FIVE QUESTIONS FOR ... MARYLOUISE BURKE

THE ACTOR'S ACTOR HAS BEEN APPEARING IN "INFINITE LIFE" AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE IN LONDON

(Above: Burke on the sloping greensward at Lincoln Center when she was starring in Epiphany at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center Theatre. Photo by Celeste Sloman/The New York Times.)

Marylouise Burke is an actor whom other actors - especially those with an affinity for the stage - often mention as their favorite among themselves for she is someone who mysteriously manifests all that is artful about acting by seeming to be artless - or more specifically without artifice - in that her lack of affect is indeed why she is so affective. There is something both limber and liminal about her presence onstage, a relaxation that realizes that reality is more porous than performative; she surrenders to the seeping of her being into other beings. That is all a highfalutin way to say that she’s just one fucking fine actor. There is no one quite like her. I have often wondered even if her name has become a kind of directorial shorthand when a theatre director is trying to get another actor to be more present and not signal what narratively or emotionally is imminent. “We need it more like Marylouise Burke: become the moment.” I have never witnessed anyone on a stage so directly tethered to each moment so that the transcendently incongruous can then transpire: the unleashing of an embodied life.

Moreover, stage acting is just harder than screen acting - at least according to Emma Stone who talked about it here.

When I posted last week on Facebook that I was about to interview Burke for this column, Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony-winning playwright and screenwriter Doug Wright commented, “Did you know she set me up with my husband on a blind date 20 years ago?” Composer and conductor John McDaniel wrote, “I saw her once on the subway and had the opportunity to tell her how much her performances have affected me. She couldn’t have been nicer.” London theatre and opera director Robert Chevara: “A wonderful artist.” Other words and phrases scattered about the comments and used by those who’ve worked with her or seen her on a stage: “brilliant,” “one of New York’s best,” “amazing,” “incredible,” “she’s a genius,” and “a honi-lamb.”

Here in England there was a storied traditionalist, the conservative Edmund Burke - “honi-lamb” he was not - who was instead an Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher who served as a member of the Whig Party in Parliament’s House of Commons from 1766 to 1794. A Burkean conservative believes in, according to the man himself, “an approach to human affairs which mistrusts both a priori reasoning and revolution, preferring to put its trust in experience and in the gradual improvement of tried and tested arrangements." When I put the question of a Burkean acting technique to Marylouise, thinking she too would talk about a reliance on the experiential and not the theoretical and maybe as well mention a mistrust of reasoning and humbly insist that she has just gradually improved over the years - she will be 83 on January 20th - she told me that she didn’t have a technique actually. Perhaps that is the secret to her greatness: she refuses to be a technician. Tyne Rafaeli, her director in the Lincoln Center Theatre production of David Watkins’s play Epiphany, has referred to her “ability to mask a simmering fragility,” and Burke herself says “The commitment to each moment is what I think of as acting. It is my method, I guess. I don’t have formal training. So this is something I made up myself. I didn’t think I could ever really become a professional actor. It just seemed to be such a formidable world.”

Burke, who won an Obie for Sustained Excellence in 2004, created the role of Kimberly Levaco in David Lindsay-Abaire’s play Kimberly Akimbo before it morphed years later into the Tony-winning musical. She also created the role of Gertie in Fuddy Meers, another play by Lindsay-Abaire, for which she won a Drama Desk Award. On Broadway she has played Jack’s mother in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods and the mother to Ethan Hawke (Lee) and Paul Dano (Austin) in Sam Shepard’s True West, a performance that Ben Brantley in The New York Times described as “pricelessly bewildered.” On film, she played Paul Giamatti’s (Miles’s) mother in Sideways. Many viewers will recognize her as the marriage counselor, Sue Shelby, to Laura Linney (Wendy Byrde) and Jason Bateman (Marty Byrde) in Season 3 of Ozark.

Burke moved to New York City in 1973 at the age of 32 to begin her life as an actress. She has lived in the same apartment on Jane Street in Greenwich Village since 1977. Back in 2020, she tripped from stepping in a pothole on the street in front of her place and fell, shattering both wrists and her left knee. A couple of years ago she battled an especially bad case of COVID. Such travails sound like someone who’d show up at the health retreat that is the setting for Annie Baker’s Infinite Life directed by James Macdonald, which closes its run at the National theatre on January 13th. Burke’s character Eileen, fasting like all the others, suffers from overarching pain from her joints to her innards. The play is also more deeply about desire, that painful throb that migrates to the surface from that place where it exists more deeply inside us all and the mysterious melding that occurs as those two basic ingredients - pain and desire - pulsate into the roux we humans rue. In his five-star rave of the production, Time Out London’s Andrzej Lukowski wrote, “in her final scene Burke wrings tremendous, hitherto unsuspected depths out of Eileen.” Critic Lauren Mechling in The Guardian called her “magisterial.”

Marylouise Burke, the person, is one of those rare treasures becoming ever-rarer but one that can still thankfully be found in Manhattan: a bohemian who has burrowed into the seams of a city that ever changes and yet survives itself because somehow the bohemian impulse to survive within such a metropolis gives it its truest life force. There are seams of that within each Burkean performance, but especially in Infinite Life: survival, truth, the force of life itself.

Happy birthday, Marylouise.

(Above: Burke with Christina Kirk, portraying two of the women desiring cures for their pain in Annie Baker’s Infinite Life directed by James Macdonald. This is from the run at The Atlantic Theatre in New York. The production now at The National Theatre in London, where it closes on January 13th, is a co-production of the two theatres. Photo: Jeenah Moon/The New York Times.)

QUESTION ONE

You are now in your 80’s and in some way hitting your stride as an actor. What is the secret to one just continuing and continuing - and continuing?

Well … what’s the alternative?

Resting.

I still usually have the energy to do it. I do sometimes say to myself, “Why are you still doing 8 shows a week?” But I love it. I feel privileged to still be up to doing it.

Just the line load and the focus it takes is daunting for someone of any age. I guess it does keep one young in a way and keeps your brain sharpened to work that memory muscle so much.

I don’t know. I am still sort of figuring that out. I have had more trouble with that aspect of acting since I had COVID. I mean, sometimes it will happen in normal conversation when I just go blank and I can’t remember a person’s last name.

That happens to me during sex.

[Laughing] So I am forgiven then.

QUESTION TWO

What was your first job?

I moved to New York in 1973 to be an actor and would get the Backstage, as one did, on Thursdays to see what auditions there were to go to. And I was cast in a play right away. That was a nice affirmation. It was a play called Exchanges. It was being done by a theatre group that was on 2nd Street and The Bowery. It was four floors up. They were doing four new one-acts for three weeks. I was in one of those one-acts. A couple of friends from Philadelphia - I had moved to New York from Philadelphia - came in to see my New York debut and walked up those four flights of stairs.

You hit the fourth floor running. So you’re a Pennsylvania girl. You even grew up in a steel town named Steelton. The state motto is Virtue, Liberty, Independence. Tell me what each of those words mean to you.

Hmm… virtuous? I’ve never killed anybody or robbed someone. Does that count? I guess it’s about being good.

I will be 68 in March and …

You’re a baby.

Yeah. I guess everything is comparative - or not. Because I have reached the point in my old-age babyhood that I no longer think in terms of good or bad/moral or immoral. The only binary to which I subscribe is kind or unkind. So kind is a virtue to me.

Kindness is my default. I don’t think I’d ever purposefully hurt someone. Now I might throw something across the room.

And miss them - on purpose. That’s kindness to, you, Marylouse: missing someone on purpose.

[Laughing] Right. Let’s see. Hmmm … Freedom - or liberty? Options. Not being constrained by who you are. That’s tough in the political scene these days because you don’t know what you’re walking into. And independent? Being capable - but I don’t mean just physically. It’s about having the ability to accomplish the things you want to accomplish or to be the person you want to be.

QUESTION THREE

What was being on Ozark like? I so loved that series. And you were so perfectly cast as Sue Shelby.

I had a wonderful time on that set. I was working a lot with Laura [Linney] and Jason [Bateman.]. They were very nice to me. Laura and I share a stage background and we had lots to talk about regarding that. It was socially pleasant. Plus, the writing was so good you could do something with it. It sort of played itself.

Because you are such an in-the-moment actress even more than an arc-aware one (or seem to be) and there is also a quietude about your work, I’d assume that even though you are one of our greatest stage actors that the camera would appeal to you and the way you approach your art.

It does. I’m still learning it - the technical part. For example, if I go up in the middle of a line, I will stop and feel as if I have to start everything all over again. And they go, “No, Marylouise, they can cut it and make it fit. Just start the sentence again. Don’t go to the top of the scene.” So I’m learning to give myself a break there. It can be easier than I tend to make it.

You played a therapist in Ozark and many actors consider acting therapy itself.

I’ve been in therapy. I was fortunate enough in my early days in New York to be connected to a doctor who really influenced me. I am grateful for that because I was pretty lost. But I am not one who thinks that acting is therapy. I do think you have to use your whole self in a way to accomplish what you have to achieve in a speech or a scene. Real therapy helped me in getting over my self-destructive choices. I’d often just walk away from a situation. I just didn’t know how to face things constructively

QUESTION FOUR

Your character in Infinite Life is a lapsed Christian Scientist. You went to Lebanan Valley College which was first a Lutheran school and then associated with the Methodist Church. What is your personal spiritual practice?

I don’t have a spiritual practice. And I miss it. When I first moved to New York, I went to church every Sunday. My mother instilled that have-to-be-in-church in me. We were United Methodists. And then I kind of lapsed out of that. When I got to New York, I started to go to St. Clement’s on 46th Street.

The actor’s church.

Yes. I started taking an acting class there with Kevin O’Connor. He originated a lot of the early Sam Shepard stuff. He was sort of my first big artistic influence, I guess, when I came to New York. Hmm .. how did I get to St. Clement’s … I can’t remember. Oh! Right. I was dating some guy. He was taking Kevin’s class. He would complain and complain about Kevin as a teacher. And everything he complained about sounded like my cup of tea. I enjoyed going to that class. Then Kevin became Artistic Director at St. Clement’s. I synched with his tastes for new work and his passion for it and his passion for new writers. That still is obviously what I care about a whole lot.

(Above: Burke photographed for The New York Times by Celeste Sloman.)

You’ve been in two of Annie Baker’s plays here at the National in London - John and now Infinite Life - one of our greatest new writers. Her plays are just about existence in some way. That is their narrative arc: existence. They are non-theatrical theatrical events.

Exactly. I was talking to my cast mate Kristine Nielsen. Someone she knew had seen the play and told her that she was just sure that I was going to die in the end. That was going to be the expected arc. Of course, it wasn’t.

It ends with you in a deeply present moment. That is your signature as an actor. It was as if she wrote it specifically for you.

Oh, I am so glad that it feels good to you.

It is interesting to me that when I brought up your spiritual practice you went straight back into talking about acting as if acting is your spiritual practice.

I don’t know. I just don’t …. hmmm .. I guess I’m just more like a Steelton girl in that way: I ought to be going to church.

I had a sense when watching the curtain call the other night that there was another level of you American actors taking that call at the National Theatre. To me, it’s a temple. So it did seem rather spiritual.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s just wonderful. When I think about the people that I am following onto that stage. The history of it. We’ve all had such respect traditionally for the British actors who have worked here. Sometimes I do stop and think: I wonder who was in this dressing room.

And now subsequent actors can say that you were there. I know you’re humble but please own that within the acting world you are considered one of the greats, Marylouise. You are revered. I hope you know that. If nothing else, I am here to be a conduit for that to be imparted to you. Just the way that Mabel Mercer is a singer’s singer, you are an actor’s actor. You are beloved within the profession.

I don’t think I do own that.

Well, own it.

Well, okay. I’m so happy to hear that I can … ah .. give that. It makes me happy.

QUESTION FIVE

If you life were a pilgrimage what would be its crucibles? This interview?

Well, the death of my father when I was a senior in high school. The death of my mother and then a beloved aunt. And then another beloved aunt. Can crucibles be good things?

Sure , why not.

When I was at Lebanon Valley College they didn’t have a a drama department but they did have a drama club called Wig & Buckle.

Sounds like a gay bar.

[Laughing] Yeah, it does. They were having an audition for a production of Outward Bound. [A 1923 play by Sutton Vane which, after opening in the West End, had its Broadway debut the next year with a cast that included Leslie Howard and Alfred Lunt.] It’s all rather other-worldly and you think the characters are all passengers on a ship. It was really a ship to death. I was a freshman. They were having auditions in the lobby of the library. It was just one of those things - I knew the time and I knew where they were having them but I just couldn’t work up the nerve to go audition. There was another young woman in my dorm and I said to her, “I would really love to audition for this play but I just can’t.” So she offered to go over there with me. And so I did go and I did audition and I got that part. In the play my character had a breakdown scene because her husband had crossed over before she had and she was screaming, “Henry! Henry! Oh, Henry …” I just went with it as fully as I could. I felt like an idiot but I knew I just had to give it that kind of commitment. That experience was a good crucible.

I assume you might be a bit homesick having been here over the holidays.

Sometimes I am. It is an adjustment to be here. Figuring out how plugs go in and wondering why you don’t have a hair dryer in the bathroom.

The West Village is what home has meant to me for almost four decades now because I have a rent stabilized apartment. It was $200 a month when I moved into it in 1977. The reason that this topic about homesickness and what home means to me gives me a bit of trouble is that the Village has changed so much. It’s all so upscale now. I miss all the small neighborhood stores done in by the pandemic or by the realties of New York real estate. I miss the old restaurants. The new ones - so many of them - are not only pricey, but noisy. There are a lot of studios in my building on Jane Street so it’s sort of like a first apartment facility for rich young people now. A friend of mine lived in the building when I was looking for a place back in 1977. I had been living at Christopher and Washington. My friend arranged for me to meet the landlord and I went in there. At the time I didn’t have a regular day job. I was temping. I think he basically gave me the apartment because his wife was from Pennsylvania.

What we finally miss is our youth - although New York is quite different now. Your own youth - your childhood and teenage years - was spent in Steelton, Pennsylvania, which instilled in you ….

A love for football. I was also in the marching band. I played the clarinet. So I would also get to go to the away games. I saw all the football games. And Steelton was a legend in that part of Pennsylvania. It was this little mill town and they had football dynasties. Kids from the time they could walk up the steps of the bleachers -even before that - were taken to football games. Now I’m more into basketball.

My father was a basketball coach. I grew up in gyms. You grew up on football fields. And now we’re theatre nerds.

I know, I know. We are.

But there is a team aspect to being in an ensemble cast - like in Infinite Life. And you’re the captain of the cast.

This cast is extraordinary.

As are you, Marylouise. Again: own that. Thank you for doing this. I adore you.

Thank you so much.