Frances Sternhagen

Two-time Tony® Award winner Frances Sternhagen, who plays an oddball Southern innkeeper in The Foreigner, is certainly no foreigner to the art of comedy.

An interview by Jim O'Quinn

There are plenty of comedies on Frances Sternhagen’s extensive résumé, but they tend to be gentle, good-natured, laugh-through-your-tears kinds of comedies—Paul Osborne’s Morning’s at Seven (2002), for example, for which she earned one of her seven Tony® nominations, or Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads (2003), for which she landed an Outer Critics Circle Award—rather than full-throttle, yuk-it-up farces like her present assignment, The Foreigner. Sternhagen is 50-plus years into a distinguished and varied film and stage career, a veteran, after all, of O’Neill, Shaw and Pinter, not to mention some very scary movies. Is her career taking a turn for the funnier?

"I do love doing comedy," the actress enthuses during an afternoon break from Foreigner rehearsals in late September. But, she insists, taking on the role of an eccentric Georgia widower in Roundabout’s current revival of the late playwright Larry Shue’s 1984 laugh-fest has nothing to do with burnishing her reputation as a cut-up or a clown. She took the role, she says, for the simplest of reasons—it’s a rich, well-written, complicated character in a terrific play. In fact, 20 years ago, Shue’s play was one of the most popular in the American theatre. It’s easy to see why: its surefire slapstick premise revolves around an incredibly introverted guest visiting the hunting lodge run by Betty Meek (Sternhagen). Charlie is so shy that he pretends he doesn’t know English in order to avoid talking to other guests. They, however, talk freely because they assume Charlie doesn’t understand—and he soon overhears conversations about all sorts of comically sinister shenanigans.

Sternhagen acknowledges that this assignment teams her up with one of America’s most skilled and subtle comic actors as Charlie, her friend Matthew Broderick—whose last partner in Broadway crime was none other than funnyman extraordinaire Nathan Lane. Front & Center wanted to know just how hard an act that might be to follow—and how an actress more accustomed to plucking heartstrings than earning guffaws approaches the rigors of high comedy.

FRONT & CENTER: You’ve just come from Foreigner rehearsals. They must be a lot of fun.

Frances Sternhagen in Skin of Our Teeth (third from right)(1955)

FRANCES STERNHAGEN: It certainly is! But we’re at the point right now where you get that desperate feeling—where you can’t remember the lines and nothing’s funny anymore.

Did you know the play before? Did you see it during its New York run in the mid-1980s?

STERNHAGEN: No, I missed it, but I knew the play by reputation. It has loads of fun stuff in it. You wish so that Larry Shue had not died—he might have written other plays just as good as this one. Great comedies are hard to find.

What can you tell me about your character, Betty Meeks?

STERNHAGEN: I think she’s someone who loves to serve people. She’s an innocent and full of good will. Her husband has died, and it hasn’t been a whole long time ago, because she tells the man who brings the so-called foreigner to her lodge that she’s just feeling bad—that things are just not interesting anymore…

…then all of a sudden they get very interesting.

STERNHAGEN: Absolutely! She says she’s going to have to sell the house because a couple of no-gooders are trying to condemn it so they can acquire it for evil purposes. That’s the set-up, the plot that sets the play in motion.

Betty Meeks sounds like the polar opposite of Bunny McDougal, the mother-in-law from hell that you play in "Sex and the City".

Viva Madison Avenue! with Buddy Hackett (1960)

STERNHAGEN: Oh, yes! Very much so.

Is it as much fun to play a nice person as it is Bunny McDougal?

STERNHAGEN: This nice person—yes, it is, because she’s so funny. Just being nice can be a little boring, but in this case Betty interacts with another character who’s supposed to be somewhat imbecilic, and when you get the two of them together, hilarity ensues.

You must know Matthew Broderick through his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker. But have you ever worked with him?

STERNHAGEN: Yes, we do know one another, but we’ve never worked together before. It’s great fun.

As an actor, do you approach comedy differently than you do a serious role?

STERNHAGEN: Do I approach it differently? Not a bit! The only additional thing you have to be aware of in comedy is timing—that’s so important. And, frankly, if you don’t have a sense of comic timing, it’s very difficult to learn. You either have it or you don’t, and most people who work in comedy do have it.

“The only additional thing you have to be aware of in comedy is timing—that’s so important. And, frankly, if you don’t have a sense of comic timing, it’s very difficult to learn.”

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The conventional wisdom is that tragedy is easy, comedy is hard. Do you agree?

STERNHAGEN: I do agree, except that I don’t think tragedy is easy. I recently saw Fiona Shaw do Medea, and I don’t think anyone could ever think what she did was easy!

You studied with Sandy Meisner. Is there anything in Meisner technique specific to comedy?

Driving Miss Daisy (1987)

STERNHAGEN: No, not really. I really do think Meisner’s basic technique works anywhere. Interestingly, I did take a year of David Craig’s audition-for-musicals class—he said he based his technique on Meisner as well. Basically, it’s simply recognizing that you’re telling a story. Meisner always said that acting was behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances. So you do that, whether it’s comedy or tragedy.

But it must be a very different feeling to make an audience cry than to make them laugh…

STERNHAGEN: You know, I was in Talking Heads a little more than a year ago. The piece I had to do was very funny, but then it went on to break your heart. As an actor, the contrast is thrilling—feeling the audience going with you through the whole process. They were roaring with laughter at the beginning, and by the end you could see the kleenex coming out.

What about acting for movies versus acting for the stage?

STERNHAGEN: Stage acting tends to be bigger. A lot of movie stuff is in the eyes and the face, and in how you react. You can’t be too big, or it looks bizarre. Basically it’s the size of your acting rather than the approach.

Looking over your résumé, The Foreigner may actually be the funniest play you’ve ever been in, right?

On Golden Pond with Tom Aldredge (1979).

STERNHAGEN: What’s scary is that you don’t want to tell people right away just how funny it is! They may not laugh. There you are acting up a storm and the audience is saying, "Yeah, show me!"

What’s your favorite kind of comedy?

STERNHAGEN: I think the most fun I ever had was doing The Country Wife. We played it a long time ago on Bleecker Street—Bill Ball was in it with me, and Steven Porter directed. The whole premise of the main role is pretending that you’re a boy—the husband wants to disguise his new young wife so she won’t get seduced by the young gentlemen, the young roués of the town. And the biggest roué of all has told all the husbands that he’s castrated, that he can’t perform, so it’s he who gets all the women. That’s Wycherly’s story, and it’s irresistible fun.

Who are your favorite comedy actors?

STERNHAGEN: Gosh, right now I think Nathan Lane is wonderful, and of course Nathan and Matthew made the most wonderful team in The Producers. And Zero Mostel was terrific. But don’t make me name all my favorites, because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings because I forgot them!

Jim O'Quinn is the editor-in-chief of American Theatre magazine.

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