By Michael Eck
Times Union
September 7, 2000

It's a long way from Atlanta to Schenectady; especially if you're making the trip on a tour bus that's stopping for a week at a time at every theatrical pit stop it can find.

Saycon Sengbloh left Atlanta in December, and she'll finally make it to Schenectady tonight, maybe a bit tired, but still ready to play Mimi in Jonathan Larson's Pulitzer- and Tony Award- winning musical juggernaut, "Rent.''

It's Sengbloh's first time on the road, and so far she's been to Toronto, Tokyo, Honolulu, San Diego, Tempe, Omaha, Kansas City, Colorado Springs and elsewhere.

The 22-year-old was a little hushed over the phone last week as Sengbloh woke up in a Tulsa hotel room.

"The show is pretty demanding,'' she said with a knowing sigh. "Mimi is a demanding role, too.''

Larson based the now-familiar story of "Rent'' on Puccini's "La Boheme,'' replacing the early 19th-century Parisian characters with modern denizens of New York's East Village -- many of whom he saw walking by as he wrote the bones of the show at his regular table at Avenue B's Life Cafe.

Mimi, who Larson turned from a seamstress into an erotic dancer with a nasty heroin habit, shoots through "Rent'' like an errant comet, taking a particularly hard turn toward the end of the play, when she is found near death in the park. A recent review of the touring cast said Sengbloh plays the 19 year-old junkie with "a tragic grace.''

It took Sengbloh, an Atlanta native of Liberian descent, a while to find both the tragedy and the grace inherent in Mimi's down-and-out character (especially since she originally auditioned for the role of Joanne, a lesbian lawyer who dates Maureen, a performance artist).

Sengbloh, a 1996 Donna Reed National Scholarship winner in acting and musical theater, didn't find much in the sunny South to relate to the show's quintessentially Manhattan setting. And she didn't see enough of New York at her call-back audition (following her success at an Atlanta cattle call) to get a good grip either.

"I didn't even have time to go to the East Village,'' she said. "I went to New York for the audition and then I was in the show and on the road.''

She turned instead to her usual method of finding a character: research.

"I always do research, and I did develop my own personal character study based on what I thought Mimi might be like.

She even went to a strip club. "It was interesting,'' Sengbloh said. "You don't see the real nitty-gritty stripping in the show, but it was good for me to see what that scene was like, to see what Mimi went through. It helped give me a sense of how she must have felt about doing that with her life.''

Sengbloh didn't immediately find a way to relate to the inner Mimi either; but she's found that through playing the role night after night.

"I certainly relate to her sense of loving life, and loving hard and loving truthfully. Her recklessness? Maybe not.''