Her Big Break
Actress Kate Debelack Found a Perfect Fit in the Lead Role of 'Fat Pig'

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 21, 2006

"The title is the worst thing about the play," Kate Debelack says. "You think, 'Oh my God, they're going to torture the poor fat girl.' "

Debelack is chatting and sipping coffee across the street from Studio Theatre, where she is appearing nightly in the play with the rude title: "Fat Pig." In it, she portrays an overweight librarian of great social confidence who is romanced by a slender guy she chances to meet in a luncheonette.

Taking on a deeply ingrained hypocrisy -- the bias against the obese in a nation of rapidly expanding waistlines -- Neil LaBute's comedy-drama seems to have struck a nerve here. It's packing them in at Studio, where "Fat Pig's" run has just been extended until Feb. 26.

The play makes some people weep and others seethe. "The response has been shocking in some ways," says Joy Zinoman, Studio's artistic director. At a recent performance, she says, during a scene in which a slim male friend of the librarian's boyfriend audaciously admonishes him to stick to his own kind, someone in the audience applauded -- and someone else yelled at the clapper to shut up.

The topic lends itself to introspection over a common insecurity. Attitudes about fatness often say more about our views of our own bodies than about others'. But a major facet of "Fat Pig's" fascination also has to do with Debelack and her poised, close-to-the-bone portrayal of Helen, a young woman who breaks the mold. She is afflicted with no debilitating complex about her size. It's Tom, her beau, played by Tyler Pierce, who is increasingly jarred by the relationship and who worries whether he's devalued because the world presumes he is the far better catch than she. (In our unbalanced social universe, it's still predominantly the man who's supposed to escort the trophy.) By the play's end, you're left to wonder to whom the offensive title is truly meant to apply.

It is a measure of LaBute's skill, as well as that of Debelack -- a 32-year-old actress who's spent nearly a decade working in Washington theater -- that you come to feel protective both toward Helen and the woman playing her.

Helen seems capable of taking care of herself, but how about Debelack? "Fat Pig's" poster, for instance, is a reminder of how loaded the issue of weight is for a woman. Debelack is posed as if she were a lingerie model: Stripped to bra and panties, she gazes at us seductively over her left shoulder. The scene that climaxes the play is calculated as well to thrust a large actress into a situation of maximum vulnerability: It's set on a beach, and she has to enter in a bathing suit.

"I wish I could say I'm as confident as Helen is," Debelack says. Although the play includes a scene with Tom and Helen in bed, it is the costume for the office beach party that has given her the most pause. "There's something about a swimsuit that's more vulnerable," she says, explaining that it was important to her to be allowed to wear a shirt over the outfit for her entrance. "I wouldn't go on without one," she adds. It's as if she feels the shirt, and her decision about when to remove it, gives the actress a bit more control over her surroundings, over how she's perceived.

Pretty and easygoing, Debelack is open to a discussion of the special requirements of playing this extraordinary character. "It's not like I don't know I was cast for this because of my physicality, my weight," she says. It surprises her, though, how many acquaintances, familiar with nothing about the play except the title, shoot her sympathetic looks and say such things as, "Are you sure you're okay?"

Okay? It's the lead! the look on her face says. "I've had some really weird conversations, people saying: 'This is so brave of you. I'm so proud of you.' 'So brave'? I say, 'Not really.' It's an amazing part, it's an amazing play."

Offers to play amazing roles are not necessarily rushing into your Hotmail account when you're young and ample. Zinoman, who has known Debelack for years -- the actress was a student in Studio's conservatory program and now teaches acting there -- says that when she offered Debelack the role, it was with a twinge of maternal concern. "If you play an adulterer onstage," Zinoman says, "the next day you go home and you're not an adulterer. This is not that."

Debelack, however, was much more pragmatic about the whole thing. For her, this was a matter of carpe diem . Like anyone with the bug, the dream is always just an opportunity away.

Little did Zinoman know that Debelack had auditioned in New York for an earlier production of the play. For the actress, that reduced the thinking-it-over period to about 11 seconds. "She said, 'All those parts I didn't get?' " Zinoman recalls. " 'Now, all those people can't get this one.' "

Over a leisurely conversation with Debelack, you get a clear sense of how long she's been waiting for someone like Helen. Born in a northern suburb of New York, Debelack grew up with three elder brothers in Minnesota and Texas and finally in Seattle, where in high school she became a standout competitor in oratory and forensics contests. In her senior year as a theater major at Western Washington University, she went to nearby Seattle and got a part in a professional production of "The Music Man." (She also is a singer, and has developed her own cabaret act, "I Never Drink Alone," that she performs around town.)

Stuck in retail sales after graduation -- "Lane Bryant, the store for fat girls," she says -- she came to the District at the invitation of her brother Drew and sister-in-law Linda Macri, who added a wonderful, life-changing Christmas present after she moved in with them. They paid for acting classes. She went to Studio, and slowly found her way into the insular Washington theater scene, landing parts in a number of shows by subversive (and currently dormant) Cherry Red Productions.

Alas, like so many good actors in this city and virtually every other, she must accept menial jobs to survive. Still living with her brother and his family, she works for a small law firm in Silver Spring. That helps her keep it real when she's advising her pupils at Studio: "It's always the hard part. I tell them: 'Don't quit your day job.' "

As limits go, she says she's aware that size can be an impediment for an actress (although her social life is full, and she's been with her boyfriend for two years). And like many who have struggled with their size, her weight can cycle up and down. "I had a personal trainer, and then I gained it all back, and more," she says.

Like Helen, too, Debelack's had her share of men with the values of, well, pigs. One fellow she had been seeing confessed to her, "I want to date someone who looks good in cute shorts in the summer." Her response? "Okay. See ya."

Interestingly, Pierce -- who plays the guy who, in Debelack's words, "breaks my heart every night" -- expresses his own misgivings about having to bare himself to an audience. "I have my own kind of personal body issues," says Pierce -- who in fact has the body of a trim athlete -- "and the last scene was a particularly hard one for me because I didn't want to appear shirtless. It was funny during rehearsals -- I was much more uncomfortable than Kate. She was all ready and like, 'I'm going to do this.' "

Debelack does give off ready-for-the-next-challenge vibes. She is not sure where Helen leads her next, but she is hoping that what she does in "Fat Pig" shows people her range. "The question is, will this translate to other things? Is this going to open more doors?" she asks. She knows not to quit the day job. But playing Helen has given her new reason to be optimistic about the night shift.