Naomi Jacobson, Changing With the Roles

In Arena Stage's recent Arthur Miller repertory, the protean actress Naomi Jacobson played Beatrice, the longshoreman's wife in "A View From the Bridge" and Willy Loman's mistress in "Death of a Salesman." Jacobson says Beatrice, in particular, was one of her "dream roles."

In "Maria/Stuart" at Woolly Mammoth, Jacobson was a daft maiden aunt who gobbled cheese curls, using hooks where her hands once were. And there was that unforgettably hyper and loquacious businessman's wife in "The Unmentionables," also at Woolly, in which the character tries to stay perky while life falls apart around them in an unstable African country.

"I guess different theaters cast me different ways," says Jacobson, who has also done much work at the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

At Woolly, she says, she tends to play characters who are "a little on the edge. I think Woolly kind of takes advantage of my neurotic side. I never knew being neurotic was an asset until I met [Woolly Mammoth Artistic Director] Howard Shalwitz. There was this wonderful place where all my social awkwardness and neuroses were valued."

At the Shakespeare Theatre, Jacobson has played ladies of horizontal refreshment and vertical social ambition: Doll Tearsheet in "Henry IV, Part II," Madame Haughty in "The Silent Woman" and Lucetta in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona." She says she called Artistic Director Michael Kahn "and I actually said to him, 'Do you need any aging sexpots at Shakespeare Theatre?' "

Jacobson, who grew up near Santa Barbara, dropped out of the University of California at San Diego. "Antsy and impatient," she transferred to the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts, where she could concentrate on theater full time. She finished her bachelor's degree at Temple University in Philadelphia and got an MFA there.

"There were times when I felt so out of sync with the people around me. I was sort of on my own path," she says. ". . . I often felt like I was a weirdo."

Jacobson looks back at a kind of personal struggle involved in mastering her craft. "You have to explore all the shadow parts of yourself, and I think that in my 20s, I was really seeking, searching. . . . It's not comfortable to unmask yourself, to be vulnerable . . . before you have skills to protect yourself," she says.

The actress still views acting as a path to personal growth. If a character has some quality she'd like to emulate, she says, "I use playing the role to develop that in myself. . . . The idea being that when you play a role, it actually does change you. . . . You either heal something, or you take something in."

After a three-month break, Jacobson starts rehearsals next month for "The Winter's Tale" at Folger Theatre, in which she'll play Paulina, a character who takes a tragic situation and, well, heals it.

An eight-time nominee for the Helen Hayes Award (she won in 1995 for "Dream of a Common Language" at Theater of the First Amendment, and was nominated most recently for "The Unmentionables"), Jacobson will join 10 other regional theater actors next August as a Lunt-Fontanne Fellow. They'll have a week-long master class with Lynn Redgrave at Ten Chimneys, a mansion in Wisconsin that served as the Lunts' country retreat.

Bethesda Theatre

Ray Cullom, executive director of Bethesda Theatre, readily acknowledges that some of the choices he made in programming the for-profit venue's 2009 season were affected by the faltering economy.