Spellcasting

Rebecca Hart channels at Trinity Rep

by Michael Caito

Maintaining distinct levels of concentration in front of a theatre audience and a rock audience involves differentiating between skill sets, which puts Rebecca Hart in the hot seat for the next several weeks. Now starring in Trinity Rep's A Girl's Lifeand playing gigs promoting the Rebecca Hart Project's self-titled debut album, the Brown grad sifted through mindsets last week.

Rebecca Hart: People around here know me first as a singer, which is funny to me because I was born into a theatre family, and they put me onstage for the first time when I was a baby. Literally, a baby. I spent all my time acting until I was in college as a theatre major. That's all I was doing until my last year at school when Imet Danny, now my manager, and Carson, who plays the bass in my band and arranges my material. It's weird, because I equally love acting and music, and [acting] is more deeply-rooted. I'm a better actor than Iam a musician. I know more about it, that craft.

Even though Jen's -- the character's -- music is very different from mine. It's garage, punk rock, very young, immature, silly stuff, and I'm playing an electric guitar, which I don't usually do. It's more comic than what I'm used to.

Q: Where are you from?

A: New Jersey. My mom's an acting teacher. She was an actress when she was younger, and teaches at a studio in New York. My father is a director and drama teacher at Rutgers University. And he's a playwright.

Q: Why Brown? You didn't want your mom as a teacher?

A: Rutgers was too close to home, I didn't want to go to theatre school particularly. I knew somebody I had done a lot of plays with in high school had gone to Brown, and said "You should really look at this school." I did a lot of theatre in college, then was ready to move to New York and start auditioning, then suddenly band happened. I spent my past two summers in L.A. recording both the albums and playing. Then living here, waiting for the guys to graduate.

Q: Which aspects overlap as arts?

A: One of the things I started saying when I started playing music a lot, becoming used to that, was, "Oh, this is not that different." The more I played, the more I realized it was completely different. It's hard to explain, so I'm gonna sound stupid for a while. The biggest difference is in theatre, obviously, in working with somebody else's material you're interpreting. You're channeling different parts of yourself to fit what their story is. When performing as a singer/songwriter, you're just you. It's your whole self right there, no protective boundary, no anything. Ripping your guts out, going "here they are." It's a different kind of consciousness.

Q: Were you surprised to get the Trinity role?

A: Yes. Excited that they would consider me for it. It was a sudden blessing. It was actually an agonizing decision, because it meant that for a month while I'm in tech and performance I can't play as many gigs, with seven shows a week. It was a decision we had to make within the band, and we had to fight that out among ourselves.

Q: Ever given thought to writing plays?

A: No. When I was very, very little I did, but it never took hold and I never found it interesting. If I was gonna go there I wanted to be given a script and get to act. Entering into that process of interpretation, someone else's world and making it my own world, is fascinating. The idea of expressing myself in writing has nothing to do with theatre. That's more about spellcraft or creating. It's poetry. Naturally, when I discovered music, poetry and music went together and it became became songwriting.

Q: You're playing a room where no one's ever heard of the Rebecca Hart Project. Do you approach is like you have a finite time to convince them?

A: There is a feeling about throwing myself to the lions, this is who I am and this is how I want to be remembered. Singing a song is turning yourself inside out for people, holding up your guts to the light. I'm usually too petrified onstage to think about convincing them. Again, it's about protective boundaries. When I'm acting I can't be thinking about convincing the audience, because if you are you're not doing your job. You're not acting. [In theatre] you're involved in your world and your work and whatever the audience get out of it they get out of it. [With the band] I'm completely thinking about the audience the entire time. And that is doing my job. Danny would stand in the back of the room and tell me at set break, "You're not sending your energy far enough. You have to hit the people in the back of the room with it." A director won't necessarily give you a note on that. He might say bring up your volume or be aware of where you're looking, because if it's not where it's meant to be you'll come off as false. Being a musician is a more conscious act of spellcasting.

Rebecca Hart stars in Trinity Rep's A Girl's Life through March 22. Tickets at 351-4242. The Rebecca Hart Project performs tonight (March 5) at the Met Cafe with Erin McKeown.