Anyone can play Hamlet.
What has made David Strathairn so admired is his ability to take the most ordinary people and transform them into characters as complex as any in Shakespeare.
So it was with the violently tragic and abusive drunken small town New Hampshire father he played in the movie “Dolores Claiborne” or with Strathairn’s brooding West Virginia coal country lawman in John Sayles’ “Matewan”–a quietly courageous man who struggles with the conflict of upholding the law while defending with his life the downtrodden people being persecuted by it.
So it is again on the New York stage with Strathairn in the lead role in “Eyes for Consuela,” a tense new drama by Pulitzer Prize-winning author/actor Sam Shepard, based on a short story by Nobel Prize-winning Mexican writer Octavio Paz.
Strathairn plays an average sort of American who has fled a failed marriage and his possession-filled but otherwise empty Midwestern life, and seeks refuge and solace in a God-forsaken village in the steamy jungles of Mexico.
Ignoring warnings, he goes for a solitary walk one dark night and is set upon by a knife-wielding and seemingly crazed bandit. But the man isn’t interested in the American’s money; he wants to carve out Strathairn’s character’s eyes–to bestow them as a sacrificial gift on a dead girlfriend and “make her smile.”
Through this ordeal, which ends in a different kind of sacrifice, Strathairn keeps his character an ordinary guy, such as you might find getting off a business flight at O’Hare. But he takes his man and the audience on a torturous journey in search of self that’s as fixating as Hamlet’s.
“I like to play roles that are complex,” Strathairn said. “People who have things going on inside them.”
Strathairn’s approach to acting is altogether different from “method” or classical training. Like some alien invader in a science fiction movie, he seems to subsume his own self completely within the persona of his character.
Characteristically, his “Who’s Who in America” listing notes only that he was born in San Francisco in 1949. The rest of the space is devoted to his extremely long list of stage and screen credits: “I’m Not Rappaport,” “Salonika,” “The Birthday Party,” “Danton’s Death,” “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” “Temptation,” “Mother Night,” “Losing Isaiah,” “Return of the Secaucus 7,” “Silkwood,” “Eight Men Out,” “Sneakers,” “A League of Their Own,” “Memphis Belle,” “Lost in Yonkers” and “The Firm,” among them.
There’s no mention of his much-acclaimed Broadway showing last year in “Three Sisters,” about which Ben Brantley in the New York Times wrote: “He brings to mind an often-quoted Chekhov dictum, `When someone expends the least amount of motion on a given action, that’s grace. . . . Mr. Strathairn’s exemplary performance alone makes it worth seeing.”
Whether they’re in Chekov classics or Hollywood crime thrillers like last year’s “L.A. Confidential,” Strathairn discusses his characters as though they were living people.
“I liked Rennie,” he said of his laconic, back bayou handyman character in “Passion Fish” who restored paraplegic Mary McDonnell to the joys of life despite wheelchairs. “There was a lot going on inside him.”
His lawman in “Matewan” was based on an actual person–a Hatfield of the Hatfields and McCoys feud fame. Strathairn gives you a sense of how much he appreciates what that man represented.
“We shot that movie in Beckley, West Virginia,” he said. “It’s so poor there that . . . people heard we were filming and came down from the hills with their entire families, hoping for work. We tried to find jobs for as many as we could.”
In person, Strathairn is much like one of his characters–shy and withdrawn with a lot of things going on inside.
Married, with two sons, he lives in upstate New York near Vassar College, and is reluctant to discuss his private life. He will say that his first work in the theater was as a professional stage hand–but not tell you that he went to Williams College with director Sayles.
“He’s the most serious actor I ever met,” said actress Tanya Ginerich, the Cuban-American beauty who plays the title role of Conseula in the play. “During rehearsals, when the rest of us would take breaks, he’d be studying his lines.”
Anthony LaPaglia, starring in a successful revival of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” down the street, gives his assessment of his New York stage rival with the same earnestness of someone revealing a great universal truth.
“David Strathairn,” LaPaglia said, solemnly, “is a really good actor.”
