NYT: The Three Sisters of ‘Twelfth Night’
June 21, 2009
Theater
The Three Sisters of ‘Twelfth Night’
By PATRICK HEALY
AT the first preview performance of “Twelfth Night” this month two newcomers to Shakespeare in the Park - the actresses Anne Hathaway and Audra McDonald - were greeted by the sort of old friend oft seen at the Delacorte Theater: a raccoon, waddling across the stage during the first scene between Viola (Ms. Hathaway) and Olivia (Ms. McDonald). Audience members giggled, but the two women did not break focus.
The next night a dewy mist descended. Intermittent drizzle soaked the grass covering the stage; one cloudburst stopped the performance for 15 minutes. The air turned awfully buggy. Yet Ms. Hathaway, Ms. McDonald and another tenderfoot in the park, Julie White (as the wily servant Maria), never once slipped, never once seemed to swallow a winged pest.
The three women looked like seasoned pros of outdoor theater - another fine acting job, given that each of them (even Ms. McDonald, with her four Tony Awards) admits to having a lot to learn in her first outing at the Delacorte.
“We had a moment the other night where we have this lovely song written for the play, ‘Come Away Death,’ so melancholy and lovely, and we finish and are all full of emotion - and then a 747 comes booming through the sky,” Ms. Hathaway said between rehearsals during a recent interview, which included Ms. McDonald and Ms. White. “It totally ruined the moment, but I remember thinking, this is my first real park moment.”
As Ms. McDonald put it, “That’s what makes for a night in the park, experiencing the expected and the unexpected.”
Ms. White said, “The bugs are actually easy for me, compared to doing a play where I’m not saying” a profanity that cannot be printed. “I’m used to doing contemporary plays and an American vernacular. But no swearing for me this summer.”
A successful Shakespeare in the Park depends in large part on the bonding of the ensemble, given that the plays always have large casts and usually include Hollywood stars like Ms. Hathaway, who was an Oscar nominee this year for her leading role in “Rachel Getting Married.”
“Twelfth Night,” one of Shakespeare’s great blends of romance, comedy and melancholy, full of cross dressing and mistaken identities, is a natural for the free Central Park productions because it has several roles of equal weight, thereby allowing the producers at the Public Theater to cast several major actors in the same play, the better to draw audiences. (The cast of this “Twelfth Night,” which opens Thursday, also includes Michael Cumpsty, Raúl Esparza, Hamish Linklater and Jay O. Sanders.) Ms. White recalled sitting on a lawn chair to wait in line for free tickets to the 1989 “Twelfth Night” production, starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Goldblum.
This production, which runs through July 12 and is directed by Daniel Sullivan, is the debut of Ms. Hathaway, 26, in a professional staging of Shakespeare, so audiences are particularly curious about her.
“I have a double learning curve, not only because it’s my first time with Shakespeare but because this is my first major theatrical production,” Ms. Hathaway said. “So just staving off a nervous breakdown has been the main thing for me.”
“That makes you a true theater veteran,” Ms. McDonald, 38, said.
Ms. Hathaway laughed. “A lot of people in the cast come up to me at the end of the week and ask how I’m feeling, and I kind of vomit emotions, and they say, ‘Oh, good, that’s exactly where you should be,’ ” she said. “And I remember the first time a bug flew into my face at rehearsal, I turned to Dan and asked, for my own edification, ‘If a bug flies into our face, are we allowed to react or just be stoic?’ He just said, ‘Use your discretion.’ ”
Ms. White, 48, said, “I remember after one act you came off and said, ‘Will you hug me?’ And you were fantastic. And these two actresses - they are so beautiful. It’s scary to sit between them in a dressing room.”
“Oh please, Ms. White and your size 2,” Ms. McDonald snapped.
“I was going to say, Julie and her 23-inch waist,” said the trim Ms. Hathaway, whose character in the film “The Devil Wears Prada” was memorably referred to as the “fat girl” by her boss Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep.
The three-way ribbing among the actresses, of which there was a great deal, came from a place of love, Ms. Hathaway emphasized.
“I’ve encountered, time and time and time again, people assuming that actresses don’t get along, that it’s impossible for them to be supportive of each other. And it’s wonderful to be in something that disproves that,” she said.
Ms. White said: “I always found that to be a myth. I always get along with the girls.”
Ms. Hathaway countered: “I don’t always get along with girls, but I don’t get along with girls at the same ratio that I don’t get along with boys.” (She declined, with a laugh, to name names.)
Mr. Sullivan, the director, said that the environment of the park is an adjustment for even veteran actors.
“There has been a somewhat steep learning curve for Anne, but she has been extraordinarily disciplined, always present, never late, even in the first rehearsals, never missed an entrance,” he said. “And it’s always a bit of a shock for everyone to go from a rehearsal space into the park, when you realize that about two-thirds of the way up the house, it becomes increasingly difficult to see faces. Voice becomes everything, and vocal energy becomes everything.”
Ms. Hathaway said she has wanted to do a Central Park production since seeing the Public’s 2001 production of “The Seagull,” starring Ms. Streep, Kevin Kline and Natalie Portman. “And the year Meryl did ‘Mother Courage’ in the park, I was on vacation in Italy, and my parents called and said: ‘Get on a plane. It’s worth interrupting your vacation and coming home,’ ” Ms. Hathaway said.
Ms. White said: “There’s that crap shoot aspect. You can never predict how the show in the park will be.”
Ms. McDonald empathized with the crowd. “The audience is so, so grateful when the play is good after all that waiting in line,” she said.
Ms. McDonald, who is on summer hiatus from her ABC series “Private Practice,” has performed at Joe’s Pub at the Public and been a steady consumer of the theater’s fare, but her many years onstage have not included a Public production until now. She said, half-jokingly, that she had only one real motive for wanting to join this production.
“Being onstage with Julie White - I wanted to know what she was really like,” she stage-whispered about her colleague, who was memorably high-spirited and adventurous in her Tony-winning performance as the Hollywood agent, Diane, in “The Little Dog Laughed.”
“It’s my typical first rehearsal thing,” Ms. White said, adding that her fears of failure are compounded outdoors.
“Oh, same here,” Ms. McDonald said, chuckling.
“Yeah,” Ms. Hathaway said, “I think I live in constant fear of being revealed to be a fraud because I’m with not only exquisite experience, but actors who have so much stage experience. And people who have experience in the park, which is a whole different kind of expertise.”
“Outdoors you’re really exposed to everything,” Ms. McDonald said. “It’s your own kind of test.”
Ms. White added, “I haven’t done any work for the Public Theater, so I’m assuming their first, second, third, and fourth choices got other jobs.”
Mr. Sullivan said that all three women were the ideal type of actresses to fit into the kind of ensemble that works best for Shakespeare in the Park.
“Because the major roles in the play are approximately the same size, the actors end up spending a lot of time waiting around to go on, so you really need people with minimal vanity who enjoy the company,” he said. “These three women are perfect in that regard. They’re also a lot of fun to be with in our very cramped and crowded backstage space.”
Mr. Sanders, who plays Sir Toby Belch in “Twelfth Night,” his seventh Shakespeare in the Park production since 1976, said that the actresses shared “a generosity of spirit and a professionalism” that he did not always find in theater or film work.
“An ensemble show like ‘Twelfth Night’ is about a lot more than whoever is out onstage,” he said. “It’s about showing up on time when you’re excited, about keeping focus despite the outdoor elements, about getting in sync with your cast. Anne, Audra and Julie seem like sisters to one another, and they have really become sisters to me.”
Ms. Hathaway still seemed a bit surprised and thrilled to be in the cast.
“I had a very naïve, really arrogant adolescent idea that I could do Shakespeare because I did one monologue in an acting class when I was 18,” she said. “One thing that dawned on me early in this process: We were sitting around and sharing our knowledge of Shakespeare and some trivia, and I just realized that the study of Shakespeare is cumulative, and I felt really lucky to be getting my first crack at it at such a young age.”
For all of her theater work and honors, Ms. McDonald has only one professional credit in Shakespeare, in the small role of Lady Percy in Lincoln Center Theater’s 2003 production of “Henry IV” with Kevin Kline and Ethan Hawke.
“The more I do, the more I want to do it, because you’re just starting to figure out the puzzle of his language and the thought behind almost every word,” Ms. McDonald said. “And you realize Shakespeare has done everything for you. The man has laid out your emotional journey for you. You just have to trust him.”
The experience of soon being an alumna of Shakespeare in the Park seemed like its own sort of honor to Ms. Hathaway.
“It’s something that Julie said: ‘This is the party you want to be invited to,’ ” Ms. Hathaway said, referring to the more than 45 years of Public productions in Central Park. “You’ll always have park memories, have stories. You all remember taking the same tab of acid - kidding. You remember that same gust of wind blowing across the stage, the nights with the raccoons and the bugs. This is history making for an actor.”
Theater
The Three Sisters of ‘Twelfth Night’
By PATRICK HEALY
AT the first preview performance of “Twelfth Night” this month two newcomers to Shakespeare in the Park - the actresses Anne Hathaway and Audra McDonald - were greeted by the sort of old friend oft seen at the Delacorte Theater: a raccoon, waddling across the stage during the first scene between Viola (Ms. Hathaway) and Olivia (Ms. McDonald). Audience members giggled, but the two women did not break focus.
The next night a dewy mist descended. Intermittent drizzle soaked the grass covering the stage; one cloudburst stopped the performance for 15 minutes. The air turned awfully buggy. Yet Ms. Hathaway, Ms. McDonald and another tenderfoot in the park, Julie White (as the wily servant Maria), never once slipped, never once seemed to swallow a winged pest.
The three women looked like seasoned pros of outdoor theater - another fine acting job, given that each of them (even Ms. McDonald, with her four Tony Awards) admits to having a lot to learn in her first outing at the Delacorte.
“We had a moment the other night where we have this lovely song written for the play, ‘Come Away Death,’ so melancholy and lovely, and we finish and are all full of emotion - and then a 747 comes booming through the sky,” Ms. Hathaway said between rehearsals during a recent interview, which included Ms. McDonald and Ms. White. “It totally ruined the moment, but I remember thinking, this is my first real park moment.”
As Ms. McDonald put it, “That’s what makes for a night in the park, experiencing the expected and the unexpected.”
Ms. White said, “The bugs are actually easy for me, compared to doing a play where I’m not saying” a profanity that cannot be printed. “I’m used to doing contemporary plays and an American vernacular. But no swearing for me this summer.”
A successful Shakespeare in the Park depends in large part on the bonding of the ensemble, given that the plays always have large casts and usually include Hollywood stars like Ms. Hathaway, who was an Oscar nominee this year for her leading role in “Rachel Getting Married.”
“Twelfth Night,” one of Shakespeare’s great blends of romance, comedy and melancholy, full of cross dressing and mistaken identities, is a natural for the free Central Park productions because it has several roles of equal weight, thereby allowing the producers at the Public Theater to cast several major actors in the same play, the better to draw audiences. (The cast of this “Twelfth Night,” which opens Thursday, also includes Michael Cumpsty, Raúl Esparza, Hamish Linklater and Jay O. Sanders.) Ms. White recalled sitting on a lawn chair to wait in line for free tickets to the 1989 “Twelfth Night” production, starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Goldblum.
This production, which runs through July 12 and is directed by Daniel Sullivan, is the debut of Ms. Hathaway, 26, in a professional staging of Shakespeare, so audiences are particularly curious about her.
“I have a double learning curve, not only because it’s my first time with Shakespeare but because this is my first major theatrical production,” Ms. Hathaway said. “So just staving off a nervous breakdown has been the main thing for me.”
“That makes you a true theater veteran,” Ms. McDonald, 38, said.
Ms. Hathaway laughed. “A lot of people in the cast come up to me at the end of the week and ask how I’m feeling, and I kind of vomit emotions, and they say, ‘Oh, good, that’s exactly where you should be,’ ” she said. “And I remember the first time a bug flew into my face at rehearsal, I turned to Dan and asked, for my own edification, ‘If a bug flies into our face, are we allowed to react or just be stoic?’ He just said, ‘Use your discretion.’ ”
Ms. White, 48, said, “I remember after one act you came off and said, ‘Will you hug me?’ And you were fantastic. And these two actresses - they are so beautiful. It’s scary to sit between them in a dressing room.”
“Oh please, Ms. White and your size 2,” Ms. McDonald snapped.
“I was going to say, Julie and her 23-inch waist,” said the trim Ms. Hathaway, whose character in the film “The Devil Wears Prada” was memorably referred to as the “fat girl” by her boss Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep.
The three-way ribbing among the actresses, of which there was a great deal, came from a place of love, Ms. Hathaway emphasized.
“I’ve encountered, time and time and time again, people assuming that actresses don’t get along, that it’s impossible for them to be supportive of each other. And it’s wonderful to be in something that disproves that,” she said.
Ms. White said: “I always found that to be a myth. I always get along with the girls.”
Ms. Hathaway countered: “I don’t always get along with girls, but I don’t get along with girls at the same ratio that I don’t get along with boys.” (She declined, with a laugh, to name names.)
Mr. Sullivan, the director, said that the environment of the park is an adjustment for even veteran actors.
“There has been a somewhat steep learning curve for Anne, but she has been extraordinarily disciplined, always present, never late, even in the first rehearsals, never missed an entrance,” he said. “And it’s always a bit of a shock for everyone to go from a rehearsal space into the park, when you realize that about two-thirds of the way up the house, it becomes increasingly difficult to see faces. Voice becomes everything, and vocal energy becomes everything.”
Ms. Hathaway said she has wanted to do a Central Park production since seeing the Public’s 2001 production of “The Seagull,” starring Ms. Streep, Kevin Kline and Natalie Portman. “And the year Meryl did ‘Mother Courage’ in the park, I was on vacation in Italy, and my parents called and said: ‘Get on a plane. It’s worth interrupting your vacation and coming home,’ ” Ms. Hathaway said.
Ms. White said: “There’s that crap shoot aspect. You can never predict how the show in the park will be.”
Ms. McDonald empathized with the crowd. “The audience is so, so grateful when the play is good after all that waiting in line,” she said.
Ms. McDonald, who is on summer hiatus from her ABC series “Private Practice,” has performed at Joe’s Pub at the Public and been a steady consumer of the theater’s fare, but her many years onstage have not included a Public production until now. She said, half-jokingly, that she had only one real motive for wanting to join this production.
“Being onstage with Julie White - I wanted to know what she was really like,” she stage-whispered about her colleague, who was memorably high-spirited and adventurous in her Tony-winning performance as the Hollywood agent, Diane, in “The Little Dog Laughed.”
“It’s my typical first rehearsal thing,” Ms. White said, adding that her fears of failure are compounded outdoors.
“Oh, same here,” Ms. McDonald said, chuckling.
“Yeah,” Ms. Hathaway said, “I think I live in constant fear of being revealed to be a fraud because I’m with not only exquisite experience, but actors who have so much stage experience. And people who have experience in the park, which is a whole different kind of expertise.”
“Outdoors you’re really exposed to everything,” Ms. McDonald said. “It’s your own kind of test.”
Ms. White added, “I haven’t done any work for the Public Theater, so I’m assuming their first, second, third, and fourth choices got other jobs.”
Mr. Sullivan said that all three women were the ideal type of actresses to fit into the kind of ensemble that works best for Shakespeare in the Park.
“Because the major roles in the play are approximately the same size, the actors end up spending a lot of time waiting around to go on, so you really need people with minimal vanity who enjoy the company,” he said. “These three women are perfect in that regard. They’re also a lot of fun to be with in our very cramped and crowded backstage space.”
Mr. Sanders, who plays Sir Toby Belch in “Twelfth Night,” his seventh Shakespeare in the Park production since 1976, said that the actresses shared “a generosity of spirit and a professionalism” that he did not always find in theater or film work.
“An ensemble show like ‘Twelfth Night’ is about a lot more than whoever is out onstage,” he said. “It’s about showing up on time when you’re excited, about keeping focus despite the outdoor elements, about getting in sync with your cast. Anne, Audra and Julie seem like sisters to one another, and they have really become sisters to me.”
Ms. Hathaway still seemed a bit surprised and thrilled to be in the cast.
“I had a very naïve, really arrogant adolescent idea that I could do Shakespeare because I did one monologue in an acting class when I was 18,” she said. “One thing that dawned on me early in this process: We were sitting around and sharing our knowledge of Shakespeare and some trivia, and I just realized that the study of Shakespeare is cumulative, and I felt really lucky to be getting my first crack at it at such a young age.”
For all of her theater work and honors, Ms. McDonald has only one professional credit in Shakespeare, in the small role of Lady Percy in Lincoln Center Theater’s 2003 production of “Henry IV” with Kevin Kline and Ethan Hawke.
“The more I do, the more I want to do it, because you’re just starting to figure out the puzzle of his language and the thought behind almost every word,” Ms. McDonald said. “And you realize Shakespeare has done everything for you. The man has laid out your emotional journey for you. You just have to trust him.”
The experience of soon being an alumna of Shakespeare in the Park seemed like its own sort of honor to Ms. Hathaway.
“It’s something that Julie said: ‘This is the party you want to be invited to,’ ” Ms. Hathaway said, referring to the more than 45 years of Public productions in Central Park. “You’ll always have park memories, have stories. You all remember taking the same tab of acid - kidding. You remember that same gust of wind blowing across the stage, the nights with the raccoons and the bugs. This is history making for an actor.”