July 10, 2009
BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic
At 56, William L. Petersen is still a ruggedly handsome actor continually in search of big artistic challenges. Considered one of the "elder statesman" of Chicago theater (though he might cringe at the description), he forged his career here, went on to fame and fortune in Hollywood (including a nine-year stint as Dr. Gil Grissom in the CBS drama "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation"), and recently returned "home" to work on the stages he knows and loves best.
With one acclaimed performance already under his belt (in Conor McPherson's "A Dublin Carol," seen this past winter at Steppenwolf Theatre), he is about to open in Scottish-born playwright David Harrower's "Blackbird," which receives its Chicago premiere Monday at Victory Gardens Theater. And he's already booked for next spring, too, when he'll play the blind, rambunctious Hamm in Samuel Beckett's "Endgame" at Steppenwolf.
» Click to enlarge image William L. Petersen (right) plays Ray and Mattie Hawkinson is Una, in Victory Gardens Theater's Chicago premiere of "Blackbird."
'BLACKBIRD'Opens Monday, and runs through Aug. 9
Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln
Tickets: $30-$58
Phone: (773) 871-3000
Petersen's "Blackbird" co-star, Mattie Hawkinson, is a soft-spoken but bristlingly smart beauty with a lightly freckled porcelain complexion, reddish hair and an understated aura of confidence. At 28 she is younger than Petersen's real-life daughter (who already has made him a grandfather). Born in Bellingham, Washington, she admits to having been "pretty precocious" -- performing in community theater (along with her family) from early on, and then, during high school, sitting in on the college classes her mother was taking to earn a degree in theater. She headed here to attend Northwestern University. Since graduating she has appeared at Chicago Shakespeare, Steppenwolf, Lookingglass, Apple Tree and, most recently, the Goodman Theatre where she memorably played the fetching, pot-smoking, 16-year-old daughter of a Cambridge professor in Tom Stoppard's "Rock 'n' Roll."
When we chatted recently, Petersen and Hawkinson were still in rehearsal mode for Harrower's "Blackbird" -- a highly poetic, darkly disturbing play that is known to take a toll on the two actors who move through its harrowing 80 minutes of psychological exorcism. The pair still hasn't quite figured out the necessary pre-show decorum ("We go to our separate dressing rooms, but should we even chat casually?," Hawkinson wonders aloud). And they have no idea how things will change onstage once an audience arrives to observe their characters -- Ray and Una -- who are locked in a ferociously private and upending act of confrontation concerning a calamitous period from their past.
Harrower wrote "Blackbird" (the British term for "jailbird") after reading news accounts of an American veteran of the first Gulf War who made contact via the Internet with a 12-year-old girl in London and eventually arranged to meet her. He heavily altered the story so that the two initially meet when she is 12 and he is the 40-year-old neighbor on her family's street who is invited to a barbecue in their backyard. Now, 15 years after the fact -- and after he has served a three-year prison term for statutory rape and subsequently returned to work -- she finally gets a chance as an adult to confront him.
"This is a play that is bigger than just the two people in it," said Petersen, who noted that he and director Dennis Zackek were looking for a play when "Blackbird" was suggested by Michael Billington, the British theater critic. "It's about love, about lies, about a person's ability to deal with his or her own psychology. It's not just about passing judgment or seeking revenge. It's also about men -- about certain guys who are never able to deal with girls in their adolescence, and who later, because even at 40 they still haven't figured things out, want something back from women they missed in their adolescence.
"In a way it's like that play I did early in my career here, 'In the Belly of the Beast,' about Jack Abbott, the guy who committed murder after he was released from prison," Petersen continued. "This story is about child sexual abuse. And like prison life, it's not something we like talking about much, but we should, especially now that the Internet has made contact so easy and so dangerous."
For Hawkinson, who has an eight-page monologue at one point in the play, a principal attraction of "Blackbird" was "the phenomenal writing," and the complex way Harrower plays with time as he "puts the middle of the story in the beginning and the beginning at the end, with many well-placed surprises along the way."
"It's got a sort of [Harold] Pinter-like quality about it," Petersen added.
"I saw the New York production of this play with Jeff Daniels as Ray, and Alsion Pill, who I know, as Una," said Hawkinson, who moved to Brooklyn a couple of years ago but has ended up "living out of a suitcase" because her work has taken her to many regional theaters and also back here. "So when I heard Victory Gardens was planning to do it I called up Dennis [Zacek]. He still made me audition, but he said 'Mattie, I really want you to be good,' so I was very nervous. In fact, I came super-prepared, with about half the play already memorized.
"What was great was that I sensed immediately that Dennis would really honor the complexity of this work.I didn't want Una to be a weepy victim, or to have the whole thing feel like some salacious after-school special, which can be the pitfalls."
As for being a bit intimidated by Petersen, she smiled and recalled: "Dennis handled us beautifully in the early rehearsals, and I think we became comfortable quite quickly."
And after all, she recently had a small film role as an art gallery assistant in "Everybody's Fine," playing opposite Robert DeNiro.
"And I want to get her out to L.A. for a 'CSI' episode," Petersen chimed in.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen