Holly Hunter
The Greek tragedy of Medea spotlights the darkest side of human nature and the extreme of what can go awry when one is utterly shattered by betrayal and pain. Marina Carr's By The Bog of Cats, inspired by Medea, is presented in a contemporary setting appropriate to the tone of the play: in the dark, marshy bogs of the Irish Midlands.
In
this play, directed by Timothy Near and premiering at the San Jose
Repertory Theatre in September, Holly Hunter plays the lead of Hester
Swane, to whose depth and sense of alienation she was particularly
attracted. "I find it quite unusual to find a great woman's role,
period. But I found this one really remarkable because it has such
scope, and it's a hybrid between too already large canvases, one being
Irish theatre and Irish heritage, and the other, the Greeks."
Although Hunter may be recognized by most as a film actress, she actually
spent the first decade of her acting career on the stage, after having
studied theatre for four years at the Carnegie Melon University. Hunter
reveals that By The Bog of Cats, however, is unlike any project she's
ever worked on before. "In the language, in the place, in the weight
that [Hester] carries, the darkness that she carries, and in her sense
of alienation. Although I've played several characters with a vast sense
of alienation, really kind of starting with The Piano, this just goes
further." Hunter also sees the language in this play as more than
just dialogue - she sees it as akin to poetry. "I think that Marina
Carr is a poet, and she injects that into prose. I mean the dialogue
- it's not written in stanzas, but it has a flow and a musicality to
it that is as if you are reading a really large poem."
In preparation for her role, Hunter went traveled director Timothy Near
to Dublin to meet playwright Marina Carr. They spent the majority of
their time in the Midlands, where Carr grew up and the play takes place. "It
was very interesting to talk to people in that part of the world, in
that part of that country, and get a feel for their lives, to get a feel
for the landscape, to be exposed to the different bogs that are in that
area of Ireland, and to how people feel about the landscape. I think
that their lives are very much about their surroundings, whereas our
lives can be a little bit divorced from our surroundings."
Based on the repertoire of character types she has portrayed over the
span of her career, Hunter does not limit herself to any one type of
role, nor does she have a favorite type of role. However, she does tend
to attract to roles which contain parts of herself in them. "I don't
think I've ever played a character that was tremendously different from
me. I mean all the characters are there. Their humanity is mine, I just
use different elements of my own to be theirs, but I think Hester is
very close to me."
Lynn
Redgrave With an acting career that spans nearly four decades, Lynn Redgrave started writing her own material about ten years ago, largely out of frustration. "I'd reached a point in my career where suddenly people weren't beating down doors," she says. "To write your own work, it takes you back to basics, to the old days when you set up your cart in the village square and if people came and threw money at you and not tomatoes, you could go onto the next night. Writing feels like that in the most wonderful, wonderful way. "The Mandrake Root, the second play that Redgrave wrote and performed in, is coming to the San Jose Repertory Theatre this month. Her first, Shakespeare For My Father, was, as the title suggests, written for her father. This time around, The Mandrake Root was inspired by her mother.
"There were two elements that came together that made me write this particular play as opposed to any other," explains Redgrave. "One is the poem by John Donne, 'Go Catch a Rising Star.' This was a poem I read when I was about 10, and I had been entranced, enchanted and mesmerized by it all through the years, and have often returned to it. So along with that, I began thinking of my mom and her life and the time when she went very nearly over the edge emotionally, which I remembered extremely well, of course. I thought, well, what if I write a play about a woman who is obsessed and torn and ripped away from the love of her life, using the poem of the mandrake root as something that was their secret ritual?"
The Mandrake Root, which had its first run in Connecticut earlier this year, created speculation amongst many audience members as to how autobiographical it was. "No, Sally isn't me," says Redgrave about the central character. "There are aspects of her that are similar, and there are aspects that you can say are my sister, but she really isn't either of us. And although there are aspects of the story that are similar too - yes, Rose [Redgrave's character, based loosely on her mother] is a British actress, and yes, she has, like my mother did, a husband who is a bisexual man - those things are the same, but they're not the same people. I guess you just write about what you know."
Redgrave says the play is very much about women's sexuality. "Particularly aging sexuality, which is something that as I've gotten older IÕm more interested in," she laughs. "The truth is women may not always have an outlet for their sexuality, but that doesn't stop it from being there. And the potent force of it, in the play, is embodied in the image of the mandrake."
The mandrake root has, throughout history, been thought to be a powerful aphrodisiac, an aid to fertility and childbirth, and even a hallucinogenic. "It's extraordinary, and has a magical quality to it," says Redgrave. This magical quality is naturally reflected in the play as well, which utilizes a very minimal set and minimal costuming. "I suppose my favorite form of acting is when an actor - perhaps very much the way it was in the days of the original Shakespeare, without the help of massive costuming or locale - reaches out to the audience, through the playwright's words, and says, 'Take my hand and believe with me, and if we believe strongly enough you will see anything and everything.' So my play asks the audience to see things that actually aren't there: to see a break water, to see rocks, to see seagulls, the waves. And in the case of Rose, to see this woman who is actually 58 years old as a 22 year old, an 80 year old, and other ages in between."
"I have a romanticism about that aspect of the theatre," reveals Redgrave enthusiastically. "I love it. It's what really excites me, to see somebody stand on the bare stage and make you see things. It's part of the magic."
Redgrave has definitely found a new love in writing as well. "I love the fact that the characters live, and sort of come out of you. They surprise you. That's extraordinary sometimes. I just love, as a playwright in the process of doing a play, that you can 'fix' the lines [that don't work.] Actually, I sort of stopped thinking of them as "my" lines, it's just that I'm the one who can change them."