Swoosie Kurtz lends her impeccable comic instincts to Shaw's Heartbreak House as Hesione Hushabye.

“With Heartbreak House, the play is so beautifully written that I believe it will reveal itself.”

Correct me if this is the wrong impression, but it seems to me that your career–or at least the milestone performances in it–has always been marked by roles where you're often playing comic characters that have seriously dark undertones.

No, that's an accurate impression, I'd say. I guess it's like standup comedians always say, “Laughter comes out of pain.” I didn't think Frozen was comedic, at first, but audiences laughed. And Bananas in House of Blue Leaves was the same: some of it was farcical but a lot of it was sad. It's always my job as an actor to find the character's grounding, to lift the woman I'm playing off the page and find the real human being, whether she lived in the 1930s, like Lillian Hellman in Imaginary Friends, or she lived in Bloomsbury or Sussex in 1917 England, like Hesione in Heartbreak House. We're all human and we all have similar ways of covering up and dealing with insecurities and fears—and especially the fear of humiliation or being found out. That's what fascinates me about acting, and about humans in general—how well they cover or hide themselves.

Do you do a lot of work before you go into the rehearsal room?

I'd say it's mostly internal. I don't do a lot of memorization unless I have relentlessly long monologues, which I did in the last three plays I've done: Frozen, Imaginary Friends, and The Mineola Twins. My role in Heartbreak House is primarily dialogue, and I like to memorize those lines as they come magically to me in rehearsal. What I'm doing at this point is mainly reading the play over and over again, each time from a different point of view. I'll read it for big notes or the broad strokes and themes; then I'll focus and narrow my search—using computer jargon—to find what she's actually doing, what she wants at each moment. It's the classic actor thing: What does she want at each point in the play?

Heartbreaker Shaw's Heartbreak House makes you laugh before you cry The thud of axes cutting trees at the end of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, is replaced in Nobel Prize winner George Bernard Shaw's version, Heartbreak House, by the sound of German bombs. Such an apocalyptic punctuation point to all the irreverent comedy and social satire that has preceded this coup de theatre, is what makes the play so...well, heartrending. It's a testament to Shaw's dramatic skill that though there may be chuckles when Hesione Hushabye (Swoosie Kurtz) delivers her last line about an aerial bombardment—“What a glorious experience! I hope they'll come again tomorrow night”—your heart wants to break. Clearly, Shaw's heart was burned by current events when he finished his comedy in 1916. He had started Heartbreak House before “a shot had been fired,” as he writes in his 40-page preface, but it was clear war was set to engulf Europe. A year after the play's completion, in 1917, Shaw visited the front in France, where a large portion of Edwardian England's best and brightest perished in senseless trench warfare. An acclaimed political writer and commentator, Shaw did his part to stave off England's involvement, via speeches, columns, and pamphlets such as “Commonsense about the War.” He was vilified: anti-war sentiments were seen as unpatriotic, even aiding the enemy—charges that antiwar protesters seem destined to bear. Amazingly, “war” is never mentioned by any character in Heartbreak House. The plot is propelled by Ellie Dunn , a young woman who makes a weekend visit to the country manor home of the doddering Captain Shotover (Philip Bosco). Hesione, his freewheeling daughter, has forgotten she'd issued any such invitation. The comic shenanigans begin as other guests arrive, including Shotover's second daughter and her brother-in-law, after years of exile in the British foreign service; Ellie's naïve father; and Ellie's fiancé of convenience, the crass capitalist Boss Mangan. Shaw's romantic comic touch is sure, yet tinged with melancholy. Instead of pedantic speechifying, he relies often on metaphor. Most obviously, the play's stage directions call for Shotover's house to be an “old-fashioned, high-pooped” ship's stern, an appropriately nautical symbol for England. Yet in Shaw's view, the “ship of state” is floundering: Hector: And this ship we are all in? This soul's prison we call England? Captain Shotover: The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split. Shaw claims to have withheld production of the play until after the Armistice. He wrote, while some of his countrymen were “heroically dying for their country, it is not the time to shew their lovers and wives and fathers and mothers how they are being sacrificed to the blunders of boobies, the cupidity of capitalists, the ambition of conquerors...” For all his despair at human folly, Shaw's faith in the power of an intelligent comedy to affect society is heartwarming. –John Istel

What are your impressions of the play so far?

It's a glorious play. I read it back when I was 19, but I had forgotten most of it. When I picked it up again, I was so blown away by it, by the resonance to today's world, especially its overall theme about war and how utterly oblivious all the characters are to what's going on in the world. Of course, they didn't have CNN or TNT back then.

You have a remarkable supporting cast. I know you just finished working with Laila Robins in Frozen, but had you worked with Philip Bosco before?

Laila's wonderful. Phil and I only worked together for the first time recently when we did a single evening of Michael Frayn pieces for some event or benefit. Of course, I'd seen him onstage for years, but we spent the day together working on this event and after, I said, “I've fallen in love with you.” My god, everything he does onstage is so natural and so real! I can't wait to see how it feels to do an entire show like Heartbreak House together.

After more than three decades of acting, what do you know now about the process of creating a character that you didn't necessarily understand when you were starting out—but wish you did?

In general, with age and experience has come a little less... well, more a relaxation in the work, a little less micromanaging of every moment. I tend to trust more in the material and in the audience. I've come to learn that the way will be shown instead of my having to pursue it. With Heartbreak House, the play is so beautifully written that I believe it will reveal itself. As you start to study it, you get more and more out of it. It's like a great emotional crossword puzzle.

How much of the acting process for you is discipline and practice and how much nature and instinct?

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, talks about instinct and how we ignore it. He suggests that when you're trying to make a decision, 9 out of 10 times you'll come to the same conclusion as your first impression, no matter how long you study the problem. You might meet someone and think, “I don't trust that person,” and then three years later you find out that there was a reason. So the first few readings of a play, you get a visual image and a rhythm and that's crucial. That's a big part of what goes on inside me. Until the rhythm feels right, I know it's not right. I can't explain it. It's like a piece of music. You can play all the right notes and it doesn't sound right. It's very tangible but hard to talk about. When I hear a sentence, I can hear when there's a beat or something missing. It's an instinctual thing and it doesn't come right away.

Comedy seems such a different art form. Do you know when audiences are going to laugh? How do you rehearse that?

The comedy comes from the audiences. I can kind of imagine laughs, but it always surprises me. The laughs in Frozen always shocked me. There are different kinds, too. There's the laughter of discomfort and of embarrassment, when you think, “Thank god it isn't me.” Also, sometimes you can hear the silence. And that's great.

That's obviously something that actors must miss in film and television. What are some of the other differences that affect your performances?

In film and TV you don't have rehearsals. Some of the biggest directors on a large budget film will insist on a week of rehearsals. In TV it is rare. Maybe you'll do a table reading of a script or scene for the writers, to help them figure it out. Most often, you arrive in the morning and they say, “Here's your husband. Now, we're going to shoot the break-up scene first, and then do the earlier scenes.” I love rehearsals.

Onstage, you have the problem in long runs of trying to keep a performance fresh and immediate. How do you do that?

The live audience and immediate feedback keeps you going. Early in my career, I remember thinking, eight performances a week! Oh god, it's inhuman. But partly, it's the terror: Will I screw up? Will I get through it? Then it becomes kind of a drug.

There's a greeting card I've seen that has this slogan: “Do something every day that you're afraid of.” I get to do that six days a week! The actors also keep you going, but it's mainly the audience. The play may not be new to you, but each performance is totally new to the audience. It's just wonderful and I just love the talk backs.

What do you do when you're not onstage?

Try to get back onstage. Whenever I get back to the theatre, I think, “Whew, now I can relax.”

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