Marriage, Interrupted - article about Wendi Weber
Source:  Chicago Magazine, April 2000

    Tall, thin, with a high arched nose like that of Queen Elizabeth I and a deceptively quiet manner, Wendi Weber looks as if she would have been class secretary rather than class clown.  In real life, she says, she likes to be in the background: "I'm not good at telling jokes."  But onstage she's a genuine crack-up, with an unerring feel for the lunacy that lurks just around the corner from ho-hum normalcy.  In last season's production of Mere Mortals at the Organic Theatre Company, she was hilarious as a sexy, tremulous mayfly watching a PBS special on pond life, who panics when she learns that her species has a life span of only 24 hours.  She was so memorable, in fact, that the director Bill Pullinsi cast her in Touchstone-Organic's production of the black comedy The Food Chain, scheduled to open March 20th.
    "I play Amanda, a poet," Weber says.  Is Amanda funny?  "We hope so."  When the play opens, Amanda is calling a crisis hot line, because her husband, Ford, has been missing for the two weeks since their wedding.  She married him only a week after they met and knows nothing about him, so her position is both sad and faintly ridiculous.  "I'm used to playing the odd, misunderstood, can't-get-it-together type," Weber says.  "But I haven't done a lot of sexual comedy.  This involves talking about sex, a little foreplay, heavy petting" --she rolls her eyes.  "I'll be fine, but it's that leap of appearing to make it with someone you really don't know.  Sometimes there are auditions like that.  What if it's someone who"--she gives a little shudder of distaste to suggest auditioning with someone who makes her flesh creep; then, stiffening her backbone, she lifts her chin and gives her voice a fluting, grande dame-of-the-theatre intonation.  "So sorry."  She points a languid finger at the imaginary actor she disdains.  "He won't work out.  Let's recast this, shall we?  Mm?"  She relaxes.  The impromptu character so startlingly present is just as startlingly gone, and Weber takes a demure sip of her tea.  -P.M.