Naomi Jacobson, Changing With the Roles

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, November 26, 2008

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.

"We probably erred more toward a commercial title, if there was a choice between something that was new and something that was proven," Cullom says. Only one of the shows he picked, "pluck -- the Titanic Show," in which a string trio cuts up on the subject of the musicians who played on the deck of the sinking Titanic, was something Cullom admits he booked "for my soul." He fell in love with the piece at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and expects it will do well here with the right marketing. The rest are shows that experience has shown him will work in the Bethesda venue, he says.

Ever since the 1930s art deco movie house reopened as a legit theater in October 2007 (operated by Cullom on behalf of Nederlander Worldwide Entertainment), Cullom has made clear his intention to mount or bring in touring productions of the sort of middlebrow off-Broadway fare rarely done by nonprofit regional theaters such as Arena Stage, or his own neighbor, Round House Theatre.

The Bethesda Theatre's remounting of the musical "Altar Boyz" has done well, for example, and has been extended to Jan. 3. Steve Solomon's "My Mother's Italian, My Father's Jewish & I'm in Therapy" brought in audiences this year, and Solomon will return in 2009 with a new angle.

"The shows that really went through the roof for us last year were these smaller, quirkier . . . broader-appeal shows like 'Italian/Therapy,' " says Cullom. "That's our sweet spot."

Cullom says he's also responding to the economy with more tickets in lower price ranges. He says the average price last year at Bethesda Theatre was about $50. This year, it's about $42.

Follow Spots

· Arena Stage reports that its 24-hour New Deal ticket sale Nov. 14 sold 6,661 tickets at $25 apiece, and took in "almost $200,000," including handling fees. One woman in line at the box office at midnight when the sale began was even in a sleeping bag.

· Backstage announced it back in September, so here's a reminder that the memorial celebration of the life of Washington Stage Guild's John MacDonald, who died July 6, will take place 7 p.m. Monday at Catholic University's Hartke Theatre.