Feeling lucky

Phyllis Kay takes center stage at Trinity Rep

by Bill Rodriguez

It's about time we get to see Phyllis Kay in a title role at Trinity Rep. For nearly a decade, she has been delivering the kind of impressive supporting parts that makes productions at Trinity Repertory Company first-rate. We laughed (at the hot-tempered Maria Merelli in Lend Me a Tenor). We cried (at the psychologically torn Lee in Marvin's Room). Trinity regulars have learned to expect something interesting when she's on the bill. I recall the first day of rehearsal for Angels in America three seasons ago. After the around-the-table read-through, director Oskar Eustis -- who heaven knows was familiar with the characters -- was pleased by a spark of ferocity Kay had found in the downtrodden Morman wife Harper, who ultimately will have to be passive. She added "a new color" to familiar interpretations, said Eustis, who had commissioned and developed the play.

And now she's Maureen in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the Broadway hit by Martin McDonagh, playing a spinster colleen in an Irish village, and giving as good as she gets in a vicious relationship with her mother. The plot is simple but has all the twists and treacherous turns of a one-lane mountain road. At 40, Maureen's last chance at happiness seems to lie with a man, played by Fred Sullivan Jr., who has taken an unexpected interest in her.

A dip into a rehearsal demonstrated the power of the play. The air was electric between Kay and Cynthia Strickland -- who was playing the mother with an intensity by turns smoldering and explosive --in the silences between their exchanges of dialogue. Director Brian McEleney was pleased and encouraging in the interludes when he made comments, fine-tuning the duration of a pause here, the expression of a feeling there.

Afterwards, Kay sat to chat in the upstairs lobby, at one of the little window tables above the theater entrance she walked into as a temporary company member for the first time in 1992. She played one of the back-up nuns in the comedy Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You; the Boston Globe's Kevin Kelly found her "wonderful." She was given the role of Lady Macduff in Macbeth the next year, and she has had steady work at Trinity Repertory Company ever since.

Kay admitted to being much more cautious back then about the chances she'd take in trying on a character, but said that confidence eventually comes along with experience -- especially in the tradition of this troupe.

"Just jumping in and making mistakes. `It was horrible yesterday, let's try this today.' But that's what so fabulous and why I'm so lucky to be working with this company," she said, slapping her forehead as though startled by good fortune. "I get to keep working and trying stuff with an amazingly talented collaborative group of people. Who's luckier than me?"

Kay certainly has gotten a variety of parts. Among her numerous roles at Trinity, and many roles off-, Kay has inhabited just about every portion of the emotional spectrum. I remarked how I especially liked her takes on comic roles, such as both the protagonist's boyfriend and girlfriend in The Mineola Twins, and a whole string of wide-eyed servants and feisty women in farces and comedies. She reminded me of what she said in a previous interview, about having used the same monologue -- about a woman having a nervous breakdown -- in auditions for both comic and tragic roles. Although The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a pretty consequential drama, some productions have lightened its intensity with humor.

"In this thing, you could play a lot of it for laughs. And I know how to do that," she said, citing the opening two lines: Maureen enters soaked, the mother says, "Wet, Maureen?" and she replies, "Of course, wet." "Now, I could get a laugh on that -- but it would be wrong."

"I think humor's OK because I think humor's so human," Kay added. "Maybe I look for those opportunities. They're not laughing at themselves, they're saying, `Do you believe this?' " And she furrowed her brow into a wry expression.

The acting bug bit, hard, back in high school when she was a teen in Fall River in the 1970s. A "talented, generous, and supportive" drama teacher, Jimmy Tavares, took her under his wing, Kay related. She studied drama for a year at Emerson College, dropped out, studied languages in Switzerland, voice and other courses briefly at Brown University, and eventually went to New York, studying with the famed acting instructor Sanford Meisner and his colleagues at the Group Theatre. Kay offered a good summary of the reality-based Meisner Approach, which contrasts with the self-absorbed Method technique. "A lot of people talk about how you become the character? No, no. You don't change, you don't transmogrify into something," she said. "It's always you, Phyllis. You can't change who you are. You don't become the character, the character becomes you."

Kay's account of getting one of her first parts at the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre tells a lot about her determination as well as her loyalty. This was back in 1980 when current Trinity company actor Bob Colonna was running TRIST in Newport.

"Bob said he was doing Hamlet the following summer, and I said, `Oh, can I play Ophelia?' Just that ballsy. And he said, 'I'd cast you in a minute if I thought you would do it. But you won't, you're going to go off and do something else.' And I said, 'I'm committing right now to doing it.'

So then she met Ed Shea, now a Trinity actor, and that led to becoming a mainstay of Newport's 2nd Story Theatre, which Shea was running with Pat Hegnauer.

"So I worked with them, and that was tremendous. We had a ball. It was wonderful," Kay recalled. "She's a great director, is our Pat."

No longer up for ingénue roles -- her first part at TRIST was as a chorus line chorine in Colonna's Merchant of Venice, done as a 1940s backstage musical -- her concerns have matured along with her talent.

"You think about who was kind to you, who was valuable to you, who did you some good, who treated you with respect. And there are a lot of people. I'm very lucky," Kay said wistfully, and then emerged from the sentiment in full humor. "Either that or I'm getting so old that I'm just forgetting about the mean things that happened!"

"As an actor," she concluded, "getting older and just getting out of your own way is of enormous use."

The Beauty Queen of Leenane is at Trinity Rep January 28 through March 5.