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A Radical Vixen Retakes the Stage
JANE FONDA,
it’s hard to believe, is 71. While the rest of us have just about
managed one life, she’s had half a dozen. She has been a sex kitten, a
fashion model, a radical and war protester, an Oscar-winning movie
star, an exercise impresario and the consort of a billionaire. Her
marital history alone has made her a kind of cultural bellwether. Her
first husband, the French director Roger Vadim, introduced her to threesomes; she first made love with her second husband, Tom Hayden,
after he showed her some slides of Vietnamese peasants (this was back
when people took foreplay seriously); and her third husband, Ted Turner, told her on their first date, “I have friends who are Communists.”
These
days Ms. Fonda is revisiting an earlier incarnation, Broadway actress,
and next month she will star in “33 Variations,” written and directed
by Moisés Kaufman, almost 50 years (46 if you want to be fussy) after she last appeared on Broadway, in “Strange Interlude” with Geraldine Page.
She
looks great, not that you were the least bit curious. She has had a new
hip installed, and a few years ago she had her breast implants removed.
But she is still willowy and glamorous; she still has that smoky,
velvety voice; and age has brought out her bone structure — something
that the director Joshua Logan used to fret about. When she was 21, she resisted his suggestion that
she have her jaw broken and her back teeth pulled so that her face
would have more definition. No longer the chubby-cheeked vixen of
“Barbarella” and “Klute,” Ms. Fonda has at last achieved a sort of
Hepburnian elegance. She even looks a little like her father now.
As it happens, Henry Fonda has been on her mind lately, she said recently, sitting in her dressing room at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, where “33 Variations” opens March 9. With her was Tulea, her
Coton de Tuléar, a tiny, Bichon-like dog that is part of her
accommodation to life without Ted.
“You can have a big dog when
you’re married to a rich man with a plane,” she explained. Even after
their divorce in 2001, though, she has continued to live in Atlanta,
where she runs a couple of nonprofit organizations and stays in touch
with an extensive net of mostly female friends, including Eve Ensler, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan and the writer Patricia Bosworth.
About
her father, she said: “I’m becoming obsessed with his presence in my
head, because my dad adored theater. He didn’t talk much, but he would
talk about how he loved the immediacy of a live audience. I was never
comfortable enough in my own skin 45 years ago to be able to understand
it. I just wanted to escape. And now it’s like, ‘Oh Dad, I wish you
were here and alive, so I could say to you: “I get it! I’m finally able
to experience what you were talking about.” ’ ”
In the early
’90s, after she married Ted Turner, Ms. Fonda officially announced her
retirement from acting. She had more or less quit years before while
still married to Tom Hayden, who gave her a hard time about it. He
thought her film career called too much attention to her at the expense
of “real” people who deserved more credit.
“When I was really,
really unhappy with myself and my life, which happened in the second
half of my marriage to Tom, I just stopped,” she said. “Acting became
too painful. I just couldn’t. All the joy leached out of it.”
In 2005 Ms. Fonda resumed her movie career with “Monster-in-Law,” in which, starring with Jennifer Lopez,
she played with great relish a nightmare version of Jane Fonda: a TV
star who has burned through four husbands, gone bonkers and can’t
accept that she’s getting old. It was slammed by the critics but was
nevertheless a popular success and introduced her to a new generation
of fans.
“That movie was the single smartest move I ever made,”
she says now. She has two more films in the works, but in the meantime,
when “33 Variations” came her way, she embraced the chance to return to
the stage.
“I am not the same person I was,” she said. “I really
am a different person. And I feel now that I could really be better
than I have ever been in acting. It felt like something I had left
prematurely. I didn’t complete it, and I wanted to see if I could find
joy in it again.” She added: “It’s been 45, 46 years since I was last
on Broadway, and it feels like it too, in the sense of my personal
trajectory. I feel that in terms of my personal development there has
been at least half a century in there. Thank God.”
A large part
of why Ms. Fonda feels like a different person is that she is always
working on herself. She is like a relentless home improver who adds a
new wing, tears down the back porch and replaces it with a deck, puts a
cathedral ceiling on the family room and then goes back and rips out
all the wiring and replaces the plumbing.
As she documents in “My Life So Far” (Random House),
her 2005 autobiography, she has, with the help of therapists and even a
psychic or two but mostly by rigorous self-examination and ponderous
mental burrowing, labored through a daunting list of issues: a
disastrous childhood (her mother, Frances Seymour, slit her throat when
Ms. Fonda was 12; her father was famously icy and remote), anorexia,
bulimia, sexual insecurity, stage fright, fear of intimacy, excessive
need to please and more than one midlife crisis. She has become a
feminist, an environmentalist, a student of Zen, a practicing Christian
and, just lately, a blogger. (On the evening of the first preview of
“33 Variations” she even blogged during intermission; the blog is at janefonda.com.)
At one point in “My Life So Far”she talks about being “pregnant with
myself,” about to give birth to a new Jane, and the reader can
practically feel the pangs.
“Variations” is about a woman who is
in many ways the complete opposite of Ms. Fonda — someone who has shut
down and is out of touch with herself. Ms. Fonda plays a character
named Katherine Brandt, a musicologist who is suffering from
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and is
determined before she dies to solve the mystery of Beethoven’s
Diabelli Variations: why he spent the last years of his life obsessing
over an ever-expanding set of variations on a waltz theme, written by
the music publisher Anton Diabelli, that was clunky and banal.
Beethoven called it a schusterfleck, or so the story goes — a cobbler’s
patch. (Beethoven is a character in the play, along with his assistant,
Anton Schindler, but his music is played offstage by Diane Walsh.)
Distant and controlling, Katherine also has a difficult relationship with her daughter, Clara (played by Samantha Mathis),
and the eventual thawing of it, Katherine’s opening herself up, proves
to be the key to the musical mystery. On the one hand, Katherine fits
neatly into the long Fonda tradition, going back to “Cat Ballou” and
even “Barbarella,” of women who are tough and self-possessed. But
unlike, say, the seemingly buttoned-up Gloria Beatty, Ms. Fonda’s
character in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” or Bree Daniels, the
prostitute turned sleuth in “Klute,” Katherine doesn’t seem to have
that Fonda-like inner edginess or hint of stridency. She’s such a
perfectionist she has erased even that.
“In some ways she’s a
cipher,” Ms. Fonda said of the character, talking about her struggle to
find a way to play the part. She thought she had figured it out, she
said, when she was on a plane one day and, finding the nearby seats
unoccupied, had a glass of wine and began to rehearse with herself.
“It’s
always great to rehearse on a plane,” she said, “because people think
you’re mad. Anyway, I thought I had found a way to be emotional in the
part. I thought, ‘Man, I’ve got this nailed.’ I took it to the first
rehearsal, and I thought I’d really wow them. Moisés said, ‘Strip it
all away.’ ”
Mr. Kaufman, when reminded of this, said: “That is
very funny. Because what I remember is thinking: ‘Oh, this is really,
really right. How do we sculpt it?’ ” He added that he had chosen Ms.
Fonda in the first place for both her emotional range and her comfort
with intellectual ideas, and that she understood the play in a profound
way right from the beginning.
“Emotionality is really easy for
me,” Ms. Fonda said. “My father always said that Fondas can cry at a
good steak. And so on a personal and professional level it’s great for
me not to have to do that. The hard part is to try to clarify why she’s
so obsessed with Beethoven and what the problem with the daughter is.
That’s what we’re working on in rehearsal.”
The play sometimes
made her painfully aware, she added, of how withholding her father had
been, on the one hand, and, on the other, of her sometimes complicated
relationship with Vanessa, her daughter with Roger Vadim, who is now 40
and a producer and cinematographer. (When Ms. Fonda proposed making a
video about her life to help her discover its many themes, Vanessa
said, “Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the
screen?”)
“In some ways it’s very easy for me, this part,” Ms.
Fonda said. “I guess it’s because I’ve lived it from both sides. I know
what it feels like to have a relationship with a child where you
sometimes feel it’s two ships passing in the night and the signals
can’t quite reach one another and you don’t quite know why.”
What
was hard about the part, Ms. Fonda said, was that it sometimes felt
like a blow to her vanity. “I remember joking with Moisés,” she
recalled. “I said: ‘You’ve taken away all the emotion, you don’t want
me to have a sense of humor. You’ve taken away my sense of style.’ ”
He
wouldn’t let her turn up her collar, she complained, or wear a brooch
that had originally been part of her costume. “Would I like to get a
few laughs?” she went on. “Of course. But that’s not my role. It was
hard in the beginning, and I doubted myself a lot, but what I’m doing
now is I’m viewing it as a Zen challenge: to lose the ego and view
myself as the carrier of the message.”
At that point “Variations”
was still a work in progress. Mr. Kaufman was cutting some passages,
adding others. Ms. Fonda, who according to Mr. Kaufman had memorized
her part by the first day of rehearsal, said she relished the whole
process: the rehearsals, the improv work, the cuts, the new pages, the
daily notes from the director. “Notes,” she said. “I love notes. I’m
going to be sad when this part of the process is over, and the whole
thing is locked into place.”
Stage acting, at least if you’re
Jane Fonda, turns out to be like swimming or riding a bike; it all
comes back to you. “Vocally it seems easy,” she said. “I feel very
comfortable. For me the only trick is figuring out the dosing of
energy. You can’t really have a social life. I’m a person who gets up
with the sun and goes to bed at 9, and now I’m going to bed at 1.”
She
mentioned, with a laugh, that a friend had fixed her up with a blind
date for the following week. “But that’s not something I spend a lot of
time thinking about,” she said. “Nor do I miss it, frankly.” She went
on: “I feel 71 years old. I do. I’m really aware of the miles that have
been logged and of the life that has gone under the bridge and how it
has made me grow. I’m someone who has always tried to think about what
it has all meant. I’m a quester. So I feel my age. I feel grown up.”