“You want your face to reflect your emotions. Your face is a road map of your history,” Roxanne Hart says with a radiant smile. And she can well afford to say it, because her classically beautiful face belies her age by about 20 years.
Roxanne Hart
Hart is currently bringing all her emotions to bear in Shem Bitterman’s mystery, A Death in Colombia, running at the Skylight Theatre in Los Angeles. “After putting in all this time at my craft I have tools that are honed,” she says. She’s been working steadily since her first film role in 1979 in The Bell Jar and a stage role that same year playing Susan in Loose Ends at Circle in the Square in New York. But she is perhaps best known for her roles as Brenda Wyatt in the film Highlander and as Nurse Camille Shutt in the TV series Chicago Hope.
In A Death in Colombia Hart plays an American anthropologist living in Bogota with her husband, an activist lawyer who is helping an indigenous tribe stave off the incursions of the oil company that is about to destroy rain forest habitat. But her husband has not been heard from in three weeks, and Hart fears that he may have been killed by any number of partisan groups for any number of reasons.
Suddenly a stranger appears at her door, purportedly looking for her husband. He claims to be an old college buddy, but Hart, who was with her husband during his years at Harvard and for 20 years since then, has no recollection of this stranger and is skeptical that he is who he claims to be. Who he eventually turns out to be, and why he is there, makes for a story that is gripping, enigmatic, and thought-provoking. Hart fluctuates from friendly to curious to flirtatious to wary to terrified to conciliatory and beyond.
Hart was born in Trenton, New Jersey, one of five children of a biology professor who moved around the country teaching at various universities as he advanced his career. Eventually he became the Superintendent of the Science Curriculum for the state of Delaware, but, Hart says, “we kids grew up like army brats, moving from school to school.” She was continually “creating herself anew,” she says, which undoubtedly helped in her later career, when she had to create herself anew in each new role she played.
Hart went to Skidmore and then spent her senior year at Princeton preparing to become an English teacher. Changing her mind, she entered the MFA program at New York University and spent a year and a half learning to become an actor. (Joe Regalbuto, her costar in A Death in Colombia was a year ahead of her at NYU.) Meanwhile, she put in her time as a waitress, a bartender, and a salesperson at Barney’s before landing a role as understudy to Blair Brown in The Comedy of Errors at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1975. (She also played a townsperson, a vendor, and a prostitute in that same production.)
Roxanne Hart and Sarah Foret
On Broadway she also played Jill, the stable girl, in Equus (“I was the 10th Jill,” she says), and then played the role in the year-long national tour. She also appeared on Broadway with Al Pacino in Salome and in the U.S. production of British playwright Peter Nichols’ Passion, for which she received a Tony nomination in 1983.
The following year she married Philip Casnoff, an actor she met in classes at Michael Howard’s acting studio in New York. Casnoff, too, had gone on a national tour in the ‘70s, understudying both Jesus and Judas in Godspell. In 1988 his role as Freddie Trumper in Chess brought him a Theater World Award for Best Debut Performance and in 1992 he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance as Frank Sinatra in the television miniseries Sinatra.
The couple loved living in New York. “We had friends across a broad spectrum,” Hart says, “and with our theater friends we talked about the art, the process, the craft of acting.” When they moved to California, however, they were dismayed to discover that “out here the focus is all on the deal.” But now that has changed a bit for her “because I’ve been working in smaller theaters,” she says.
Smaller theaters, not community theaters, she emphasizes. “In community theaters you have people from 90 different professions acting for their own entertainment,” but, she says, “but acting is not a ‘recreational’ activity. You have to focus your passion. I believe in artistry, in the sacred nature of theater. It gives me oxygen; it feeds my soul.” She was one of the four actors in last year’s Four Places at Rogue Machine — one of the most honored productions of the year.
She notes that her roles now often are “as district attorneys or grieving mothers. Serving the story, feeding the story line. I fill that niche.” She adds that she has access now to capabilities that come with age and experience, but “the older you get, the less they ask of you.”
Joe Regalbuto and Roxanne Hart
Asked what roles she would like to play, she responds, “I’d like to have played Masha in Three Sisters, and I’d have liked to play Hedda Gabler.” She explains that she played Mrs. Elvsted in Hedda Gabler to Susannah York’s Hedda at the Roundabout Stage, and when York left the play the role was offered to her. “Dianne Wiest had recently done it at Yale, and York had been doing it in New York, so I turned it down because at that time I wanted to create my own role.”
“In my 20s I didn’t realize how lucky I was in the things that were offered to me,” she continues.
In 1982 she had a role in The Verdict, the courtroom drama starring Paul Newman, with script by David Mamet, and directed by Sidney Lumet. “And I just thought, ‘Oh, this is what it’s like to work in the movies,’” she laughs.
Now, in addition to her acting, she produces a monthly Rant and Rave with Rogue Machine. Writers are given a one-word topic in advance and have to write a playlet based on that idea. This month’s topic, for Monday, July 18, is Death, and the public is welcome.
**All production photography by Ed Krieger
A Death in Colombia, produced by Katselas Theatre Company and Gary Grossman, opened June 18; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 7 pm; through July 31. Tickets: $20-30. The Skylight Theatre, 1816 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles; 702-582-8587 or www.ktctickets.com.
