The stairs of Brian Watkins’ play “Epiphany” at the Lincoln Center Theater go up and down. The tall and striking set is the centerpiece of the set, which makes you wonder who climbs and descends when you arrive at the performance.
Actor Marylouise Burke, as one of them, spends a considerable amount of time dashing up and down these steps that he knew would appear in the show from the script. So when her agent received a phone call asking her to play the leading role in Morcan, the warm and eccentric host of a dinner party that was inspired by existential despair and touched on spiritual aspirations. I asked: “Will it be a normal staircase or a crazy staircase?”
She wasn’t immediately tempted by the part she felt sympathetic since she did it in her pre-pandemic reading. However, at the age of 81, playwright David Lindsay Avail’s longtime favorite, Burke, stumbled upon a hole in front of a West Village building that lived in the studio two years ago, with his wrists and left patella. The apartment since 1977.
And from time to time, she sat a little embarrassed for an interview in the theater’s glass lobby the other afternoon, saying, “You decide that the floor is ridiculous, for example because the script is ridiculous. I have a designer. I knew it needed to go one step further. I can’t change the height or tilt it. “
In John Lee Beatty’s design, Neither. Burke is on perfectly solid ground and is free to destabilize. It’s one of her specialties. She has a very attractive surface and captivates the audience with a depiction that you wouldn’t expect to see more underneath. And it’s always more down — comics, tragedy, or perhaps both.
For Epiphany director Tyne Rafaeri, Burke’s “specific humor brand” and “ability to hide boiling vulnerabilities” are ideal for Morcan, a character who attracts new acquaintances to her and elicits urges from them. Brought a humorous match to help her.
“Mary louise is that,” Rafaeli said. “She is influencing other artists. The people around Marylouise want to collaborate with her. They want to lean on her. She has such an energetic charm. So the line between her and the character is obviously very thin. “
Mokan is a rare starring part for Burke. The other was Kimberly, a rapidly aging sick teenager at Lindsay Avail’s “Kimbury Akimbo.” Character actor Burke has been performing on the New York stage since arriving in New York in 1973. She was 32 years old and she was eager to “she want more opportunities to act for free,” but she wasn’t kidding. She said, “I never thought I would be rewarded for acting in my life.”
It was a small part of Off-Broadway’s “The Broken Jug” by Heinrich von Kleist starring Larry Pine, and it took her another eight years to get the actor’s equity card. She has accumulated nearly 50 years of New York theater credits. Much of it is the title role of the Mabou Mines-Trick Saddle show “Imagining the Imaginary Invalid” at La MaMa in 2016, a strange downtown production she loves.
Her screen credits include a movie like “Sideways,” which played Paul Giamatti’s brilliantly broken mother in a middle-aged wreck, and Netflix’s “Ozark,” who had a dark and fun Season 3 arc as a marriage therapist. A TV series like “Welcome to” includes Laura Linney and Jason Bateman to a very criminal central couple.
“I’ve probably wanted to act since I was 13 or 14,” Burke said from behind a white KN95 mask that wrapped her underside. “But it seemed like such an impossible dream, and I didn’t admit it to anyone.”
She spent her childhood in Steelton, Pennsylvania. She was a Bethlehem Steel company town, her father owned a grocery store, and her mother was a comic timing housewife inherited by Burke. The town was proud of the high school football team, and she played a fighting song on the school band clarinet in their game. But she didn’t know who she acted on.
Her adolescence coincided with the conservative age of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s cookie cutter, and her family’s expectation was that she would become a teacher “if I knew I was wise.” However, after graduating from her college, she called it a “great rebellion,” and she quickly changed her major from her education to English, with philosophy as a minor, and acting in school theater. started.
“I always felt better during the play,” she said, wrapping her arms around her body in a protective manner, making herself even smaller. “I always felt more about who I was.”
Wait a minute, what’s the gesture that wraps your arm? Burke hesitated and thought. Then she said, “I want to be kind to that girl.” In other words, it means a young self with a “dissonant dream.”
After graduating from college, she earned a master’s degree in English literature and realized that as a teaching assistant, she hated talking in front of classes. After her short marriage in her mid-twenties, she lived in the suburbs of Philadelphia with her compassionate aunt, curtailing her daytime work and taking classes nearby at night. I noticed. Hedgerow Theater Company..
For years after she moved to New York, office work-copy editing, proofreading, word processing-continues to highlight her. When “Kimbury Akimbo” opened off Broadway in 2003, she said five of her ex-bosses came to see it with their wives.
She was a Soho representative in 1997 and first collaborated with Lindsay Avail in his play “A Devil Inside”. Two years later, his “Fuddy Meers” at the Manhattan Theater Club was a turning point in her career as her casting director began to notice her.
When Watkins asked Lindsay Avail about casting Burke for “Epiphany,” Lindsay Avail thought it made perfect sense. Their plays are very different, but he said, “There is that double tone of funny sadness performed under both of our works.”
He told Watkins about his extraordinary dedication to Burke’s playwright, but Watkins was surprised when he scrutinized him about the pronunciation of the recurring “oh” admiration in her lines.
“That level of peculiarity is just a gift to the writer,” he said.
Even more surprising, Burke had Covid just before the rehearsal began, so he was fighting over brain fog and physical fatigue to learn her lines.
But Mokan is now in her bones — and, as Lindsay Avail said, Burke “goes down those stairs as she was 14 years old.”
According to her, the theater is still “not the same” as it was before the epidemic, but I am grateful that the Lincoln Center Theater is paying attention to the Covid protocol and that the audience is masked. She also returns to the stage with eight actors to tell the story of the character.
“It’s very valuable to go there,” she said. “Go out together.”
