Clear Eyes, Full Hearts! Janie Dee on How Friday Night Lights Helped Her in London's Hand to God
Janie Dee has won two Olivier Awards and moved from classics to new plays, Shakespeare to musicals. But the protean talent is shifting gears big-time to inherit 2015 Tony nominee Geneva Carr’s role as the Texan mom Margery in the British premiere of Robert Askins’ subversively funny Broadway play Hand to God at the Vaudeville Theatre. Broadway.com met the ever-spirited Dee prior to the start of previews to talk sock puppets and more.
Did you know much about Hand to God before the role of Margery came your way?
The first I heard of it was when they asked me if I would come and meet the team. I read it at home and was sort of agog. At the end, my mouth opened and my jaw dropped. I’d never read anything quite like it!
The play is set in and around the world of a Christian puppet ministry in Texas, which must seem a world away.
What’s interesting as an actor is that your mind does things for you, and it’s pretty well painted on the page. More challenging in a way was that people kept saying to me “it’s a comedy” when in fact any good play has everything: in Shakespeare’s comedies, there can be moments of great sadness and in his tragedies moments where you want to laugh.
This play gets very dark.
It does, and our job is to set the audience up to go on that journey. Moritz [von Stuelpnagel], our director, keeps emphasizing with our characters that they don’t think what’s happening is funny. The audience may laugh, but the people in the play aren’t finding it funny.
Faith is hugely important to you, so did that make it difficult to sign on to a script that some might find blasphemous?
I do go to church and more than anything I feel close to God and don’t know what I would do without God: I talk to Him a lot. So I was worried about what the play might be saying about God, and it was wonderful to have Rob [Askins, the playwright] here to talk about it.
How then did you make the decision to join the show?
One thing I did was speak to my vicar. The wonderful thing is that whenever I told him anything I was worried about, he just wasn’t phased by it, and that gave me great hope. Good plays are always about holding up a mirror to nature and asking what are we and how are we behaving and how are we lying sometimes to ourselves—Hand to God does all of that.
Will your fellow congregants be in attendance?
Well, most are my age or around that, so they’ll be on the same page. And besides I’ve already done a TV thing called Crashing, which really has no boundaries and goes further than I’ve known comedy to go on telly. And yet I like it because somehow it holds on to humanity, and that’s what I feel Rob [Askins] has done.
Mostly from watching Dallas or Friday Night Lights [set in a fictional town called Dillon, Texas]. Friday Night Lights is probably closer and more accurate to where we are in the play. For me personally, going to church is the closest kind of idea I have of the situation Margery is in. I totally get her.
She’s a pretty extraordinary character.
She is, and I get the feeling a quite lonely one, too. She seems to be pretty alone with this boy [her son Jason, played by Harry Melling of Harry Potter fame] but for all the wrong reasons. I think she feels like a failure and as if she is trying to prove herself and that is proving very difficult for her. Even her Christian puppet ministry is not going very well, so I’ve got loads of backstory for why she is how she is.
How is Harry coping with the dual demands of Jason and his rather outspoken sock-puppet alter ego, Tyrone?
He is absolutely brilliant! He’s been compulsive about working on it while managing to be very laidback, as well. He’s got a lovely balance. There are times when I forget it’s him and I think he’s become Tyrone—it’s like a wonderful magic trick.