Marcia Gay Harden
Newly minted Tony nominee Marcia Gay Harden is delighted to chat about her hit play, God of Carnage, but first she has to help her five-year-old daughter, Julitta, finish making a ballerina doll. Speaking from her home in Harlem, the Oscar-winning Broadway star is obviously an experienced juggler, balancing her busy acting career with raising Julitta, twin brother Hudson, and their 10-year-old sister, budding actress Eulala Scheel. “Go take a picture of your ballerina while Mommy has a phone call,” she whispers to Julitta, who obeys, chattering as she goes. It’s a happier domestic scene than the one portrayed in Yasmina Reza’s Tony-nominated comedy, in which Harden, James Gandolfini, Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels have it out quite literally after their children get into a playground fight. Carnage allows Harden to display both sides of her prodigious talent: Though she’s best known for dramatic roles Pollock, Mystic River, plus a Tony-nominated performance as Harper in Angels in America, Harden has taken on comedic roles in movies like Welcome to Mooseport, American Dreamz and Drew Barrymore’s upcoming Whip It! For now, she is savoring her nomination for the acting award she feels is the most prestigious of them all.
You’ve had a little time to get used to being a 2009 Tony nominee. How are you feeling?
I recognize that it’s the highest honor an actor can receive, and that is what has sunk in for me. Doing theater is such a specifically energetic and almost acrobatic work. And the fact that all four of us were nominated is just fantastic. I can’t tell you how pleased I am about that.
Do you consider the Tony a higher honor than your Oscar?
The Academy Award is tremendous, and I don’t want to denigrate that at all. It’s just that in film, so many factors are put together to create a performance. You don’t edit yourself; they edit you. And film is about something that looks beautiful. You tilt your head, the music comes in, the light is shining off the mountain lake in the background, and people start sobbing. You know what I mean? You can manipulate the viewer in film. With theater, what you see is what you get. You really can’t compare, but for an actor, I think the Tony is the highest honor.
Didyou and rest of the cast ever get a chance to celebrate?
After the Tony nominees’ reception we ended up having lunch together, and that felt like a celebration because we don’t really go out at night. Half of us have kids and the other half don’t drink; we’re not a “let’s go out and party” group, so it was lovely to just sit there, four adults having lunch and going, “Yay!” If any of us had been left out, it would have felt horrible because we’re such an ensemble.
And yet you are considered one of the favorites in your category. How much do you care about winning the Tony?
Of course I’d love to win. Of course. I did read something that said I need to “shake more hands.” I don’t really know what that means [laughs]. If schmoozing is what it takes, and I’m sure Jane [Fonda] would say the same thing, I’ll do a fair amount for the fun of it, but at the end of the day, there’s no such thing as “better.” I know what our performance is, and it’s not “better” than Jane or the two girls at Mary Stuart, Harriet [Walter] and Janet [McTeer]. You don’t say Beethoven is better than Mozart, you say, “What do you like better?” But at this moment, the fact that the four of us were nominated is a glorious win. After this point, it’s out of our control.
Why has God of Carnage become the season’s biggest hit play?
It’s funny. People love a comedy, and yet it’s a comedy that has a resonance to it. Our director, Matthew Warchus, calls it a “comedic tragedy,” not a tragic comedy. I think it resonates with audiences, this idea there’s nothing more tense than trying to parent someone else’s child. You understand the situation, and you recognize yourself in it. Someone came up to Jeff [Daniels] and said, “I think this saved my marriage.” But, bottom line, it’s a funny play.
Several reviews, including the Times, gave the four of you and director Matthew Warchus credit for the success of the play, rather than the script. Is that fair?
That’s not my opinion at all. I think [Yasmina Reza] is a wonderful writer and a very interesting lady. She writes novels, she writes poetry, she writes plays, she’s directing a film, she’s an actress—I think she’s phenomenal, and I think the play runs deeper than it might fall on you at first glance. It’s not just rollicking ride, it covers a myriad of issues, from the most basic: What is the nature of man? I don’t know that she provides answers, but no one really likes any playwright to provide answers. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about raising the questions and making us look at our own humanity and our own behavior and our own hypocrisy.
Matthew Warchus manages to get the most out of every element in this production.
Does conflagration mean when everything comes together in a flame? That’s what I feel like is happening. The good writing comes together with Matthew’s superb direction. Actors love to say—and I’m guilty of this—that theater is an actor’s medium, film is a director’s and television is a writer’s. This play, without a director, would be disastrous. Disastrous! He cuts out all the fat and then allows other areas of incredible rich excess. He insists that it stay dark, that we invest in the pain and make it rich and funny and lean and mean. He had to use Yasmina’s words to achieve that. She set up the situation.
Your onstage husband, James Gandolfini, has avoided contact with the press. What’s he like? Did you feel from the start that he’d be right for the part?
I adore this man. He’s humble, he’s loyal, he’s funny, he’s self-deprecating, he’s generous. Some of his choices are genius because he knows what his body is and what he can do with it. People forget that James began in theater, and then he got this huge break [in The Sopranos] with this brilliant character that took off and threatened to take him with it. But James proves in about four seconds flat in the beginning of the play that he can sell this other character, this gentler hardware man. So when he does take his shirt off and yell, “I’m a fucking Neanderthal,” there’s a little cheer [from the audience], but it’s not Tony, it’s Michael Novak. He does this incredible twist, using the guy we expect him to be and whipping it all back into the guy that Michael is. I just think it’s brilliant, and I never for a minute doubted that James could do it.
It’s been 15 years since Angels in America. Are you surprised it’s taken you this long to get back to Broadway?
Yes and no. I did Simpatico at the Public and [The Seagull at] Shakespeare in the Park and then I worked with Tony Kushner on a Laura Bush piece [Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy] he wrote for me that we would take around to smaller theaters. I looked at other Broadway things, but oftentimes at the end of it, I’ll say, “Hmm, so what?” or “I don’t get where it’s going” or “It’s not using me enough” or “It’s too much of a star vehicle.” I was spoiled with Angels. It was a seven-person ensemble in this beautiful comedic tragedy where everybody had something to do. In some ways, this play is the closest to that, which was the ultimate Broadway experience. I’m not saying it’s not fun to carry a show, but it’s much more fun when nobody’s sitting on the bench, and that’s what this feels like.
It must have been a huge challenge to perform the two Angels plays [Millennium Approaches and Perestroika] in rep.
Those were three and a half hours, and this play is an hour and a half. But what I’ve found is that the audience feeds you. I imagine it’s more exhausting to be in a dreadful play. [God of Carnage] is energizing because people are cheering and laughing; you literally see them wiping their eyes. My memory of Angels is the same. At the end of the show, all excess energy was gone, but you were full because the audience gave it back to you. You knew you were doing something meaningful. Tony [Kushner], for instance, gave Harper that incredibly beautiful speech at the end of Perestroika about the potential for healing, with the earth and the human body in perfect harmony and synchronicity. That’s genius. It had never struck me that the ozone was the immune system of the earth, and that AIDS was tearing apart the immune system of the body. The moment in time when both were in grave danger was the moment Tony wrote that play.
How difficult is it to do eight shows a week with three young kids, including twins?
That’s the pull. Between my husband, my fabulous nanny and my two assistants, we make it work. But it hurts, mostly for the little ones, who really want me there. I pick up my 10-year-old daughter from school and she comes backstage with me. She has her own dressing room right next to mine, and we do homework until the moment they say, “Places.” As I’m running down to the stage, I’m yelling, “I want that social studies done in an hour and a half!” I spend a lot of time organizing. Sometimes I ride my bike to see the kids after a matinee and then ride back to do the show. That’s the hard part, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
How did you decide to allow your older daughter to start acting? She’s worked mostly with you, right? [Harden and Eulala Scheel played mother and daughter in the recent film Home].
That’s right, although she was up for several big movies and they didn’t go her way. We select them very carefully. The things she’s done are more art films with me. At the moment, she doesn’t want to be an actress. She thinks she wants to be in the FBI or an animal rights activist; she loves the show Paw & Order. She has talent though. The movie we did [Home] surrounds the subject of breast cancer in the 60s, and her character makes my character stop drinking. It was a tough little performance for Eulala. I wanted to do a couple of things with her just get her head focused, if she’s going to act, in the place of being an artist and not a star, and of [thinking about] what stories she wants to tell. It’s not that I think doing Disney or something is bad, but there’s a level of commercialism that can get you set in a rhythm that doesn’t allow you to explore deeper forms of writing. I want her to discover who she is and not what television tells her she should be.
You’ve done a huge variety of parts, both comedic and dramatic. What do you enjoy most?
I like it all. Isn’t it nice not to have to compartmentalize yourself? I like being stretched, and I like having people identify with some part of what I’m doing even if they hate the character.
Which film are you most proud of?
Quite likely Pollock, not just because of the Oscar, although that’s gorgeous, but because Ed [Harris] pushed me and brought me to places I didn’t know I could go. It was a very hard process of auditioning to get the part [of Lee Krasner], and it was about character transformation. But as soon as I said that, all of the other characters I’ve played started jumping up and down inside me, going, “Wait a minute! Celeste in Mystic River and Allison in Meet Joe Black. Inga in Home!” I feel like I have a chorus yelling that shouldn’t forget all the people I’ve played.
And now you’re back on Broadway with a great character named Veronica.
The other day, I was invited to ring the Nasdaq bell in the middle of Times Square, and they put in back of me, “Congratulations on your Tony nomination Marcia Gay Harden.” It just choked me up. Because I remember coming here 25 years ago, getting off the bus at Port Authority dragging my suitcase, before they had wheels. The Real Thing was playing on Broadway when I came, with Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons and Christine Baranski. It was phenomenal, and I knew I had to put my nose to the grindstone to become part of this community. Years later, I’m standing in Times Square, and it doesn’t seem that far away from when that I got off the bus. I view this moment with a lot of gratitude.
See Marcia Gay Harden in God of Carnage at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.
