Austen Danielle Bohmer makes a home in her dressing room
Circling Issue #25, featuring Austen Danielle Bohmer
Austen Danielle Bohmer is a many-hatted maker who craves and cultivates spaces of creative incubation. In life and in art, she centers collaboration and community, pleasure and play. As an actor, Austen has played on Broadway, on screen, and around the country — currently playing Glinda on the national tour of Wicked! Austen is a big believer in the power of live theater (+ music) as a sneaky little conduit to the shared well of human experience. As a teaching artist, she has served as one of Arts Ignite’s longest running residents. As a songwriter, she releases tender tunes under the name Plain Austen. As a kooky aunt and trusty pal, she has painted many murals in the homes of loved ones. Austen is a yoga teacher/student, a slow-but-avid reader, and an in-process-pursuer of decolonial frameworks. She loves dreams, Butoh, David Lynch, and composting.
It was such a treat to connect with Austen early in her tour. We met for a long and winding chat in her dressing room backstage at Wicked, where she makes the space her own and fills it with prized possessions. Austen’s approach to her work is earnest and thoughtful, lighthearted and curious, devoted to growth and integration. We talked about her relationship with her job, how she came to be #MulletGlinda, her plans for producing new music, her habits on tour, and more.
This interview was really special for me. Austen was warm and generous, and so attuned to the premise that it was a pure joy to talk with her. She speaks about her objects with love and tenderness, and while we often talk with our artists about their homes and studios, Austen brought the same mindfulness to the life she is making on tour. I hope you enjoy Austen’s touchstone objects, and a glimpse of how she is making a home where art can survive, even on the road.
Home Shrine Box
This is my first time touring and it’s big for me because even though I travel a lot, I’m a real homebody. I love my home. I have a rent-stabilized studio apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where I live alone, and it’s the best thing ever. My walls and my spaces are filled with so much that I love. I am the opposite of a minimalist. Not in the sense that I accumulate unnecessarily, but in the sense that my things are important to me and buoy me. When I feel lost, these objects hold me.
When I left for tour, somebody I love very dearly surprised me with this box that she painted to match exactly how I painted my apartment walls at home. So I have filled it with treasures and made it a shrine — trinkets, photos of my mom and sister, a newspaper clipping from when bell hooks passed away, an old metro card that was like a talisman during a hard time, poetry, quotes from books. I read a lot of queer art theory and criticism; I love Olivia Laing, I love Maggie Nelson. I’m always jotting passages down to read again and again.
As I was packing all these things, I felt some shame that it’s so unnecessary. But I tried to allow myself permission to be generous with myself, to keep close what I love. I don’t want to live like I’m on vacation or taking a break from my life, and these objects tether me. Even already, there is not one single thing I’ve packed that I haven’t held and thought I’m so grateful I brought this.
Guitar
I’m on tour for a year, but I actually have plans to release music at the same time. This is part of why I think I had to bring home with me, because I still need to remain myself to make art outside of my job. I’m going to release an EP this fall, and then by the end of my tour year I’m hoping to release a full album. I have an album already written that has been biding its time until I have the capacity — and now I think I do have capacity. Weirdly, as an artist, this is maybe the most freedom I’ve had because I have a really stable job! Usually I have five million jobs that I’m trying to juggle, but right now I have one job and a real income. It’s a wild thing to say about a dream job, but part of what it is giving me is the chance to relax and have creative capacity. What a gift.
This album is going to be different than my first one; I’ve written songs that feel more pop-y, so I have to figure out production elements that are new to me. I’m going to have to reach out for collaboration to produce it, which scares me. In the meantime, I try to play guitar every day. It’s one of my favorite things to do in the evening after a show is over, to end the day playing music. I leave the theater carrying all of this wild energy that the audience has just thrown at me. I will never get over the fact that people gather together night after night for this show, and every night when we finish, they rise to their feet and cheer. It’s incredible, and I do not take it for granted at all. But it is A LOT. I leave just vibrating with adrenaline. So it helps me to settle down when the night is done and channel it into something else.
Charms
This is another object that is so special to me. One of my sweet older mentor friends got me this charm ring that has a charm for every show I’ve ever done, and every role I’ve ever played. Lots of Gypsy’s, lots of Fiddler on the Roof, one from Diana, and now a charm for Wicked. He’s seen all my shows, and he came to see me during my first week as Glinda in Connecticut in May, and he told me afterward that he felt he could see all the other women I’ve ever played inside my performance of Glinda. It meant so much to me. I love to think of a career that way. Like every job, every role, offers something to learn. Like there’s a reason each one comes to you in a particular moment, and then you carry facets of those experiences with you onward forever.
Steamer
This is a new part of my routine on tour. I try to get to the theater with lots of time — ideally 90 minutes before the show, but more realistically at least an hour. I always exercise before I go to work. I’m a yoga instructor when I’m back in the city, so I do a lot of yoga, or sometimes high-intensity interval training, sometimes weights, sometimes rock climbing. Then I warm up my voice a little in the shower just to make sure everything is working. So by the time I go to work, my body has been moving and my voice has started getting warm, and then usually on the way here I steam. They tell us to do it, and to be honest I don’t know that it makes the most difference for me, but I am doing what I’m told! I get to feel a little bit like look at me, I’m a Broadway girl, doing what the Broadway girls do.
Tattoo Concealer
The first thing I do when I arrive at the theater, while I warm up, is cover up my tattoos. I don’t think they’ve ever had a Glinda with tattoos like me. Actually, I don’t think they’ve ever had a Glinda like me in general. In theater, we’re taught that if we want to play a particular role, we have to market ourselves toward it. But in my case, this is very deeply not something that I would have ever imagined for myself. My managers who are in LA got me the audition appointment, and my agents in New York who know me better were so confused that I took it, but I just wanted to try. My hair is in a mullet, so for my self-tape I pinned it up in a little twist and did my bangs like Audrey Hepburn. I didn’t look at examples to prepare, I didn’t try to be anybody else. I did it like I had never seen Glinda in my life; I just tried to do what I thought would be fun. I got a final callback after the self-tape, and I got the part. It’s a dream, but from the start, it was so important to me that I not morph into somebody else. That’s why I immediately dubbed myself “Mullet Glinda!” I want the kids who come to this show, especially little queer babies, to see me for who I am. When I’m out on stage I do look like all the other Glindas, and certainly she is part of me, but not the whole of me.
Makeup Plots
After my tattoos, I start doing my makeup. They gave me these makeup plots for Glinda’s face, which out of context are very scary looking. But I had to learn how to do it the same every day, and add certain things at intermission and throughout the show, so now I can do it by heart. This is different for me too; I’m not a big makeup gal in my normal human life. Maybe a tinted moisturizer and a fun eyeliner? But it’s fun to play dress up. The same goes for the costumes. All these costumes are so amazing. Susan Hilferty’s work is iconic, and she hasn’t slowed down — we just got news that she changed her mind about Glinda’s shoes in “Thank Goodness,” which have been gold for over twenty years. But now Susan says, “They must be blue.” So I got new shoes because Susan says they must be blue!
Water
I drink so much water. The water bottle on the left is the one I carry around in my life, which I have had for ten years and is covered in stickers from all over the place. Then on the right is my setup backstage in my dressing room. I like to drink warm water before I go onstage and sing. I heat up my water heater, and then I fill my water bottle with half hot water and half cold water so that it ends up just warm but not hot. I have this ritual where I pretend I can tell whether it’s going to be a good show or not by the temperature of the water. My amazing dresser, Lindsey, does so many things; one of them is that she keeps the water for me and hands it to me right as I get into the bubble to descend as Glinda, and I take my first sip and decide, Oh no, it’s too hot! It’s a bad show! But of course, in reality, sometimes the best shows happen on days when the water was not just right.
Rehearsal Outfit
Starting to rehearse for this new role, I knew that my character would have a physicality that’s vastly different from my own. I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to find her if I didn’t create a specific feeling in my body. So I pulled out specific clothes to wear as I was learning the part, and I would not let myself rehearse without them. These shoes and this skirt were from a very different phase in my life, during college, when I was trying to be a super femme little musical theater girl. (They literally call it a flirt skirt.) It’s like I’m tapping back into a past self, which maybe is part of what I bring to Glinda. I know what it feels like to feel like you have to convince everyone that you are beautiful and perfect and good. I know what it does to my body. I know what it feels like to realize that not only is that not good for you, but it’s also not doing good for anyone else, and maybe it is causing harm.
Glinda’s Crooked Tiara
This is Glinda’s tiara, and I love its subtext because it’s off-center. It’s in Act Two, when she starts to fall apart. Her perfect image is unraveling, and you watch her grasping frantically to get it back. I think a lot about the journey to integrate all the parts of us — if you want to get very therapized about it, the internal family system. So much of growing up is feeling like well, this part of me I don’t like, this part here I don’t want to acknowledge, so I’m going to shut them down. But those parts will still be there. And if we don’t learn how to integrate them, they’re going to rear their ugly heads. That’s what happens to Glinda a lot; something happens and some little girl part of her rears up and panics. She goes through so much, and she’s so complicated.
I feel like a broken record sometimes when people say that Glinda is superficial, because I so firmly believe that she is not superficial at all. She is so involved with worrying about everyone’s perceptions and needs and feelings that it makes her come off as selfish, but she is working so hard. I love getting to know her. She is always on my mind. It’s why I probably couldn’t be trying to record music this year if I didn’t already have the album written, because I’m always thinking about Glinda. I wake up in the night thinking about her, as if she’s haunting me. I just love her so much. A character like this is the greatest acting gift you could ever be given, and I’m just beginning. What a gift to have a year. I am not going to get bored.
Follow Austen on Instagram, listen to her music, visit her website, and see her in Wicked!
This interview took place on May 30th, 2024. Austen’s words have been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness. Headshot, guitar, and water bottle images shared courtesy of the artist; all other images by Krystiana Kosobucki-Howell.
PS. Don’t forget to register for our coming events in Indianapolis! July 2nd and 5th, pay what you can, all ages. See you there! <3