After a decade of acting deliberately and exclusively in some of the most under-the-radar plays in town, a gig at a major local theater outed the beguiling Nicole Wiesner from obscurity. The role forced her to face the do-I-or-don’t-I dilemma that defines any Chicago actor’s career: whether or not to join the actors’ union.

Wiesner spent years on the tiny shoestring stage of Trap Door Theatre in Bucktown, a hole-in-the-wall company that specializes in obscure European titles, many of them wildly experimental (witness, for example, her role as a gleeful, fornicating housewife in the German smutfest People Annihilation, or My Liver Is Senseless). “For years and years I never auditioned anywhere else,” Wiesner recalls. “I lost all of my agents, because Trap Door was always more important to me than my personal career.” So devoted was she to Trap Door that she also took on the somebody-has-to-do-it job of marketing director, which sometimes included scrubbing toilets.

Then last fall she caught a major break. Wiesner was offered the role of a sappy 1970s Jesus freak in Goodman Theatre’s mammoth Passion Play: a cycle in three parts and knocked the collective socks off critics and audiences. But to take that role, Wiesner had to join Actors’ Equity, a union that, naturally, forbids its members from working in theaters that can’t pay them scale wages. Long story short: no more Trap Door.

“I am about to turn 30 and something kept telling me that if I didn’t try to make a living as an actor, I was going to regret it,” Wiesner says of her decision to go Equity. Opting for health insurance and a living wage can sometimes be an actor’s dream, but walking away from challenging material is the working artist’s reality.

Wiesner still will haunt the Trap Door as an artistic associate behind the scenes, but for the foreseeable future, you won’t be seeing her working her mojo on the stage that helped make her a great actor. Now who’s going to play fornicating German housewives at the Trap Door?

Next gig Recreating her role in Passion Play —the part that got her into the union—at Yale Repertory in New Haven, CT, this fall.