TheStar.com | Entertainment | Fonda's no diva, her play co-stars say
Fonda's no diva, her play co-stars say
Colin Hanks and Samantha Mathis play caregivers who seek solace in each other
Mar 16, 2009 04:30 AM
Richard Ouzounian, theatre critic
NEW YORK–
The big news in the Big Apple this week is 33 Variations, the play in which Jane Fonda made a triumphant return to the Broadway stage after 46 years.
Fonda's elegant and nuanced characterization is worth cheering about, but there are other things that deserve commendation as well.
Two of them are the beautifully sensitive performances of Colin Hanks and Samantha Mathis, who play a pair of decidedly different caregivers in Fonda's life.
Fonda's character is Katherine Brandt, an eminent but personally difficult musicologist who is racing to assemble a thesis on why Beethoven spent some of his final years working on a series of variations on a piano piece by Anton Diabelli.
What complicates matters is that Fonda is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and is leaving a lot of personal baggage behind her.
That's where Hanks and Mathis come in. He portrays Mike, her sympathetic nurse, while Mathis is Clara, her alienated daughter.
In the wonderfully complex structure of Moisés Kaufman's play, these two strangers, whose only common link is a devotion to the overbearing Katherine, carve a tender relationship between them that gives the already heady play one more level of resonance.
"As soon as I read the script, I knew it was good and incredibly smart and beautiful," says Hanks, unwinding before a recent matinee.
Hanks, 31, is the son of superstar Tom Hanks, but he's also been carving out his own career path for quite a while now, and fans of subtle acting have been cheering his recent work as the conflicted Father Gill on the hot series Mad Men.
To Hanks, the major issue in the play is not the patient/nurse dialectic he shares with Fonda, but the far trickier romantic one he negotiates with Mathis and how he ultimately helps Fonda and her daughter make contact.
"That's the watermark for me," he says. "I can chart everything off of that."
The briskly intelligent Mathis has her own take on the story, although she admits that she plays it "scene by scene. That's the only thing you can do."
She's had a varied career on TV and film, including a memorable turn in American Psycho, but she made a decision to move to New York and onto the stage, "where it wasn't always the same 10 women auditioning for the same parts over and over again."
This script gives her something she feels she can really grab onto. "My character feels that my mother never understood me. As a musicologist, she had been almost myopically focused on her career path and that's why someone like Mike comes along like a gift to her."
Any play brings its quota of psychic baggage and 33 Variations is no exception. Dealing with the imminent death of an older woman one is close to touches psychological bases for both of these actors.
Mathis allows that even though her mother died 13 years ago, "her death is always present with me, some nights more than others."
Hanks, whose mother Samantha Lewes, Tom Hanks' first wife, died when he was 24, speaks quietly. "I think any actor is going to use whatever experience they have with their parents in dealing with a script as complex as this. You need all the hand-holds you can get."
Hanks comes off as a truly nice guy when he discusses how conflicted his character feels about entering into a relationship with the daughter of a woman he's providing medical care for.
"Mike wouldn't just jump into this with reckless abandon," he says.
"There have to be personal standards of decency. He hesitates over how egotistical of him it is to insert himself into this woman's life at such a difficult time for her."
Mathis agrees that, "Mike is a rock for Clara. He's good for her. He cares for her."
Then comes the ultimate question. Katherine Brandt is a demanding superstar. So is Fonda. Has it been a similar experience to work with the woman and the character?
"Absolutely not!" insists Mathis. "Jane is just so much more accessible and approachable than Katherine. She doesn't think she has all the answers. She's a seeker."
Hanks sums it up in a voice filled with warmth and affection.
"Jane is witty. She's funny. She cracks jokes that are bluer than you might expect from her. She's not a judgmental person.
"She comes from a place of wanting to know more. She's looked at her past and said, `Maybe I could have done this or that differently,' but she now knows she's in this beautiful time of life where she tries things and relishes them."
http://www.thestar.com/article/602769
