Reborn on Stage

Judith Light has just returned from a 100-mile wilderness trek in South Africa. If the hike didn’t get her, you’d think the airplane food would. But the actress, whose flight landed only a day ago, is admitting no wear and tear.

“When you’re doing things that give you energy, you’re not tired,” says Light, chatting during the lunch break of her first day of rehearsals for Athol Fugard’s “Sorrows and Rejoicings.” The play opens at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday, in a production directed by the playwright. “This is all very exciting to me. It feels very alive. It doesn’t exhaust me, it feeds me.”

Really? “Well,” she admits, “at some point today, I’m going to probably feel it.”

And no one would blame her. Light wasn’t in South Africa to do character research for her role in the South African playwright’s latest work. On the contrary, she participated in the trek as part of her ongoing commitment to AIDS causes. The fact that her destination just happened to be where the play was set was purely serendipity. The trip had been scheduled long before Light was cast.

“There must be some sort of pure cosmic timing, because we had planned to do this a year ago,” says Light, whose extreme thinness accentuates her big brown eyes and square jaw. She is affable and exudes kindness, speaking softly yet insistently, as though it’s crucial to her that what she has to say gets across. “I went to New York, did the play. Then I came back, had a week before I left for South Africa, and literally came back yesterday afternoon, and rehearsals are starting today.”

Timing notwithstanding, the trek was the kind of challenge she welcomes. “When you put yourself up against a demand like that, it has the potential to turn you into a different person, because you look at your life very differently,” says Light, who was joined on the hike by her husband of 17 years, actor Robert Desiderio. “Celebrity can be hollow unless you’re doing something with it.”

What’s more, the trip gave her the added bonus of insight into the Fugard play. “There were images that I talk about in the play that I would see there, and I could only have done that with my imagination before when I was in the New York production,” says Light, referring to her previous stint in the same play. “I knew that I would come back and it would be different. It does feel like I’m beginning all over again.

“I felt that when I was in Athol’s land, I could understand things about him in a way that I hadn’t been able to see before,” Light adds. “It’s as though there’s a constant heartbeat, and that land has an energy that you can see and feel. I’d never seen such abject poverty and squalor, and yet this immeasurable gratitude in these people for whatever they have, this loving open-heartedness, this warm embrace.”

Set in Fugard’s homeland of the Karoo, a semi-arid region in South Africa, “Sorrows and Rejoicings” takes place immediately following the funeral of a white poet exiled for his dissident views. The man’s estranged white wife and his black mistress--who is also a family servant and the mother of his only child--return to the house where he grew up and confront one another.

Told partly in flashback, with the poet appearing at various ages and the daughter hovering on the periphery, the story unfolds as a chronicle of the emotional fallout of apartheid. In addition to Light, the Taper cast features John Glover, Cynthia Martells and Brienin Nequa Bryant.

The play premiered at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., in 2001 and was produced later that year at the Baxter Theatre Centre at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. It opened at off-Broadway’s Second Stage in New York in February, with both Light and Glover in the cast, as well as Charlayne Woodard.

Fugard has directed all of the productions so far. The Taper production will be his final outing as a director: He says he wants to concentrate on his writing. Fugard has used several different actresses for Allison Olivier, wife of exiled poet Dawid. He cast Light not on the basis of an audition, but thanks to a long lunch conversation.

“I don’t remember us talking specifically about the play or the character,” Light says. “I remember us talking about the essence of life and spirit and relationships and psychology, which is what this play is about. It had to do with people’s connections, the barriers that they put up, and what is required to overcome those barriers. I don’t want to sound like this woo-woo Southern Californian, but it was a very cosmic conversation to me, as though two old souls had met and were continuing a conversation.”

Cosmic or not, Fugard clearly heard something that told him Light was the one. “The huge challenge in casting Allison is that you’ve got to have an actress who’s prepared to be really naked emotionally,” says the noted writer-director, who had never seen Light on stage before casting her. “The thing with Allison is that she comes from a culture, a middle-class white world, a world in which you’re involved in hiding your emotions. It’s not done to have them hanging out all the time. But when push comes to shove, the actress has got to be able to hang it all out. Judith does that magnificently.”

“This is very much a woman who has been in control all of her life and has closed herself down,” Light says of her character, Allison. “And in the process of this play, she knows that there are truths that she has to tell and amends that have to be made between she and Marta, and forgiveness that she has to begin to understand in herself. She begins to understand what her culpability was, and that it’s only through telling the truth to this woman in this moment in time that she will ever be free.”

The strategy that Light takes is not necessarily the easiest. “She makes no attempt to get the audience to like her, and I’ve previously worked with actors who approached the role very differently,” Fugard says. “She is fearless in the way she goes out in the first few seconds of the play, saying, if anything, maybe you’d be well advised not to like me.

“The one thing Judith Light has proven herself to have is courage,” Fugard continues. “And you’re also looking for a superbly crafted actor. That emotion has to be modulated. So it’s craft, courage--and I wish I could find a third c. The other word that one is looking for is intelligence and the ability to read a text carefully.”

Still, that intelligence has to be combined with intuition and flexibility. “Performance is something that must be born anew every night, and Judith has a very special gift in that respect,” says Fugard. “I know from my own experience as an actor how important it is to tune into the chemistry of the audience. You’ve got to feel your audience within the first few minutes and modulate your performance accordingly, and Judith is very skillful at that.”

Indeed, Light has been honing those skills a long time. While she is perhaps best known for her TV work, she started out as a stage actress.

Born and reared in Trenton, N.J., Light, now 52, was an only child who developed an interest in performing early on--about age 3, by her account. She spent her childhood attending performing arts camps, then enrolled in the theater program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

After graduating, Light paid her dues for five years in regional theater, mostly in Milwaukee and Seattle, before landing her first roles in New York, including her Broadway debut in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” in 1974.

Three years later, Light was signed as a regular on the ABC soap “One Life to Live.” While on “One Life to Live,” she won two Daytime Emmy awards and other awards for her portrayal of Karen Wolek. In 1984, she landed the sitcom “Who’s the Boss?” with Tony Danza, a series that lasted eight years.

Light did many TV movies during the ‘80s and ‘90s, including “The Ryan White Story,” which inspired her AIDS activism. She began spending time on the speaking circuit, “talking to many different groups about how courageous and inspiring the gay community has been to me.”

Eventually, her agent suggested a return to the stage. “I made up some mishegoss that it wasn’t really the thing I should be doing,” Light recalls. “After I said no, my manager said, ‘I just want you to know that I think you’re scared.’”

He was right. She hadn’t done a play in 22 years. But Light decided to go for the next one that came along, which turned out to be Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Wit,” about Dr. Vivian Bearing, a scholar who is dying of ovarian cancer. “I read the play, and I was incredibly moved,” Light recalls. “They said, you know you’re going to have to shave your head.

“Then I’m reading the play, and it says, ‘She takes off her own hospital gown, and she takes off the other hospital gown, and then at the end, she is naked and beautiful in the light.’ And I said, ‘She is what and beautiful in the light?’ And I said, ‘Oh no, I should have gone up for that other play. Then I wouldn’t have to do this.’ But in fact, it’s the best thing that ever happened.”

Certainly it turned her career around--or rather, brought her back to the vocation that had lain dormant through all those TV years. Light replaced Kathleen Chalfant in “Wit” in New York, spent six months in the role and got strong notices.

Writing in the New York Times in 1999, Peter Marks said, “The folly uncovered here is that Ms. Light has avoided the stage for far too long. Her performance ... cuts poignantly close to the bone. It is the sort of transformational work that would hint at other future successes, with Shakespeare, maybe, if a full-time career in the theater were truly an option these days.”

Light went on tour with “Wit” for a year, in Florida, Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Among the many who saw her perform was Michael Kahn, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington. “I had never seen ‘Who’s the Boss?’ which is probably a good thing,” says Kahn, speaking by phone from Washington. “She totally bowled me over.”

His immediate thought was to bring Light to his own theater. “I went back to the office and thought about ‘Hedda Gabler,’ a play I thought I would never do again,” Kahn says, referring to the Ibsen classic whose complicated protagonist has long challenged actresses and directors. “Here was a woman who was smart, strong and had lots of colors.”

Last year, Light assayed ‘Hedda’ in Washington. “We had a wonderful working relationship,” recalls Kahn, who hopes to bring Light back to his theater next season, although they’ve not yet chosen a play. “It was a case of working with a really responsive actor who had not so much intellectual ideas, but the ability to live through the moment.”

For the actress, it was a matter of deciphering Hedda’s complexities. “Hedda, for me, was not monstrous or evil,” she says. “For me, she was a woman caught in the web of her own narcissism, her own inability to have found a way to stop operating as a child. She never got beyond that neurosis and was ashamed of being in so much emotional pain. I also see her as extremely courageous, incredibly intelligent, and with an incredible life force.”

For Light, however, expressing things is not a problem. It’s her life’s work, and nowhere more so than in her rebirth as a stage actress. “There are a lot of things that I’m seeing and that have troubled me for a long time in my own life--fears that have held me back, things that I’m talking about in terms of Allison, being protective, not open, not really vulnerable. Or like Hedda, narcissistic. Or like Vivian, using only her intellect to get through the world.

“It’s a great advantage to get to play people like that, because I find that I have to find those places in myself where those things are true for me,” Light adds. “And I don’t have to reach so deep to see them. It’s been a very active process for me the last couple of years, and it really got precipitated by my going back into theater.”

*

“Sorrows and Rejoicings,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. (Added matinee on June 26, 2:30 p.m.; no 7:30 p.m. performance on June 30.) Ends June 30. $30-$44. (213) 628-2772.

*

Jan Breslauer is a regular contributor to Calendar.