Actress Jayne Houdyshell’s journey with Stephen Karam’s play The Humans began three years ago in the Laura Pels Theatre in New York. An immediate transfer to Broadway happened and with it came four Tony Awards including Best Play, Best Actor (Reed Birney) and Best Actress for Houdyshell. After appearing in last season’s A Doll’s House Part 2 (and receiving another Tony nomination), Houdyshell is back in the role of Deirdre Blake for the Los Angeles production at the Ahmanson Theatre where The Humans continues through July 29th.
I recently spoke with Houdyshell about her passion for this part, the journey of The Humans and why the theatre will always be home for her. Her pragmatism was both very apparent and very refreshing.
Two years ago, after winning the Tony Award, are there still new discoveries for you to make in this play?
Absolutely. Two years later we’ve all been off doing other things. Now here we are returning to it and it’s really interesting. If anything our work has gotten deeper and more nuanced and nuanced in different ways. When we were doing the play in New York we were leading up to the 2016 election and there was a great deal of anxiety and also hope in the world at that point. As we were running the election happened and the outcome was unexpected for many of us and the tenor of the conversations about our country and the state of our culture shifted radically. By the time we closed the world felt like a different place. Now two years down the road many more cultural and political changes have happened. If anything the message of the play around the difficulty that people are having and the struggles surviving and living in our current political, cultural and social climate have become more intense. The play resonates in different ways now. It highlights for me how significant and important the theatre can be in terms of illuminating our lives and reflecting back to us the world in which we live.
You’ve said several times how much you love this play and you never want to stop doing it. Does it still inspire that same passion in you?
If anything more actually. The longer you do it the more nuance and depth you discover. It’s very interesting. We had such a kind of magical trajectory and run with it in New York. He had a relatively brief rehearsal period for off-Broadway. We were only in rehearsal for three weeks and then in previews with this very sophisticated and dense play. Something happened with the off-Broadway production which I’ve never heard of. On opening night we were summoned by [director] Joe Mantello and [playwright] Stephen Karam and they announced plans were already underfoot to transfer to Broadway. It gave us a great sense of momentum and also the grace of knowing we would have time to live inside this play. Then the Tonys happened. The whole thing was magical.
I saw the play at the Helen Hayes Theatre in New York and now here at the Ahmanson. I never doubted that your were a family on stage. How unique is this bond you have with the cast and does it feel like a family that gets together every night?
We are a family. We have great love and respect for one another. In the absence of the play in the year and half when we did it on Broadway and now, we stayed in touch. We care about how one another is doing. And that will always be true for us. If you re lucky it happens once in a lifetime in the theatre – the bonds made feel timeless. Our relationships will exist beyond this play.
The Helen Hayes theatre, with his seating capacity of 597 is significantly smaller than the Ahmanson with a seating capacity of 2,000. What is your perspective playing such an intimate show on so large a stage in such a large house?
When we played the Laura Pels Theatre it was 300 seats less than the Helen Hayes. We were worried when we moved it to the Hayes if we could size up to that space. When we moved to the Schoenfeld [a move necessitated by a scheduled renovation of the Helen Hayes Theatre] it was two times what we had just experienced at the Hayes, but we found this play had this remarkable elasticity. When we came into the Ahmanson we thought “Oh My God. We hope this will carry.” Actually it is a testament to the play that it does. It is because the impact and the kind of the weight of the play is quite large, even though the story is told in the apparent intimacy of one set.
This is not her first time on the stage at the Ahmanson Theatre. Houdyshell had previously appeared at there in the 2012 production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. She received a Tony nomination for her performance.
You are completing your journey with The Humans when the show opens in London at the end of August. I suppose middle class issues are the same all over the world.
I think indeed they are. England is very much like America. It is feeling a lot of the same issues culturally in terms of loss and economics with that country living with the impact of Brexit. It’s nice we’re going to close out the play in a tiny intimate space – even smaller than the first place we played. We’ll go back to that small room where we first encountered the intimacy of the play.
Women of a certain age bemoan the lack of opportunities in film and television. But the stage seems to be a great home for you. Do you envision your career continuing mostly and stage?
I think that is truer for me. I really am a creature of theatre. I came up in the theatre. I chose the life of an actress because of my love of the theatre. It’s always been foremost home for me. I’ve had a few small opportunities to do television and film work. While I appreciate it very much, I don’t feel like the real trajectory of my career is about that or will probably ever be about that. I just am most a home in the theatre.
Main Photo by Joan Marcus