It will be 'a different show every night' when Ed Harris takes to the Cork stage in Neil LaBute's new one-man play - and he's curious to see where it goes, he tells Michael Dwyer
Ed Harris will be on his own when he steps on stage tonight for the world premiere of Neil LaBute's play, Wrecks, at the Everyman Palace in Cork. He will remain alone for the duration of the play, which runs without an intermission, but he appeared quite undaunted by that prospect when we talked in a dressing room at the theatre last week, the day after he and LaBute flew into Cork from Los Angeles.
"Ask me that again after opening night and I'll tell you," he says, laughing. "One of the things I love about theatre, and what I really missed because I haven't been on stage for quite a while, is the rapport with the audience and feeling the energy of the crowd. In this piece I basically come out and talk to the audience for just over an hour. It's hopefully going to be very much of a shared experience. It will be a different show every night because of that. It's going to be exciting and I'm really looking forward to it."
He rightly does not want to give away too much about the play, but it sounds much more tender and intimate than LaBute's abrasive bash, staged at the Gate in Dublin four years ago, or his provocative feature films, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors.
"This is a very beautiful play," Harris says. "It's really interesting because these characters - this man and this woman, whose funeral it is - had a great relationship over 30 years, which was very full and rich. He talks a lot about that, how they met, his feelings for her and what she meant to him. He's a very honest man who doesn't pull any punches. He tells it like it is."
The character sounds much more grounded than the insecure men who have populated LaBute's earlier work, camouflaging their fear of losing power and control through targeting women - the male executives who humiliate a hearing-impaired secretary in In the Company of Men, or the company man in bash who rants that it's time for "a bunch of these women with MBAs and affirmative action nonsense get the boot". Harris says he hasn't seen any of LaBute's plays performed, "but I was very impressed with his first film, In the Company of Men. It's very tough material."
"Neil uses words so effectively and he is meticulous as a writer. I was planning to direct a play in New York last fall and I was looking at this rehearsal space. The play didn't work out because I couldn't find the right actor and then I had a commitment to another film.
"I happened to meet Neil at that space because he was rehearsing Fat Pig in there. That was the first time I met him. Then my agent sent me the script of this new play Neil was planning to do in Cork for a couple of weeks. I read it and I didn't have to think too much about it, and I said I'd do it. Neil and I talked about it, and off we went."
LaBute has a particular skill for grounding his characters in the sheer mundanity of life, lulling us with their apparent ordinariness so that we become more susceptible to the shocking revelations that spill out of them.
"I won't deny that this play has some surprises," Harris says. "It's a love story ultimately, and it's got a lot of humour in it, hopefully, with a few twists and turns."
With Wrecks, Harris finds himself in the relatively uncommon position, for an actor, of being directed by the writer of the play, LaBute.
"There's not really any pressure," Harris says. "I respect playwrights and the written word, and I've no interest in paraphrasing his words. In terms of Neil directing it, he doesn't really say that much, you know. We've been rehearsing since November 1st in Los Angeles and it feels comfortable. Of course, it's going to be a lot different to be doing it in front of an audience rather than just for Neil and the stage manager.
"You have to be willing to expose yourself, at least to yourself, to get to some kind of truth about a character. That is part of what I so enjoy doing. You keep learning about yourself and about the world, and you keep your eyes open, observing other people and being aware of what's around you. It's ultimately healthy, I hope.
"That's one of the reasons I'm excited about doing this play, because it's very personal, it's pretty intimate, and I'm really curious to see where it goes, night to night."
Wrecks marks his return to the stage for the first time since the Broadway production of Ronald Harwood's play, Taking Sides, in the winter of 1996.
"One of the main reasons I haven't done much theatre in recent years," Harris says, "is that I've got a 12-year-old daughter and I don't want to go to New York and do a play for six months if that means uprooting her or not seeing her for all that time. I love doing theatre in New York and I hope to do some more when she gets a little older."
Harris, who turns 55 next Monday, was born and raised in Tenafly, New Jersey, and lives in California with his actor wife, Amy Madigan, and their daughter, Lily. It would be an understatement to say that he is unimpressed with the present governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"Well, his six or seven propositions got soundly defeated in the voting this month," he says. "That cost about $60 to €70 million, which could have gone to the state. They all failed, so he's scrambling to survive right now. Everyone thought it was so funny when he was elected governor, but it's no joke now. California is now ranked something like 46th of all the states in terms of per capita spending on children's education. It's just appalling."
Harris speaks with more affection for Ireland, a country he first visited in the early 1980s, inspired by the handsome landscapes of Ryan's Daughter to explore west Co Kerry. He returned this year with his wife and daughter for a holiday in Connemara and in Co Monaghan.
"I really do like this country very much," he says. "I like the people and it's a good feeling to be back here. I know that it's boomed here in recent years and I hope that, with the growth, there's some attention paid to the aesthetic of things, you know. It's hard to watch some of the charm being ruined. Everywhere you go there are these huge cranes all around."
It is 25 years since Harris played his first leading role in a film, as a jousting motorcyclist in George Romero's Knightriders.
"Yeah, I've been doing it for quite a while," he says. "And I've enjoyed it and I'm still enjoying it. I like meeting these different challenges along the way and doing things that feel new to me and with people I haven't worked with before. I can't complain. Things are going okay."
Harris has acted in close on 50 movies since then, and directed one of them, Pollock, a labour of love in which he portrayed painter Jackson Pollock.
"I've got another one now that I want to direct," he says. "I decided not to direct again for quite a while, because I worked on Pollock for most of a decade. I was so preoccupied with it for so long that I didn't want to get into the same situation too soon again. But I recently read a western script that I'd really love to do."
His latest film as an actor is Copying Beethoven, his third with Polish director Agnieska Holland following To Kill a Priest (1988) and The Third Miracle (1999). Harris plays Beethoven, with Diane Kruger as the young musical copyist who comes to work for him, and the film follows the relationship that develops between them.
Beethoven is the latest in a long line of real-life people Harris has portrayed on screen, among them Jackson Pollock, astronaut John Glenn (in The Right Stuff), Watergate mastermind E Howard Hunt (JFK), Nasa mission control director Gene Kranz (Apollo 13), and Patsy Cline's abusive husband, Charlie Dick (Sweet Dreams). Does he feel an additional responsibility when it comes to playing real-life characters?
"I guess you do, in some sense," he says. "You want to do justice to whatever life it is and you want to respect the life. A lot depends on how much is fiction or not. You also have so much research to do as you delve into the character. In Pollock's case, there was all his work and so much written about him.
"In Beethoven's case, even more has been written about him, and the music is great. That film is basically historical fiction, set in the last years of his life, after he had composed the ninth symphony and he was working on the late string quartets. It's not something I seek out, but it's always interesting to portray great lives."
Harris was last seen on our screens as a thoroughly malevolent character in David Cronenberg's riveting A History of Violence.
"That was a really good experience, working with David and that cast," he says. "My character was a bit of a creep, so I had a good time."
The film was a critical favourite this year at Cannes, where it surprised many, though not Harris, by failing to collect any awards from the jury.
"It's like a dog show," he says. "It's very subjective. You're judging between a cocker spaniel and a Great Dane or whatever. It depends on what you like."
He has been nominated for an Oscar four times in the past nine years - as best supporting actor in Apollo 13, The Truman Show and The Hours, and as best actor for Pollock.
"Yeah, I've been having a quite a run of it," he says with an air of weary cynicism.
Oscar night clearly isn't one of his favourite experiences. "It gets to be a pain in the ass every time when they call out somebody else's name," he says.
Harris may not have won an Oscar - not yet, anyhow - but he did direct an Oscar-winning performance in Marcia Gay Harden's portrayal of Jackson Pollock's artist wife, Lee Krasner.
"That was really exciting," he says. "Probably one of the most exciting moments of my life, and well deserved."
His wife, Amy Madigan, herself an Oscar nominee for Twice in a Lifetime (1986), will join him in Cork before the end of his run in Wrecks. Two nights ago, they celebrated their 21st wedding anniversary down a transatlantic phone line from Cork to Los Angeles. They got married in Waxahachie, Texas, when they were working on their first film together, Places in the Heart.
"We had a morning off and we were married by a justice of the peace named Billy Ray Moon," Harris recalls with a smile. "And then we went back to work in the afternoon." Did the movie's cast and crew join them at the wedding?
"No," he laughs again, "just our dog."
Wrecks runs from tonight until Dec 3 at 8pm nightly (except on Nov 27) at the Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork, with 5pm matinees on Sat, Nov 26 and Sat, Dec 3
