“On Thursday night – election week – we were sitting around eating candy,” recalls actor Sarah Dunnavant, when asked how rehearsals for her next show are going. “But on Friday night we started with an hour or so discussing how we felt, because there was a realization that we couldn’t go forward without doing that. It’s theatre. We have to approach it where we are. There’s no other way through it.”

Dunnavant, who moved to Petaluma with her partner in January 2023, stars as Jean in Selina Fillinger’s comedy “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying To Keep Him Alive,” presented by Left Edge Theater and scheduled to open 5 December at The California in Santa Rosa.

Born in Marysville, Ohio (“There’s a Honda plant there and that’s about it!”), Dunnavant knew from a very early age that she wanted to be an actress.

“One of my first memories is watching my grandmother perform in a farce,” she says. “I thought it was the most magical thing I’d ever seen. Then she took me backstage and I was like, ‘This is so cool.’

Dunnavant’s grandmother — who recently finished writing a musical — continued to be a major influence on her life, but it was during her studies at Wheaton College, where she majored in English and minored in theater, that Dunnavant grew to love the form not only as an art, but a unique kind of community.

“I went to Wheaton College, for reasons that made sense to an 18-year-old, and found that the theater department was one of the safest places on campus to explore who I was,” she says. “It brought me into contact with all kinds of people, and that exposure helped me in different ways.”

After graduating, Dunnavant quickly found work as a high school teacher, but never stopped yearning for a life in the performing arts.

“I don’t know how other people navigate an artistic life, but for me the question has always been how do I balance a theatrically fulfilling life with a financially stable one?” she says. “So I’ve often taken a nine-to-five and auditioned until I could afford it.”

2019 saw a major breakthrough in the form of a full-time acting contract with Montana Shakespeare in the Park, but then pandemic shutdowns and theater closures in 2020 threw a wrench in the gears.

“That year changed everything for everyone on the planet, but for theater it was like the world ended,” she says. “Only it didn’t. It adapted. It went online, Zoom mostly — but it was there.”

Dunnavant ran a box office for an online theater company for a while, then worked in a bookstore that eventually closed.

“Then my partner and I decided to move to California,” she says. “We spent the winter of 2020 in Tahoe and then planned to move wherever one of us first got a job. My partner got a job in Sonoma, which has a rocking theater scene, so I started auditioning again.”

She landed her first show, Amy Herzog’s “Mary Jane,” with Left Edge Theatre, in 2023. It was directed by writer-director Beulah Vega (a regular Argus-Courier contributor), who also directs “POTUS.” Sheri Lee Miller, artistic director of the Spreckels Performing Arts Center, saw Dunnavant’s performance in “Mary Jane” and asked her to appear in David Ives’ “The Metromaniacs” last December.

“It was a farce,” she muses. “I get into a lot of farces.”

This past summer she worked in Monterey at the New Canon theater company playing Bernardo/Player Queen in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, and also participated in some new work development.

“I’d love to play Hamlet myself, or some Shakespearean heavy hitter that’s a traditionally male role,” notes Dunnavant. “But generally, I’m more interested in working with the best people and a good community than I am in a ‘dream role’ per se.”

In 2025, she’ll star as Truvy in Cinnabar Theatre’s February production of Robert Harling’s “Steel Magnolias” at Sonoma State University’s Warren Theater — but in the meantime, she’s happy to have a role in such a timely production.

“‘POTUS’ walks the line between outlandish comedy and moments of pure clarity, where the characters call out what they’re doing to keep an inept person in power,” Dunnavant explains. “And those moments of clarity now feel like they have roots and a foundation that’s different than it was before the election. It was always a really funny show, and a lot of the jokes in the play are applicable in a lot of different situations and regardless of who’s in power, but I will say that the show definitely has a darker resonance now.”

Which doesn’t mean the audience won’t have a good time.

“I think farce is a way to deal with difficult political issues in a way that’s palatable,” she says. “People love to laugh. So farce certainly has a political purpose, because it can highlight real causes of concern, but it also still provides a break from the world for people who need it. I hope our production can do all that for its audience .”

Dunnavant is convinced that this will be the case.

“Everyone in this show is very wise and in touch with themselves,” she says, adding, “A life in theater is a life worth living, because of the people you meet — caring, dynamic and kind.”