“THE only thing that matters is the theater!”
That passionate declaration was made not by Katharine Cornell, Ethel Barrymore or some other grande dame of the stage. It was spit out midtantrum with a stomp of her foot by a 5-year-old Lily Rabe during a petulant exchange with her mother, Jill Clayburgh.
“It was one of her favorite stories to embarrass me with,” Ms. Rabe said, explaining that her baby-diva moment came during a vacation after her mother’s peace offerings — a beach walk, sandwiches, swimming, a trip to town — had all been rejected. “She remembered exactly the dress I was wearing and the little brown sandals when she would tell the story.”
Acknowledging that her proclamation was probably something she had heard around the dinner table, Ms. Rabe, now 28, added, “Wherever I picked it up, I must have known it was a powerful statement to make.”
And not a completely surprising one given the environment in which she grew up. Her mother was among the most influential actresses of her generation, and her father, David Rabe, is a playwright whose work brought a distinctive new voice to the American theater. “There was a lot of theater, and a lot of talk about theater,” Ms. Rabe said over lunch at Maialino, in the Gramercy Park Hotel.
The past weeks have been emotionally turbulent for Ms. Rabe. On Nov. 5 her mother died after living, very privately, with chronic leukemia for 21 years. The next day Ms. Rabe bravely resumed preview performances as Portia, with Al Pacino as Shylock, in the Broadway production of “The Merchant of Venice,” the opening of which was delayed a few days to accommodate her brief absence.
“It was very hard to leave her side during those weeks when things were happening so quickly with her health,” she said. “And yet I had to keep going back to the show. I was with her on the Monday, on my day off, and I knew I couldn’t leave her again. On Thursday she wanted to go home from the hospital. We got her home, and she died on Friday morning. I was with her every second.”
Ms. Rabe spoke with moving candor about her family’s loss, pausing often to maintain her composure. While her sorrow was clearly visible, even more touching was the deep gratitude that surfaced whenever the conversation returned to her parents: “I think the experience of those two weeks is something we’re all going to be processing our whole lives. I didn’t know that I could feel closer to my brothers, or to my father, or even to my mother.”
That bond between mother and daughter was known to everyone who encountered them. The two even shared a Manhattan apartment briefly when Ms. Rabe was fresh out of Northwestern University’s theater studies program and first making her mark on New York stages, a period that coincided with a burst of renewed theater activity for Ms. Clayburgh.
“One of my mother’s friends said to me, ‘Your ex-boyfriends didn’t stand a chance with you and your mother,’ ” Ms. Rabe said. “And I think I probably was unfair to them because she was the first person and the last person I called about every single thing. Sorry, ex-boyfriends.”
While it’s a common notion that being immersed in work can provide insulation from grief, Ms. Rabe said returning immediately after her mother’s death to “Merchant” was her only choice.
“She would have wanted me to do it, and she would have done the same thing,” she said. “In a moment of tremendous struggle, making that decision on Saturday morning wasn’t a struggle. I knew it was what I had to do. And it was also a way to feel close to her.”
That Ms. Rabe should be mourning while experiencing professional acclaim in a performance critics have called a breakthrough seems oddly fitting for an actress with an uncommon ability to balance vulnerability and strength.
“She’s a quivering reed, and she can blow the house down,” the playwright Richard Greenberg said. “There’s nothing her technique won’t allow her to do as an actor. It’s boundless.”
Mr. Greenberg worked with Ms. Rabe on the 2009 Broadway staging of “The American Plan,” and with her mother four years earlier on “A Naked Girl on the Appian Way.” The duality he described has been present in every one of Ms. Rabe’s stage appearances since her Broadway debut five years ago.
Whether playing jittery Southern women in “Steel Magnolias” and “Crimes of the Heart,” or porcelain beauties from another era in “Heartbreak House,” “The American Plan” and now “Merchant,” she can combine gossamer fragility with absolute self-possession.
Daniel Sullivan, who directed “Merchant,” said, “That seeming contradiction is what makes her performances so hypnotic — that those two things exist at the same time.”
In her few short years on New York stages Ms. Rabe has specialized in playing young women who are cloistered, whether by wealth, privilege, over-protective families or by their own dreamy detachment from the real world. Yet they all assert themselves in unexpected ways.
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Stage Scenes: Lily Rabe
This is especially true of her subtly nuanced take on Portia. The Public Theater production was first seen in Central Park this summer before transferring to Broadway to become one of the few undisputed high points of the fall season.
“Ms. Rabe locates a troubled intensity and impetuosity in Portia,” Ben Brantley wrote in his review in The New York Times. “And the tragedy of Shylock’s ultimate humiliation, which she brings about, is echoed by her own dismayed discovery of the world that she must now live in.”
Ms. Rabe said her parents were in the audience night after night during early previews of “Merchant” in Central Park: “I remember, after the first one — and I had never had this experience before — they both just sort of looked at me and had nothing to say. They were really blissed out by the production.”
She described doing the “quality of mercy” speech on one of those nights, with arms outstretched under a mist of gentle rain, as a magical moment that she was happy her mother got to witness.
“I’d never seen Lily do Shakespeare and certainly nobody at the Public had ever seen her do Shakespeare, but she was the only person that I ever even thought of for the role,” Mr. Sullivan said. “It just seemed uniquely hers.”
There’s a poetic sense of continuity between Ms. Rabe’s characterization as Portia and the emotional empowerment of her mother’s most emblematic role.
Just as Ms. Clayburgh’s suddenly single Erica in “An Unmarried Woman” gradually learns that she doesn’t have to define herself through her relationship with a man, so does the orphaned heiress Portia become her own person in spite of her marriage. The difference is that her self-knowledge carries the sting of solitude more than emancipation.
Ms. Rabe’s film career is just beginning, but playing almost the opposite of the resilient women she has inhabited onstage, she gives an assured performance in the current release “All Good Things.” In a handful of incisive scenes she charts the steep downward trajectory of a smart-set party girl whose life unravels thanks to drugs, money problems and shady connections.
While she was at college, Ms. Rabe appeared alongside her mother in summer productions of plays by Israel Horovitz and Frank Pugliese at the Gloucester Stage Company. She has not yet worked with her father, though they hope to do so soon, possibly on an early play with which Mr. Rabe is tinkering.
“And I’ve always wanted to do ‘In the Boom Boom Room,’ but I don’t know if he’ll let me,” Ms. Rabe said with a laugh, about her father’s 1972 drama about a Philadelphia go-go dancer. “It’s a rough play.”
“For a long time I was cautious of working with my parents because I wanted to feel separate from them in the community,” she added. “Now there’s no more wasting time.”
*reprinted from the nytimes
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