The staircase in Brian Watkins’s play “Epiphany,” at Lincoln Heart Theater, goes up and up. Tall and imposing, it’s the form of centerpiece to a set that makes you surprise, while you arrive for a efficiency, who’s going to be climbing and descending it.
The actor Marylouise Burke, for one, spends appreciable time dashing up and down these steps, which she knew from the script can be within the present. So when her agent acquired a name asking her to play the lead position of Morkan, the warmly eccentric host of a cocktail party fueled by existential desperation and touched with non secular longing, she requested him to inquire: Was it going to be “a traditional staircase or a loopy staircase?”
Not that she wasn’t tempted by the half, with which she had felt instantly simpatico since performing it in a prepandemic studying. However Burke, who’s 81, diminutive and a longtime favourite of the playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, shattered each wrists and her left kneecap two years in the past when she tripped on a pothole in entrance of the West Village constructing the place she has lived in a studio house since 1977.
And typically, she stated the opposite afternoon, sitting a bit shyly for an interview within the theater’s glass-walled foyer, “you might have a designer who decides that the ground goes to be absurd as a result of the script is absurd or one thing like that. I simply knew I wanted it to be even steps going up. You recognize, they’ll’t all be completely different heights, or tilted.”
In John Lee Beatty’s design, they’re neither. Burke is on completely stable floor, which leaves her free to do the destabilizing. That’s one thing of a specialty of hers: luring an viewers in with a portrayal that on its floor is so immediately fascinating that we by no means suppose to count on that there’s extra beneath. And there may be at all times, at all times extra beneath — comedian, tragic or very probably each.
To Tyne Rafaeli, the director of “Epiphany,” Burke’s “specific model of humor” and “means to masks a simmering fragility” made her the best match for Morkan, a personality who attracts even new acquaintances towards her and elicits from them the impulse to assist her.
“Marylouise is that,” Rafaeli stated. “She has that impact on different artists. People who find themselves round Marylouise, they need to collaborate along with her. They need to lean towards her. She simply has that form of energetic pull. So the road between her and the character could be very skinny, clearly.”
Morkan is for Burke a uncommon starring half. One other was Kimberly, {the teenager} with the rapid-aging illness in Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo,” a job she originated in 2001, lengthy earlier than the play morphed right into a musical. A personality actor, Burke has been acting on New York levels since she arrived within the metropolis in 1973, when she was 32 and keen “to have extra alternatives to behave free of charge,” she stated, kidding however not. “It by no means occurred to me that I might ever in my complete life receives a commission to behave.”
It was one other eight years earlier than she acquired her Actors’ Fairness card, in a tiny half in an Off Broadway manufacturing of Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Damaged Pitcher,” starring Larry Pine. By now she has amassed practically 50 years of New York theater credit — many within the unusual downtown productions she loves, amongst them the title position within the Mabou Mines-Trick Saddle present “Imagining the Imaginary Invalid,” at La MaMa in 2016.
Her display credit embody motion pictures like “Sideways,” through which she performed the sprightly damaged mom to Paul Giamatti’s middle-aged wreck, and tv sequence like Netflix’s “Ozark,” through which she had a darkly pleasant, Season 3 arc as the wedding therapist to Laura Linney and Jason Bateman’s extraordinarily crimey central couple.
“I really knew most likely from the time I used to be 13 or 14 that I needed to behave,” Burke stated from behind a white KN95 masks that engulfed her decrease face. “However it appeared like such an not possible dream. And I by no means admitted that to anyone.”
She spent her childhood in Steelton, Pa., a Bethlehem Metal firm city the place her father owned a grocery retailer and her mom was a homemaker with comedian timing that Burke inherited. The city was happy with its highschool soccer crew, and she or he performed struggle songs on clarinet within the college band at their video games. However she didn’t know anybody who acted.
Her adolescence coincided with the cookie-cutter conservative age of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and her household’s expectation — “as soon as they came upon that I used to be sensible” — was that she would turn into a trainer. Off at school, although, in what she known as “a significant riot,” she swiftly modified her main from schooling to English, with a philosophy minor, and began appearing at school performs.
“I simply at all times felt higher once I was in a play,” she stated, wrapping her arms protectively round her physique, making herself even smaller. “I simply at all times felt extra who I used to be.”
Hold on, what’s that arm-wrapping gesture about? Burke hesitated, thought-about. Then: “I’d prefer to be good to that lady again there,” she stated, that means her younger self, the one with the “incongruous dream.”
After faculty she earned a grasp’s diploma in English literature, and found as a educating assistant that she hated getting up in entrance of a category to talk. Floundering after a short marriage in her mid-20s, she discovered herself dwelling with a sympathetic aunt in suburban Philadelphia, holding down day jobs and taking lessons at night time on the close by Hedgerow Theater Firm.
For years after she moved to New York, workplace jobs — copy modifying, proofreading, phrase processing — stored her afloat. When “Kimberly Akimbo” opened Off Broadway in 2003, she stated, 5 of her ex-bosses got here to see it with their wives.
She first labored with Lindsay-Abaire on his play “A Satan Inside” at Soho Rep in 1997; his “Fuddy Meers,” two years later at Manhattan Theater Membership, was a profession turning level, as a result of casting administrators began to note her.
When Watkins requested Lindsay-Abaire about casting Burke for “Epiphany,” Lindsay-Abaire thought it might make good sense. Whereas their performs are very completely different, he stated, “there may be that twin tone of humorous grief that runs underneath each of our works.”
He informed Watkins of Burke’s extraordinary devotion to playwrights, which Watkins marveled at nonetheless when she questioned him intently on the pronunciation he meant for the exclamation “Agh,” which seems repeatedly in her strains.
“That degree of specificity is only a present to a author,” he stated.
Much more strikingly, Burke was combating by way of mind fog and bodily fatigue to be taught her strains, having had Covid simply earlier than rehearsals began.
However Morkan is in her bones now — and Burke does, as Lindsay-Abaire stated, come “bounding down these stairs like she was a 14-year-old.”
At a time when, she stated, theater remains to be “not the identical” because it was prepandemic, she feels grateful for Lincoln Heart Theater’s warning about Covid protocols, and grateful that its viewers is masked. She can be blissful to be again onstage, alongside eight fellow actors, telling her character’s story.
“It’s very valuable to be going on the market,” she stated. “Going on the market collectively.”