This article by Nicole Plett was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on September 16, 1998. All rights reserved.
`Every daughter I know has a thing about her father," muses Zoe Wanamaker. "It's not a problem, but there is a daughter-father relationship which is incredibly strong. You know there's the Oedipus complex -- but one tends to forget the other one, the Electra complex."
Wanamaker is sitting in the Green Room at McCarter Theater working on a tray of take-out sushi during a lunchtime rehearsal break, talking about her title role in Sophocles' classic Greek tragedy, "Electra." Electra is a woman who persists in mourning her father, Agamemnon, years after his grisly murder at his wife's own hand. Driven by an insatiable desire to avenge his assassination, even at the price of her mother's life, Electra is the daughter who kills.
Directed by David Leveaux, in an updated translation commissioned from Irish playwright Frank McGuinness, "Electra" opens McCarter's 1998-'99 drama season on Friday, September 18, at 8 p.m. Reprising the role that won her London's Olivier award for best actress in 1997, Wanamaker is joined in the new production by Claire Bloom as Clytemnestra, Michael Cumpsty as Orestes, Pat Carroll as the Chorus of Mycenae, Marin Hinkle as Chrysothemis, and Stephen Spinella as Orestes' servant.
"Electra is not an obscure classic, a strange story of a distant time and place and people," explains director Leveaux in his production notes. "It is, in every sense, our story." Deeply moved by his experience of the civil war in the Balkans, he believes that Sarajevo in the 1990s differs little from the devastated society Sophocles imagined 2,000 years ago. Although Aeschylus and Euripides also interpreted Electra's mythic tale, Sophocles' version is considered the most direct. Faithful to the three dramatic unities, the whole sweeping family story is recounted on one spot near Clytemnestra's palace, in the span of a single day.
"The most important question about Electra is not why she must avenge her father's death, it is why she is inconsolable," says Wanamaker, considering the core of the drama. "That question can provoke some surprising answers, not least that the deepest gesture in her is not violence, it is love. And that's what's interesting." She says the transformation she must undergo during each and every performance of the play is "a sort of exorcism."
"What Frank [McGuinness] did was to pare Sophocles down to a fish bone -- a bleached piece of bone -- and make it accessible to us. All he's done is take away a lot of obscure references that we don't understand today," she says. McGuinness's own plays include "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me" and "Mutabilitie;" he has also adapted two plays by Ibsen and Sophocles' "Oedipus" trilogy.
One of the most acclaimed British actresses of her generation, Wanamaker readily admits to being a newcomer to Greek tragedy -- a form she initially found stiff, impersonal, even intimidating. She cut her professional teeth in English repertory theater in the 1970s, and while she is widely known for her leading roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company, new writing -- whether for theater, film, or television -- has been her abiding professional interest.
Despite her lofty status on the theater scene, Wanamaker is a diminutive woman and a down-to-earth talker. Her short, short haircut accentuates her puckish features that are dominated by unnaturally bright, penetrating eyes. Deliciously frank about her small failings, she still rolls her own cigarettes and dreads her professional's diet obsession with the remark -- "I'm not going to starve myself into some kind of UNICEF advert for the sake of a movie career."
Family drama is hardly foreign to Wanamaker. She is the daughter of the late Sam Wanamaker, a prominent American expatriate actor and director of stage and film whose enthusiasm, tenacity, and energy inspired the 28-year effort to rebuild a replica of the Globe Theater in Southwark, London. The new Globe opened in 1996, just a few hundred yards from where Shakespeare's original once stood. Zoe is now a trustee of the Globe and a member of its artistic board.
From the time of his arrival in England in the early 1950s as a political refugee from McCarthyism and the H.U.A.C. witch hunts, until his death from cancer in 1993, Sam Wanamaker cast a hero's shadow in England's theater world. A shadow from which Zoe Wanamaker eventually had to emerge, an acclaimed actor in her own right -- without resorting to homicide.
We asked her what it was like negotiating the territory from compliant daughter to an independent professional whom some say outshines her famous father.
"I think, for every child whose father or mother is notorious in some way -- whether they be murderers or aristocracy -- I think there is a negotiation to be made. We all have baggage to carry and to deal with. I did have a huge amount of respect for family because both my parents were present at Lee Strasberg's first group meeting of `The Method' in New York.
"Mummy had a job in New York, she was a radio soap star. I don't remember what the program was called, but I know she was very famous to radio." Sam Wanamaker made his first film with Lili Palmer when he was 25 and just out of the army. "He was already quite a powerhouse in New York as a young man. He had his own liberal theater company which Arthur Miller wrote his first piece for. They used to go to factories to put on plays and performances," she says, noting that as the son of Russian immigrants, her father had no lucrative ties to the department store chain. Their family name was probably an Ellis Island invention.
Zoe's mother, Charlotte, was born in Canada. She moved to Chicago and was working at the Goodman Theater when she met her husband, and her job took the couple to New York. As first-generation Jewish-American liberals, they became targets of McCarthyism.
"Like 99.9 percent of the people who were blacklisted, he had nothing to do with the Communist party," says Wanamaker. "Of course, it was a witch hunt of major hysterical proportions -- which it seems to me one after another happens in this country." Still her father's daughter of conscience, she suddenly adds: "I mean what possesses someone to keep a semen-stained dress? It's just terribly damaging, and I take it seriously because this is my country."
When Zoe was three, the family moved to London, and her mother gave up her performing career to take care of three daughters, of which Zoe is the second. Today her oldest sister is a speech therapist in Los Angeles, and her youngest sister lives in London. Their mother, Charlotte, died last year.
Arriving in England in the early '50s, when the country was recovering from World War II, she says Sam Wanamaker was considered a major movie star. "His appearance on the English stage was a phenomenal excitement. It changed British theater because they had all heard of the Method, and daddy was the first Method actor to appear on the British stage. They'd never seen it, and of course it blew them away."
Sam Wanamaker is also remembered for his performances as Iago to Paul Robeson's "Othello." In 1959 the pair performed "Othello" in a seven-month run in Stratford-on-Avon. "The relationship between Paul Robeson and my father was fantastic, because they'd met and worked before in America on various left-wing activities."
It appears that, by the age of 12, Zoe Wanamaker had already decided to become an actress -- or a ballet dancer. She thinks the comforts of her father's job with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon had something to do with it.
"That was when we were living near Stratford and it was really a very idyllic situation," she recalls. "Stratford at that time was extremely beautiful."
Replaying a generational conflict as ancient as classical Greece, Wanamaker's parents were initially displeased by their daughter's career choice.
"They were very resistant to me being an actress purely because they knew what it entailed," she says. "Particularly for a woman, it's a very demoralizing, demeaning sometimes. Life is full of rejection as it is, and to become an actress is full of rejection, it goes with the job. At that time, in my teens, I was a very insecure human being and easily hurt. So they were frightened that I'd be destroyed by rejection. I think they were being parents -- they wanted to protect me."
Parental resistance may have slowed her progress somewhat, but it did not stop Zoe Wanamaker.
"After I finished school, I had this idea that I wanted to paint, so I went to art school for a year; and then discovered that it was a discipline that I was not cut out for. I took a year out and learned to do typing and shorthand in order to try and subsidize myself in times of need and out-of-workness." Wanamaker worked as a secretary -- "a very bad one, I have to say" -- for a spell, then became an assistant to a casting director, Miriam Brickman, whom she describes as "the doyenne of all casting directors. She was an incredible woman. And I nearly didn't go to drama school as a result."
Wanamaker eventually spent three years completing the drama course at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, a highly prestigious school at the time. And in 1970 she started in repertory theater.
"Repertory theater in England at that time was at its peak," she recalls, "and that was, for me, an extension of my training." From 1970 to 1976 she worked in repertory "playing the best parts I could get hold of and learning my craft."
So does a famous father's name help or hinder professional progress?
"The only thing you get from a name is that it can gets you a foot in the door. After that, it's up to you. I mean the only reason you get work is because you're useful to other people. If you're useful to other people, then they employ you. There's not been a year that I've been out of work -- there have been a few months, but not more. But there have been long gaps which have worried me and made me insane."
Wanamaker has garnered rave reviews and awards on both sides of the Atlantic in a variety of media. Highlights of her theater career include her London "Electra," Amanda in "The Glass Menagerie," Kattrin in "Mother Courage," and Elizabeth Proctor in the "Crucible." On Broadway she earned Tony nominations for her portrayals of Fay in "Loot" and Toine in "Piaf." Her work in television includes "Countess Alice," "Memento Mori," and her role as the common-law wife of a serial killer in the much-lauded "Prime Suspect." Her film credits include "Swept from the Sea" and received a BAFTA nomination for her role in the recent Oscar Wilde movie, "Wilde."
Wanamaker married Gawn Grainger, a television writer and actor she met on Bob Hoskins' first film, a few years ago. He was a widowed father of two, and now they are parents of a son, Charles, 22, and a daughter, Eliza, 18. "Gawn has a healthy disrespect for the theater, which is wonderful. He gave up acting for about 12 years and wrote a few successful television series. He recently went back to acting."
Known for her work across genres, she is reluctant to state a preference for live theater, television, or film. "I don't have a preference -- I have a fascination for it all, really," she says, "because each one demands a completely different way of working. If not intellectually, then physically as well. I mean the fact that you have to be a night person when you work in the theater, and that you're a day person and a morning person when you're working in film.
"In film, you have to get up at five o'clock in the morning; then, if you're a girl, something unnatural happens to you -- you have to have makeup put on your face and you have to live with that all day, and sit in that all day, and be prepared at any minute to perform. And I find that a challenge. I don't enjoy it at all. I find the theater a much more organic place to be. You don't have to get up at a ridiculous time, and you can actually have a life and then go in to work. It's a more organic thing, and the nighttime is one for concentration. Six o'clock in the morning is not a natural time to start thinking!"
Has Greek tragedy previously figured in her career? "Not at all!" she replies. "I had been intimidated by Greek drama basically because I felt it was masks and people speaking in funny voices -- something very alienating to me. And nobody had given me a point of view and made it personal.
"When I was first starting out, I did feel that my education was a desert, and that I'd actually spent most of my time in my education -- my poor parents had put me through a private education -- I'd frittered it away by staring out the window. But my education started when I started working in the theater, for which I'm very grateful."
"Electra" is also Wanamaker's first experience working with director David Leveaux. "I liked him when I met him," she says. "I found him fascinating, interesting -- and intellectually terrifying." They were considering doing Tennessee Williams' "Eccentricities of a Nightingale" together, until Leveaux proposed "Electra."
"When David asked if I had ever thought of doing Electra, I said no because the last time I was asked to do a Greek play it was `Medea,' and her opening line in the script is `Ai-ai-ee-aa.' It was some sort of howl that was scripted as `Ai-ai-ee-aa,' and I thought, `This is silly.' I couldn't imagine myself doing it -- so I turned that one down. But when David suggested `Medea,' I just kind of had a feel for him. And I said, `If you help me, then I'll do it.'"
"I think of myself as a pupil, but at the same time he makes me laugh tremendously. His generosity of spirit and intellect is unfathomable. It's lovely to behold. And he doesn't make me feel stupid. He's one of a few directors who've made me feel that I'm on a level with him and not an inferior, which is a great way to be with your fellow worker."
Leveaux describes his idea of Electra as "a woman who is locked in a kind of captivity of childhood, and that makes her ferociously dangerous." He then goes on to explain how Wanamaker has frequently been cast as the best friend or the kinder party. "Yet I'd always though she is an actress of the most phenomenal range. So what I said to Zoe was, Don't you think it's time you had a really good scream?"
"There's a connection with some directors that you have, and some that you don't," observes Wanamaker. "I've had about four directors who, when they talk to me about a play, it illuminates, it triggers off a lot of colors or notes. I'm quite visual, I have quite an imagination. And my imagination is not an intellectual one, it's purely subjective, I think. I also think in visuals. The way he described it to me, it became an image. When I understand a director's image, if we're on the same wavelength, then that image becomes a reality. And David's image for me was very potent."
"I think because of my father's death, the play must have had some connection with me. I believe in it, I believe in the production as being something that for me was different in so many ways. But also that it brought Greek drama to someone like myself, who was so anti-Greek drama. So if it can change my mind about Greek drama, then maybe it can change other people's minds. And if it can make me unafraid of Greek drama, maybe it can make other people unafraid."
As September's arts previews and back-to-school days roll around again, regular as clockwork, it's easy to think of our life paths as some predictable forward journey from cradle to grave. But as two of our writers discovered preparing this week's issue, you never know when the present is going to be delightfully interrupted by a chance to re-visit a not-quite-forgotten and still-cherished past. That straight life's path feels a lot more like a zig-zag along crazy pavement this week.
Christopher Mario, author of the preview and analysis of Princeton's grand new Princeton Stadium that has sprung up to replace the not-quite-forgotten Palmer Stadium, has written before about architecture for U.S. 1. What we didn't realize when we assigned this piece was that Mario also has a special affinity for college football stadiums -- he has performed in them before literally hundreds of thousands of people.
No, Mario was not a star athlete of the college gridirons. But he was a baritone horn player in the University of Pennsylvania marching band, and in 1984 was the drum major -- high stepping his way onto the playing fields of the Ivy League. His favorite stadium: Penn's Franklin Field -- "it's got a presence, it's right on the campus, and while it's old, they've taken care of it," he says. For his opinions on the new Princeton Stadium, turn to page 51.
Arts editor Nicole Plett also enjoyed a unexpected detour back to her youth when actor Zoe Wanamaker arrived in Princeton to perform her award-winning role as Electra in Sophocles' classic drama at McCarter Theater. Plett was no more than 10 when her theatergoing parents went backstage (unencumbered by any of their four daughters) to meet Paul Robeson and Sam Wanamaker after their performances as Othello and a distinctly "hip" Iago at Stratford-on-Avon, England, in 1959, in a controversial production directed by the young Tony Richardson.
Pleasantries were presumably exchanged, but something else clicked between the American emigre Wanamaker family (the parents of three daughters of their own) and Plett's. The result was that the two couples began a friendship that endured the rest of their lives, and one that Plett's mother, Rita Bronowski, the last survivor of the foursome, still cherishes. So even though the two "girls" had hardly seen each other for some 30 years -- Plett still had vague memories of some grumblings from Zoe's dad about her drama dreams -- the family bond was readily renewed. The results of the bonding appear on page 31.
We hope you'll clip and save our comprehensive 32-page Preview, beginning on page 19. And as the seasons continue to follow predictably upon one another, keep watching U.S. 1 for each week's unfolding of events for theatergoers, music lovers, dance watchers, gallery denizens, families, singles, and everyone in between.
Correction
The telephone number for Reed House Gallery (200 North Main Street in Hightstown) was incorrect in the U.S. 1 Retail Directory; the correct number is 609-448-8588. Thanks to Deborah Paglione for catching the error.
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