Andrea Maulella as Adelaide Pinchin. Photo by Lanny Nagler.
Any interview is, for most actors,
an opportunity to both audition and perform. Those actors who do not
audition/perform during an interview are either making millions of dollars by
simply showing up on the set or stage, or are fools. Andrea Maulella isn’t
making millions of dollars, and she isn’t a fool, so when I met with her in the
Hartford TheaterWorks gallery, she both auditioned and performed…and thoroughly
engaged…right from the moment she entered stage right.
Maulella, who loves stormy weather,
is a slight, dark-haired lady with angular features and an embracing
personality. She showed up wearing a short gray skirt, a simple, white peasant
blouse, and dealing with a slight case of bronchitis that, she believes, has
hampered, to a certain extent, her performance in “Tryst,” the play by Karoline
Leach she is currently co-starring in with Mark Shanahan at Hartford
TheaterWorks. It was six days since opening night, which I attended. If she was
bronchitis-bitten then it certainly wasn’t apparent, but she urged me to come
see it again, because, “Last night, I finally got it, I got the second act,” she said. When urged to explain about finally
understanding an act she and Shanahan have played at numerous venues over the
past four or five years she initially shrugged, then said, “I know what Adelaide (her character)
is doing, what she’s driven by. I can’t wait to try it out tonight.”
Maulella, who was born in Maryland while her father was serving in Viet Nam, was quickly brought to New York – Queens – Long Island
– the boroughs. She’s a quintessential New York girl, sassy and sharp, the
total reverse of the role she is currently playing -- a very proper, frustrated
London shop girl circa 1910 -- and as the interview extended the LonGiland
accent manifested itself, especially when she became excited about something
she was explaining, explanations she would punctuate with expletives that an
Edwardian shop girl would blush to hear.
People attending a play may think
they are seeing a finished product, but a production, any production, is a
protean thing – it changes over time…or dies, and each performance is unique
unto itself. Maulella, Shanahan and director Joe Brancato have been tinkering
with “Tryst” for years – if “Tryst” were a hand-copied manuscript the
palimpsests would be inches thick – and that’s one of the things Maulella loves
about being an actor, the opportunity to try new things, to shake up the old
wine in the old bottles, to listen to both her mind and her heart…and to go
places beyond the strictures of the role as written. However, the fact that
she’s an actor, and a very accomplished one, is a constant surprise to her.
“I wanted to be a chef and I wanted
to be a fashion designer,” Maulella said. “My father found himself a single
parent and, well, it was cheaper for him to send us to a theater school than it
was to get a baby sitter. I was 13 and I just hated him for it.” At the time,
she had one sister – she ended up with three – and this sister was “gorgeous
and precious. Everyone just wanted to squeeze her and hug her,” Maulella said.
“Why would I ever want to compete with that? So, in my first play she was Snow
White and I was a dwarf, then she was a princess, I was a frog. It was
unnerving. So, I really just came to this by accident because my father was
cheap.”
Things slowly changed, because if a
young girl was going to do this, well, why not be more than a dwarf or a frog? But,
how do you get to be a princess? The answer to that question, asked so long
ago, might be the source for Maulella’s interpretation of the character she is
currently playing, for Adelaide Pinchin wishes to be a princess saved by a
dashing prince, or does she? Maulella’s frog into princess journey has marked
her, right from the moment she decided that she wanted this, whatever this was.
“It’s probably the most competitive
and ambitious I’ve ever been in my life,” Maulella said. “I would always have a rash from spirit gum,”
she said, quickly rubbing her forehead and upper lip, “because I would have to
wear moustaches and fake eyebrows, so I went to the family that ran the children’s
theater and I said, ‘What do I have to do to wear a dress?’ and they said, ‘You
have to practice,’ because they knew I didn’t care and I didn’t practice
anything. So I practiced and I got to wear a dress. Then I asked, ‘What do I
have to do to get a line?’ ‘Practice.’ Then I got a line.” She then asked about
getting a solo and received the same answer. Slowly but surely, Maulella said,
she became “wickedly competitive,” going home every day, putting on a record
and singing “There are Worse Things I Could Do” along with Stockard Channing.
“That became my big audition song,” Maulella explained, “and I was going to do
it perfectly.”
The game was afoot, but for all of
her competitiveness, there were inner doubts. “I felt I wasn’t pretty enough,”
Maulella said. “I felt I could never be good enough to complete with the likes
of them,” referring to the young female competition at the school. “They became
my arch nemeses; they were the bane of my existence. And thank God, because I
started applying myself. Then the people who ran the theater asked me to play
Peter Pan.”
During the run, the family that owned
the theater was out of town for a weekend and, Maulella said, “I was thinking
to myself, nobody is going to be around; I can do what I want, which was very
exciting to me.”
Manning the concession stand before
the show, Maulella, now sixteen, saw a group of senior citizens troop in and
thought, “Oh my God, we have to do it for old people. They’re going to fall
asleep.” So, after serving coffee to an elderly man, she went backstage
committed to doing whatever she wanted because, after all, the audience was
going to be nodding. And that’s exactly what she did.
“We went off stage and people
started saying, ‘Boy, you were really good today. That was really good.’ I went
down the steep stairs, trying to get past the elderly people who were leaving,
and this women stopped me at the first level and said, ‘Oh, you were as good as
you were in the movie’ – I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about --
and then I got to the next landing and someone said, ‘Oh, it’s you!’ and I
started feeling uncomfortable. I got to the bottom of the stairs and there was
this very heavy door which I decided to hold open for the old people – I’m
Catholic and those are the kind of things you were supposed to do. I had my
head down because I didn’t want anyone else to talk to me and this man I had
served coffee to before the show – he was one of those people I had thought
would sleep through the show – stopped and looked at me and then said, ‘Thank
you for taking me to Never-Never Land.’ I still get chills when I think of it.
That moment, that man, changed everything for me because, I thought, I could
see in his eyes that he wasn’t the same man I’d given the coffee to, and even
if it had been for just a few moments, he had gone somewhere, I was able to
help him go somewhere else. That was the most amazing thing ever.”
Maulella went on to study at the
American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Manhattan for two years, a time during
which she had “the most amazing teachers,” including Elizabeth Browning and
Karen Gustafson, among others, most of whom were working professional who,
Maulella said, “were more than generous.”
After her stay at AMDA, Maulella
turned away from acting for awhile. “I had some challenges to face just growing
up,” she explained. However, the profession’s draw on her was such that, after
a few years she began taking acting classes, until one day she asked herself:
“What am I doing? I’m paying to act. I’ve got to shit or get off the pot. Either
I’m going to do this or I’m not. So, let’s see, I graduated from AMDA in ’87
and in ’92 I finally said, ‘Okay, I’m going to be an actor.’”
Maulella has come a long way from
the young girl with a rash on her face from over-application of spirit gum, and
the journey has included, as she described it, “a lot of blood and guts.” Her
experiences have led her to approaching a role in her own unique manner.
“When push comes to shove, you do
what it takes,” she said. “I’ve been found on the floor praying; I’ve been
found in the wing banging my head against the floor, because, I thought,
there’s gotta be something in there but I’ve got nothing left.”
Maulella paused, sat back in her
chair, then jerked forward, hands extended. “Characters come to me asking the
same questions I ask myself. I am my own barometer of truth, so I need to know,
where does this sit with me? Am I in the basic ballpark of telling my truth? Another actor might have a
whole other take and a whole other ‘truth’ for the same material, but where is
it in me? And from there…I think it was James Cagney who said, ‘Just know your
lines and tell the truth,’ and that can often be challenge enough.”
Maulella is well aware there are
many actors who develop notebooks full of information on the characters they
will be playing, back stories and family histories and details on the historic
time and place, but that approach has never helped her. For her, “The better I
know the words, the easier I can say them, the better I can get out of the way. It’s the words that are the things that
lead me, the questions and the words. I also try to look at what isn’t said,
because what isn’t said is as interesting as what is said. It’s almost more
interesting. For instance, in ‘Tryst,’ all the things that aren’t said…it’s so
compelling.”
In addition to acting in “Tryst”
several years ago at the Westport Country Playhouse and now at TheaterWorks, Maulella
has appeared in several productions in Connecticut,
including two at the Ivoryton Playhouse: “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and
“The Miracle Worker.”
Andrea Maulella as Nurse Rached in the Ivoryton Playhouse's
production of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
In “Cuckoo’s Nest” she played Nurse
Rached, the tyrannical head nurse who battles Randall Patrick McMurphy for the
souls of his fellow patients. “We had a great director,” Maulella said,
referring to Peter Lockyer, “but I struggled quite a bit with the character.
She’s definitely out of my realm. I did feel they trusted me with something
that was…precious…a character that is almost more pop culture than a literary
figure. I wanted so much to bring out the humanity in her, and I don’t know
whether the text of the play could withstand that journey, and maybe because of
that I couldn’t honor what was written.
I wish I could go back…I think I took a running leap into the pool every night
and I enjoyed being hissed; I don’t know if I’ll ever be hissed at again. The
entire process, from auditioning for ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ to the final performance,
was all about giving up, about being willing to fail.”
Maulella may not be totally
satisfied with her work as Nurse Rached, but what she did as Anne Sullivan in
“The Miracle Worker” more than makes up for any doubts. At the time, reviewing
the play, I wrote: “I defy anyone to enter the Keller household and watch Annie
Sullivan (Andrea Maulella) fight for the mind and soul of Helen Keller (Jenilee
Simons Marques) and not come away emotionally shriven.”
Andrea Maulella and Jenilee Simons Marques in the Ivoryton
Playhouse's production of "The Miracle Worker"
“It’s because of the Connecticut
Critic’s Circle that I got the opportunity to meet Jacqui Hubbard,” Maulella
said, referring to Ivoryton’s artistic director. “You folks were kind enough to
acknowledge my work in ‘Tryst” at Westport
and I met Jacqui at the awards get-together at Roz Friedman’s house. I’d been
reading about ‘The Miracle Worker,’ I wanted to audition and then at the
ceremony they said Jacqui Hubbard and I said, ‘Oh my God, she’s here. I wonder…could
I…I can’t…it’s ridiculous…they would never…. I feel if I hadn’t been there, if
I hadn’t been recognized, she probably wouldn’t have given me a shot. It was
divine intervention.”
Maulella got her shot at
auditioning and, she remembers, Hubbard’s reaction consisted of one word:
“Lovely.” Maulella was satisfied – she had, for a few moments at least, gotten
to play Anne Sullivan. It was her role and she had done what she wanted to do
with it. “I almost fell off my chair when she told me I had gotten the part,”
Maulella said.
Having the opportunity to work with
Jenilee Marques, a young lady deaf from birth, was a thrilling and humbling
experience for Maulella. “You wouldn’t believe what she taught me about having
trust and faith on stage.”
Obviously, co-starring with someone
who cannot hear presents certain challenges, especially since you never know
from night to night what is going to happen onstage. Maulella remembers two
incidents that required she ‘communicate’ with Marques lest something dire
happen. The first involved a plate that shattered during the breakfast scene.
Marques was unaware of what had happened and was moving towards where the
shards were.
“For a moment, I thought,” Maulella
said, “didn’t she hear it? Of course she didn’t. So I grabbed her by the waist
and she fought me, she fought me so hard, that girl was incredible. I was pulling
at her, tugging at her – I didn’t want her to hurt herself -- and I couldn’t
say anything. How do you communicate that there’s danger without saying
something? Afterwards she said to me, ‘I thought you were old and you had forgotten
what you were doing.’
The second incident had to do with
the dog in the show that belonged to the Keller family. Near the end of the
second act it was sitting on Helen’s bed when, for no apparent reason, Maulella
said, the dog started to growl and show its fangs.
“I could see the dog’s teeth and it
goes, ‘Grrrrrr,’ and there’s Jenilee playing Helen and her hands are flailing
and I wanted to stop her from making any sudden movement because I didn’t know
what this growling dog was going to do. Jenilee put her hand down near the dog and
I grabbed it. She pulled it away and she went to do it again and I grabbed her
hand again and I put it on the dog’s back. I could see her hand ‘sensing’ the
dog’s emotions. Afterward, Jenilee said, ‘Oh, yeah, thanks, I felt the
vibration. That’s why I backed off.’ I’ve taken all of that with me everywhere
I’ve gone since. I’ve become more sensitive to who I’m working with. I worked
with an actress recently and I could see every time she was going to go off…her
eye would start to twitch…and I’d go over to her and…” (Maulella started
patting her own hand) “…and she’d come
back, and those were the greatest performances because something unexpected
happened, something real.”
It seems that “something real”
happens every night in “Tryst,” which runs through Sept. 9, and perhaps that’s
because the three primary members of the creative team, Maulella, Shanahan and
director Joe Brancato, are willing to take chances and try new things, so much
so that those who saw the production at Westport will see a substantially different
show at TheaterWorks.
Mark Shanahan as George Love. Photo by Lanny Nagler
“Adelaide continues to evolve,” Maulella said
of the woman she is playing. “She has changed, I guess most notably for people
who have had the opportunity to see it more than once, quite subtly. I’ll say,
‘Let me try this,’ and Joe and Mark will say ‘Yeah, yeah, go,’ and I’ll do it
and then ask, ‘What do you think?’ and Joe will say, ‘It looked exactly the
same, Andrea,’ but it didn’t feel the same.”
Director Joe Brancato
Probably the most dramatic change,
Maulella explained, has to do with what the actor referred to as a “dilemma.”
To wit: exactly how intelligent is Adelaide Pinchin? For a while, Maulella said,
she felt that she was sidestepping Adelaide’s
sense of fantasy, her sense of joy.
“We sacrificed it for this vision
of the ghost story of it all, but I felt dealing with that sense of joy and
fantasy was one of my challenges coming into the production this time around,
and it’s enhanced by being at TheaterWorks because it’s the most intimate space
we’ve been in. The acoustics are intimate and I feel it’s allowed me to really
enjoy Adelaide’s
words in a different way and really savor things that are just for her. For me,
this time around, that’s been a huge change.”
Another change is the sheer
physicality Maulella has brought to the role this time. Maulella explained that
a lot of the physical self-abuse that Adelaide
undergoes comes from what the actor herself has experienced.
“The last couple of years of my
life,” Maulella said, then paused. “I’m sorry, I have to take a deep breath.”
Her head turned aside as her chest rose and fell several times. “Well, the last
few years of my life were filled with a lot of challenges and…it’s very hard
when you come to familiar ground with familiar people …we all want to reinvent
the wheel…but for the three of us, we all end up where we started. Last year,
just because of where I stood in my life, Adelaide’s
increased physical abuse seemed to come quite naturally…giving up a little bit
more of the period behavior for a woman of her stature and class. We abandoned
some of the boundaries that previously existed. The increased self-abuse showed
up last year and Joe said, ‘Why didn’t we ever do this before?’”
Maulella stopped abruptly, leaned
over and pulled a cell phone from her purse. “I have to show you this,” she
said as she sorted through pictures stored on the phone. She turned the screen
towards me and there was a close-up of her hand with the area around her thumb
and wrist bone red and swollen.
“During rehearsal at TheaterWorks,”
Maulella said, “I kind of lost the hitting myself and I asked Joe if he was
missing it and he said, “I thought you were gonna do it, pepper it in somehow.’
Well, last year it hadn’t been a problem, it had seemed natural, but now I
didn’t know if I could hit myself, but I went for it and this is what happened.
I have to tell you, this finger…I bruised my head so badly, and my knuckle, well
my hand swelled up. And it was the sound designer who said, ‘Andrea, you’re not
doing it like you did last year,’ and she was right because last year it was
very easy for me. Here, let me give you a little demonstration.”
With that, Maulella, careful to
remove her thumb ring first, smacked her forehead with her fist…hard. “I think
the first four shows I just kept punching myself. My head hurt…I hurt myself
because it just wasn’t innate any longer, it wasn’t relevant to my journey with
this character. Over this run, the hits and slaps have become a little bit more
strategically placed and I can make the sound,” she said, again audibly
smacking her forehead, “without hurting myself, and we’ve compromised now so
that it’s no longer necessary that she actually hit herself…just the suggestion
she is going to is enough.”
We talked about the end of the
play…now the bathtub scene…which has also evolved: whether Adelaide
would be dressed or undressed, whether George, the character Shanahan plays,
would undress her or not, whether Adelaide
should wear the white nightgown…all of which has been tried by the trio. What
they have come to in the TheaterWorks production, without wishing to spoil
anything for those who have not seen the play, is certainly more graphic and
shocking than it was in Westport.
“If I can backtrack,” Maulella
said, “because it pertains to the ending, I don’t always know if Adelaide is a victim.
This time around I’m still playing with the idea that she’s getting into the
tub thinking she’s going to take a bath. How does that change everything? I
think that the audience…its reaction…does feed off that energy and I have
noticed people’s reactions when I’m playing it that Adelaide is not a willing participant in what
is going on. The other night I heard a woman in the audience scream, ‘Oh my
god. Oh my God.’ She must have said it six times. I’m glad my head was in the
tub because I thought to myself, I’m going to start laughing. The best reaction
we ever got was in Lowell, Massachusetts. This one voice called out,
‘This is bullshit!’ It was a matinee and she’d obviously had a couple of
Mimosas. She was not buying it.”
Maulella explained that her attitude
about her character’s motivation in getting into the tub clearly affects the
audience’s response to what follows, and that attitude changes performance to
performance. It’s a very subtle thing. If you listen to the words George speaks
at the end of the tub scene, Maulella said, you have to ask yourself, what do
they mean, how do we interpret them? She also noted that the splash she makes,
very intentionally, affects the audience’s response: the bigger the splash the
bigger the reaction. And for those wondering what she’s doing in the tub while
Shanahan is doing his thing, her answer was: “Abs of steel.” She keeps her
upper body tense, hands pressed against the side of the tub, while she allows
her legs to go limp. And then there’s the quick change behind the scenes, which
takes well under a minute before Maulella appears, fully clothed, for the
play’s final visual vignette, a change that Maulella credits the theater’s
interns for, including their sang-froid
while rapidly clothing a naked lady.
As for the future, Maulella fully
admits that she doesn’t know what will happen next. “That’s the fun, the
excitement, the angst of being an actor,” she said, although she indicated she’d
love to come back to TheaterWorks because “I just love the space, the atmosphere.
But I’ll do anything. I don’t know what will happen next but I’ve never been
bored.”
Andrea Maulella
And as for where she will go immediately
after “Tryst” closes?
“I’m going down to Florida to visit my
dad,” Maulella said, then threw up her arms, signaling a touchdown. “I’m going
to Disneyland!”
An appropriate destination for the
little frog who practiced and practiced and eventually became a princess.
