Funny gal Sarah Rudinoff achieves a new "State"

Character actors often don't come into their own until they've been around the showbiz block a few times.

And Sarah Rudinoff has enough mileage on her career — including stints in New York, London, Los Angeles, Chicago as well as Seattle — to be thrilled about hitting her stride now, at age 33.

"It's been great," enthused Rudinoff, an exuberant gal with dark, cropped hair and an open manner, during a recent breakfast near her Capitol Hill digs.

"For the past year I haven't had to get a [nontheater] job. I can develop my own work anywhere. This is the information age, you don't have to just be in New York or L.A."

She muses on, "Getting older has also made me feel less restless. I realize, wherever you go you have to build a life."

Rudinoff is indeed forging a life in Seattle, and a reputation as one of the city's most versatile, likable actor-singers. She's also ambitious to create and perform solo, and her new piece "The Last State," premieres next week at On the Boards.

It's in the ensemble realm that Rudinoff has distinguished herself lately, as a brassy dame with a big heart and a potent voice. Recently she lent her comic flair and belting voice to 5th Avenue Theatre's "Smokey Joe's Cafe."

And she appeared in several shows at Empty Space Theatre (wearing a diaper as the lead in the raunchy "Ubu," waxing zany as a frazzled queen in "Ming the Rude"). And she was in the women-at-war play "Shock Brigades" at JEM.

"Sarah's obviously an incredibly talented, passionate performer," says Empty Space artistic head Allison Narver. "She's also just a joy to work with. She exudes generosity, and the rehearsal room is a better place to be when she's in it."

Rudinoff has the room largely to herself during rehearsals for "The Last State," directed by "Shock Brigades' " Sheila Daniels. The multicharacter, one-woman show meshes the modern history of Hawaii with some of Rudinoff's adventures as "a white girl" growing up on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

"There's an identity thing about being haole [white] in Hawaii," she says of being raised in a place dominated by people of mixed race or nonwhite ancestry. "The show parallels that with the identity crisis the Hawaiian people went through on the way to statehood."

Rudinoff also means to explore "the idea of Hawaii as a paradise, which people project their own fantasies onto — hippies, retirees, a lot of Vietnam veterans."

Her family had its own complexities. Rudinoff's mother and her father, a now-retired Episcopalian minister, divorced when she was 3 and engaged in a "big, hairy" child-custody battle.

Sarah wound up (happily, she says) living with her father and Armenian stepmother. Add in a paternal Jewish grandfather, and "whenever we'd go to New Jersey to see my Jewish aunties, I'd really identify with that group, too."

At school, Rudinoff spoke "thick pidgin" (Hawaiian slang) with friends and perfected her ability to make people laugh. Like that other Hawaiian-bred funny gal, Bette Midler, she also loved to sing.

But she doesn't sing in "The Last State," and confesses, "Musical theater is not my first love. I liked really big, weird theater, fringey, political stuff. And solo artists like Lily Tomlin and Spalding Gray."

In her footloose 20s, she took acting classes in London, did a spell with the Second City improv troupe (one cohort there was Amy Poehler of TV's "Saturday Night Live"), tried her luck on L.A. and New York stages, and first came to Seattle to co-found the ill-fated Broken Theatre company.

One senses that if the right, great offer arose, Rudinoff might take off again. But since returning here in 2001 (and debuting her earlier solo piece "Go There" at Re-bar, in 2003), there's been no good reason to leave.

After the run of "The Last State," Rudinoff tackles her first gig at Seattle Children's Theatre, in the musical "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day."

And then, how about that $5,000 "genius award" The Stranger weekly newspaper bestowed on her recently?

"Well," she replies a bit sheepishly, "I can think of 5 million other people in Seattle who deserved it. But the money came in handy. I really needed a new computer."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com