Greta Oglesby: From a heart place

Greta Oglesby, a late bloomer as an actor, is suddenly the center of attention in the poignant lead role of “Caroline, or Change.”

By Rohan Preston, Star Tribune

Last update: May 11, 2009 - 2:05 PM

Avid Guthrie theatergoer Susan Lenfestey was crying when she left the opening-night performance of “Caroline, or Change.” The Tony Kushner musical about Caroline Thibodeaux, a black maid employed by a white family, had dredged up memories from Lenfestey’s own childhood.

Then there was actor/singer Greta Oglesby, whose portrayal of Caroline transmitted the character’s pain and anger with an exquisite, deep-reaching beauty. After joining the audience in a sustained standing ovation, Lenfestey asked, of Oglesby, “Who is she? Where did she come from?”

Many theatergoers are asking that after seeing what Lenfestey describes as Oglesby’s “superstar turn.”

Although it’s Oglesby’s second turn at the Guthrie — she sang in “Crowns” there in 2004 — she is hardly new to the Twin Cities theater scene.

The actor moved to the area from her native Chicago in September 2000, when her husband, the Rev. Dennis Oglesby. was appointed Minister to the City at Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church in Minneapolis. (In June 2006, he became pastor of Park Avenue United Methodist Church in Minneapolis.)

“I was apprehensive, because in Chicago, you have to know someone in order to break into the theater,” Greta Oglesby said. “Things are fairly open and welcoming here.”

A lark, a surprise
The second to last of five children born to a father who was a bishop in the Church of God in Christ and a schoolteacher mother, Oglesby learned to sing in the church. “My siblings and I were always the choir, the ushers, everything, in my father’s storefront churches,” she said.

She graduated with an accounting degree from historically black Rust College in Holly Springs, Miss., where she met her future husband. (Her daughter, Meghann Oglesby, graduated from Rust the day after “Caroline” opened.)

Oglesby worked for a year as an air-traffic controller in Memphis after college, then for 14 years as an accountant with the city of Chicago. Leafing through the Sun-Times one summer day in 1992, she saw an audition notice for a play called “Mens” at the Chicago Theatre Company. On a lark, she tried out. She won a part.

“I absolutely fell in love with theater and acting,” she said last week in the kitchen of her Brooklyn Park home. “I had no idea that I could act. But after that first experience, it’s like I came into myself.”