Juggling levity, pressure and power with actor, artist and clown Olivia Lindsay
Olivia Lindsay. Image Credit: George Hudson
The first time I saw Olivia Lindsay on stage, she was sporting a drawn-on mustache and was dressed like a clown.
Shimmying down a pillar inside the Actor’s Gymnasium Circus School and Theatre Company, briefcase in hand and donning a bulbous red nose, she catapulted herself into the crowd before galloping her way onto the stage.
For the next hour, Lindsay would fly through the air with her trapeze partner, sashay across the floor in a dance performance with her circus ensemble, and return to the stage in her mustachioed clown outfit, throwing her small 5 '2 frame into every trip, flip and fall.
With her nonexistent fear of bodily harm and an uncanny gift for comedic timing, Lindsay is a rising young performer inside the city’s theater and clowning scenes.
Currently represented by the Chicago-based agency Gray Talent Group, the 28-year-old multi-talent sat down with Mustard Magazine to talk about her passion for the stage, her upcoming play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, and the depth she brings to her work—both inside the theater—and out.
Olivia Lindsay as a clown at The Actor’s Gymnasium. Image Credit: GlitterGuts
“There’s a pressure that I love about being on stage and having it all be in real time. You can’t go back and change it.”
That’s what the actor tells me one cold winter weekday while sitting inside a Dark Matter Coffee shop. “It’s all happening and will never happen again. That’s the kind of pressure I really thrive under.”
That all makes sense as we talk about the path that’s led Lindsay to where she is now. The San Diego native, who moved to Chicago to pursue theater in 2019, was essentially raised in the arts. In addition to acting and clowning, Lindsay also sings, paints, dances and plays violin. Her great grandmother was a stage actress and her grandmother was the first seat violinist in the San Diego Symphony. Her father, a former graphic designer for the San Diego Junior Theatre, enrolled her in theater camp every year as a child.
“There’s a really sad statistic about if you don’t see theater by the time you’re 12 there’s like, an 80% chance you’ll never see it,” Lindsay says. “I’m so fortunate to have been brought to the arts. Art education is so important and we don’t have enough of it.”
According to a study by NYC youth theater company The New Victory Theatre, children who aren’t exposed to theater by the age of eight are more likely to feel that theater isn’t accessible to them. Oppositely, children who have experienced live theater may develop increased empathy for others and a more optimistic attitude about the future.
“My parents brought me to theater growing up, my entire life,” Lindsay says. “But even before all that, I forced my family to sit down and watch my performances,” she laughs. “I guess not much has changed.”
Lindsay graduated from Kenyon College with a BFA in theater with an emphasis in acting, and in 2024, she graduated from the Actor’s Gymnasium with a concentration in clowning.
“I’m interested in clown [and physical theater in general] because of how vulnerable it is,” Lindsay says about her time in the Gymnasium’s professional circus training program. “Using my body, doing something foreign with the audience. That’s particular to clown because you have a direct relationship with the audience and the fourth wall does not exist, and I don’t think there’s any other art forms that do that. Rock n’ roll, maybe—that’s a version of it—but it's still, like, steeped in this power thing. The rock star has power and ego and the clown does not.”
As for why she settled in Chicago, Lindsay says she was drawn to its grit.
“I was interested mostly in making work that felt very immediate to the audience, and I’d heard that Chicago had this reputation of being like, ‘Oh, yeah, someone’s going to do something crazy right in front of you,’” she says. “I’d visited and I’d seen the [theater collective] The Neo-Futurists and that was the kind of vibe I was really interested in, rather than what I’d grown up seeing, which was old school, big proscenium arch-[style theater].”
Recently, Lindsay landed a job working as a healthcare clown for patients in an elder care facility. When she isn’t at rehearsals for her latest play, she sings and performs magic tricks for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Olivia Lindsay and trapeze partner Ky Anderson performing at the Actor’s Gymnasium. Image Credit: GlitterGuts
A typical workday for Lindsay starts by introducing herself to each patient and guiding the audience’s attention to what's happening inside the room. A blend of both her comedic skills and compassionate awareness, Lindsay tells jokes, juggles and plays violin for the next 45 minutes, all while dressed as a clown.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m like, in a red nose all the time,” Lindsay says, “although I did wear one yesterday.”
Vaudeville Chicago, the program that employs Lindsay and her peers, recently received a grant to work at La Rabida Children's Hospital, she says. “The idea is to kind of dispel the fear of doctors and to help the kids have a little bit more levity and joy.”
A hospital or retirement home may sound like an odd location for a clown performance, but Lindsay says it’s opened her eyes to the ways in which we view our elders and each other—as well as the transformative power of music and the need for human connection.
“Some of these people don’t know where they are or don't know their own names,” she says. “But then we’ll start playing or singing a Buddy Holly song, and they’ll know every word.”
Maybe it’s because the art of performance has always been an integral part of Lindsay’s identity, but using theater to invoke joy is a language in which Lindsay has always been fluent.
Olivia Lindsay as Joan in Far Away. Image Credit: George Hudson
“In school, I always struggled with anything non-humanities related,” she says. “But theater? It always made sense.”
In March of 2024, Lindsay starred in the dystopian drama Far Away by Caryl Churchill, directed by Lindsay’s partner, Spencer Huffman. It was also the first play produced by The New Theatre Project (NTP), a collective run by Huffman, Lindsay, and a group of local theater collaborators.
Uncle Vanya is the second play produced by NTP as well as the collective’s second production inside Servi-Sure, a fully operative titanium factory on the city’s north side (at 2020 W. Rascher St.).
Taking place just years before the Russian Revolution, Uncle Vanya explores class divides as well as social and family dynamics tied to greed and exploitation. “Everyone’s experiencing real true suffering,” Lindsay says, who plays the titular character’s niece, Sonya. “It’s about our mundane inability to communicate with each other because we’re so worked up in our own shit. People do crazy [things] when they don’t know how to say, ‘Can we work through it?’ Can we take responsibility for our trauma? Can we try to have more grace with each other?”
Uncle Vanya runs January 9th through February 1st. For more information about Olivia, visit olivialindsay.com.
