live-streamed 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 28. Available on demand through Monday, Feb. 1. Free; donations encouraged.www.facebook.com/exittheatresfandwww.youtube.com/exittheatre