Latvian-American actress Laila Robins (from Minneapolis, also GVV grad) is featured in an article/interview in today’s New York Times! She’ll be acting in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park next month. (See http://www.publictheatre.org for more info.)
Titania Singing? What Would Cruella Think?
By ERIK PIEPENBURG
Published: July 29, 2007
DESPITE a distinguished career onstage and on screens both big and small, Laila Robins remains an under-the-radar actress, the kind whom fans of “Law & Order” and “Sex and the City” most likely recognize by face, not name. “Often I play, especially on television, a lot of smart lawyer people and cerebral types,” she says.
Stage directors know her as something else: a go-to actress who isn’t afraid to tackle the meatiest female roles in the classic repertory. She has played women we’re familiar with on a first-name basis: Cleopatra, Hedda, Alma, Blanche. On Broadway and Off her female co-stars have been equally heavy-hitting: Uta Hagen (“Mrs. Klein”), Swoosie Kurtz (“Heartbreak House,” “Frozen”) and a pre-“Friends” Jennifer Aniston (the 1989 production of Susan Miller’s “For Dear Life”), to name a few.
Ms. Robins’s latest role starts Aug. 7, when she begins preview performances as Titania, Queen of Fairies, in the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by Daniel Sullivan at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. (The show officially opens Aug. 23.) She sat down to talk about what it’s like to play queens and divas, how tears define a comedy and why Cruella De Vil changed her life.
PLAYING TITANIA
I find her sort of full-blooded. She’s out there, and she’s strong, and she is on an equal level with Oberon, as far as their powers and their being. That’s always a fun thing to play, a relationship where there’s equals. I often play roles that are repressive, or women who are slightly repressed or having some kind of internal conflict.
It’s kind of fun to have all the energy kind of going out. It’s a very cathartic kind of character to play. ...Also there’s going to be music in the piece, and I’m going to be able to sing a little bit in the play, which is something not new for me. I did a lot of musicals back in college, but it’s new for me professionally. I see that as a real challenge and a lot of fun. ...My love is classical theater, so for me to do this play in New York is what I really love. Often I’ve gone to regional theaters to fulfill that dream. To do more of that here would be great.
SHAW’S HOUSE
“Heartbreak House” was a lot of fun for me. I must have missed that day at school. I’d never read it or seen it. It’s one of those things that a lot of people are familiar with. I fell in love with the piece. ...Shaw is wonderfully challenging in that the language is almost sort of Shakespearean.
Breath control is really important. There are huge paragraphs, and in order to deliver them properly you want to do it all in one fell swoop. It was fun to be in a comedy. Often I do a lot of sort of tragic roles, and for me it was kind of like in the realm of comedy. I used to joke with my friends and say: “I’m doing a comedy. I only cry twice.”
BEING BLANCHE
Playing Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago was one of the peak experiences of my life. ... I was a little intimidated at first. I didn’t know their way of working or what it would entail emotionally.
Gary Sinise [who played Stanley] and I were both so exhausted. The show was three-and-a-half hours long, and we’d do two a day sometimes. He’d come in and give me bath salts in my dressing room and say: “Here. Who did you see today? I saw my chiropractor, my voice doctor and my masseuse.” We’d compare battle wounds through the whole thing.
TENNESSEE’S TOUCH
Tennessee Williams is an incredible writer for women because, in many ways, his women characters are him. He writes so passionately. I really love doing classical plays, particularly the kind of sexual aspect if a character is more repressed or cryptic.
If you’re doing Ibsen or something like that, it’s a little covered, whereas Tennessee Williams will just come out and say it. You get a real visceral sense from his female characters. It’s a relief as a woman to not only play it, but say it sometimes, in so many words. He brings the soul, mind and body of a woman together, or at least that’s how I feel when I play it. I’m able to express more aspects of myself in playing his roles.
LIGHT-BULB MOMENT
When I was a little kid, maybe I was 7 or something, I went to see the animated movie “101 Dalmatians.” I saw the character of Cruella De Vil, with the fur coat and the cigarette smoke and those cheekbones, and I thought she was the most glamorous thing I ever saw in my life. I thought: I must play that woman. I went home and wrote a play and put it on in my basement. It was called “The New Year’s Eve Crime.” And that was the beginning of the end.
