‘4000 Miles’ star Tana Hicken: ‘This may be my last play’

It was a lifetime ago that actress Tana Hicken rejected the obvious path leading to New York and the bland rags of ingenue parts.

“I wanted to be an actor,” Hicken says. “I wanted to do transformations.”

(courtesy Tana Hicken and Studio Theatre) - Tana Hicken

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The current stretch for Hicken, 68, is playing the 91-year-old socialist grandmother at the center of Amy Herzog’s acclaimed drama “4000 Miles,” now at the Studio Theatre. Washington theatergoers know full well she can do it: In a highly regarded career that began immediately before “The Great White Hope” at Arena Stage in 1967, there isn’t much Hicken hasn’t done.

So when she volunteers that “this may be my last play,” it’s slightly alarming. Hicken has never been a Streep-y chameleon — her sharp features and patrician voice are unshakably distinctive — yet she somehow makes herself over again and again. Reflecting on Hicken’s body of work generates a prism of light:

She’s been the life-giving Dolly Levi (in “The Matchmaker,” opposite Robert Prosky) and the life-annihilating Hedda Gabler. She has played Madames vain (Arkadina in Chekhov’s “The Seagull”) and dotty (Arcati in Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit”). She’s starred in Shakespeare and Shaw, Chekov and Brecht; she has shined in mighty Irish works such as “Dancing at Lughnasa” (at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and Arena Stage) and “Juno and the Paycock” (at Arena).

She was a mainstay of Arena’s acting company for 14 years and the last one on the payroll when the company evaporated for good in 1998. She earned 12 Helen Hayes Award nominations during that period, winning for leading roles in Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” and Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

“Hicken is so good it’s easy to take her for granted,” Lloyd Rose declared in her Washington Post review of “Long Day’s Journey,” typical of the critical glows the actress has collected by the armload.

Post-Arena, she has been nominated seven more times for roles with five different troupes, and she is still called on to shoulder demanding loads. Shakespeare Theatre Company artistic director Michael Kahn relied on Hicken for a daunting passage of the epic “Strange Interlude” last year. In recent seasons she’s done Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers” at Theater J and Athol Fugard’s “The Road to Mecca” at the Studio Theatre, the latter with her “4000 Miles” director, Joy Zinoman.

“If you want to learn something about acting, just watch her,” Zinoman instructed the young performers in “4000 Miles.”

Herzog’s 90-minute play is about Leo, a mixed-up 21-year-old who has just biked across the country and pops into his grandmother Vera’s Manhattan apartment in the middle of the night. The only other characters are Leo’s girlfriend, Bec, and a party girl named Amanda.

Zinoman, who retired as Studio’s founding artistic director in 2010, was touring Southeast Asia when her successor, David Muse, asked if she’d like to direct the play with Hicken in it. Even though Hicken has spent a good deal of her career performing big works in large spaces, Zinoman says the actress has an intuitive sense of how to capitalize on the Mead’s small-thrust stage. The director also speaks to something that contributes to Hicken’s clean, incisive style: “She knows how to touch the emotional truth of a moment and turn away quickly, so it doesn’t become self-indulgent.”