BY LUCIA MAURO
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Kate Fry is rarely off Chicago’s theatrical radar screen. She recently starred as Eliza Doolittle in Apple Tree Theatre’s production of Pygmalion and will take on the musical incarnation of the Cockney flower girl in Court Theatre’s spring staging of My Fair Lady. Earlier this year, she performed in Twelfth Night and Piano as part of the rotating repertoire at Court Theatre, where she is a resident artist. Now Fry is in rehearsals for the role of Celia in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of As You Like It, running Jan. 8-Mar. 9.
A sincere actor with the uncanny ability to make audiences feel like they’ve known her forever, Fry is also a masterful chameleon—tackling androgynous and ultra-feminine roles with equal urgency and credibility. Her malleable, blank canvas-like being—in a decidedly complimentary sense—must appeal to directors who can help her believably metamorphose into a vast spectrum of characters from Sister Sarah in Guys and Dolls to Pope Joan to Dunyasha in The Cherry Orchard.
Over coffee, Fry acknowledges that "versatility is my goal"—at the same time fretting about how "uninteresting" she thinks she’s going to sound when talking about her career path and approach to her art. While she has performed on the regional circuit, the Winnetka-born actor chooses to ply her craft in Chicago. Celebrity has never been an objective. In fact, our interview takes place shortly after Fry returns from a vacation—I repeat, a vacation—in Los Angeles.
"The highlight of my trip to L.A.," she enthuses, "was hiking to the Hollywood sign. I wasn’t all that interested in networking or promoting myself there.
"I grew up watching people at Steppenwolf and throughout Chicago. I knew I wanted to work here. I didn’t want to be a movie star."
Since graduating in 1993 from Northwestern University with a degree in performance studies, Fry has become a fixture on area stages in the musical theatre, classical/dramatic and comedic realms. While still in college, she helped found Roadworks Productions—performing in their earliest shows Road and The End of the Road. And, since childhood, she was active on the North Shore’s musical theatre scene.
"I was fortunate to grow up in an area where a lot of attention was paid to providing quality arts programs," notes Fry, 30. "It’s easy to take it for granted when you’re raised there. But there were so many resources. I never hammered a nail [in theatre productions] in [New Trier] high school."
Today the actor is a proponent of sharing those high-caliber resources with young people from under-served communities. She is involved with Court Theatre’s apprentice and outreach programs—the latter consisting of teaching basic theatre skills, with an encouraging interactive focus, to students in an English class at Wendell Phillips Academy.
Attracted to music studies at Winnetka’s Crow Island School, Fry recalls, with a tinge of embarrassment, the first time she "felt present" on stage. She was in the fourth grade and landed the role of the Artful Dodger in an abridged and sugar-coated version of Oliver ("Nancy didn’t die, and Bill Sykes was portrayed as a really nice guy.") Little did she know that getting cast as a boy would resurface more than once during her professional career.
"I was performing 'It’s a Fine Life,’" she relates, "and realized that I wasn’t just singing or doing the steps but feeling the music and the steps."
The stage became her second home, and Fry remains grateful to her parents for being supportive, "but not in a pushy way."
"I was brought up to think I could do anything," she continues. "It’s interesting that all three children chose low-paying, high-stress jobs: [a veterinarian, a teacher and an actor]."
She also was exposed to a lot of professional theatre experiences, like seeing Alec Guinness and Judi Dench live, and being inspired by Cherry Jones’ performance in Night of the Iguana.
When Fry enrolled in Northwestern’s performance studies program—rooted in literature and adapting literature to the stage—the bulk of her experience had been musical theatre. A new dimension opened up to her, and she became more interested in dramatic acting. She felt that the liberal arts-structure of her college experience allowed her to more fully understand and shape characters in classical plays, thus demystifying classical theatre. She also developed a "reverence for the playwright."
Nevertheless, her first paying theatre job out of college was the wholesome role of Mary in the musical version of It’s a Wonderful Life at Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace in 1993.
"At the time, waiting tables seemed so romantic," shares Fry, "like Nina in The Seagull—attracted to the romance of living in a garret and eating black bread. Of course, it’s pretty dismal when you actually live in a garret or wait tables.
"I worked part-time at Starbucks and, although I wanted to do classical plays, I kept getting cast in musicals. I think one of the toughest things about going into theatre is trying to marry your vision of what it should be and the way things really are. It’s much easier to neatly plan out your career as a student. Real life is a lot more chaotic and unpredictable. Early on, I didn’t have a strategy other than getting hired."
But, since getting noticed is a key component of a stage career, Fry soon found herself swept up in the cycle of "work begetting work."
Many opportunities followed, including another production of It’s a Wonderful Life at Candlelight; Guys and Dolls at Marriott’s Lincolnshire; Pope Joan and Don Juan in Hell at Bailiwick; More Fun Than Bowling at Organic/Touchstone; A Death in the Family with Streetsigns; Baby, Falsettos, Kindertransport and Pygmalion at Apple Tree; The Two Gentlemen of Verona at Chicago Shakespeare Theater; and The Barber of Seville, Tartuffe, The Philadelphia Story, An Ideal Husband, The Cherry Orchard, The Learned Ladies, Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards, Twelfth Night and Piano at Court Theatre.
Fry also has performed regularly at Peninsula Players in Door County, Wis.; and starred as Maria in The Sound of Music at Indiana’s Wagon Wheel Playhouse; Cinderella in Into the Woods at St. Louis Repertory; and Eve in The Diaries of Adam and Eve at Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab in New York City.
In defense of musical theatre, Fry welcomes the challenge of trying to make the story and characters believable and stresses the high level of maintenance required of artists in that genre. On the flip side, she admits to loving "the kitsch and the fun"—having been a huge fan of Hollywood movie musicals.
Fry unexpectedly became what she calls "Chicago’s favorite androgyne" when she decided to cut her hair in 1994. Convenience was her primary motivation. She wanted a low-maintenance hairstyle. Now that she’s the more glamorous Celia—and not the in-disguise Rosalind, as expected—in As You Like It, Fry jokes that "I’ll be doing a lot with my hair [actually a luxurious curly-red wig]. My performance will be a celebration of my hair."
For the most part, though, Fry is attracted to "transformative roles"—like Viola in Twelfth Night and Eliza Doolittle.
"There’s a very transformative journey that takes place in these characters," she explains. "Viola is her most feminine when she puts on a pair of pants. Eliza’s transformation is very internal—it’s not about the outside accoutrements of being a lady.
"I find them very true to life. We often learn something that’s opposite to what we expected. There’s something about being thrown into a crisis or a loss and having to go underground emotionally. You later learn that you’re a better person because that happened to you."
Right now, Fry is "jazzed about Shakespeare"—likening her more recent experiences with the Bard to someone who views an exhibit of Impressionist art, and suddenly the colors of the world seem brighter. "My ear is more attuned to language in general," she adds. "Even when I’m on the train, conversations around me become more profound, deep and human."
Fry also enjoys the best of both worlds in that she is a resident artist at Court Theatre (a residency which must be renewed every year) but works at other theatres.
"A change of scenery is just good," she states. "You get to flex different muscles by physically working in different spaces."
Acknowledging that every play and every process varies, Fry generally tries to read the script over and over again and be off book as much as she can.
"To borrow a phrase from [Court Theatre’s artistic director] Charlie Newell," she says, "that mental percolation time is really important. The play has to live in my head. To get to that place to let things happen, you have to be very familiar with the play. Then a month from now [referring to As You Like It], I throw it away and become one with the character."
Fry embodies her own theory that "sometimes putting on a disguise enables you to be truer." In the artificial realm of acting, she succeeds at being intensely real.
How does she achieve that almost contradictory balance?
After a few self-deprecating remarks, Fry offers an encouraging and heartfelt reply: "I try to preserve the reverence for my craft without slipping into pretentiousness. You never want to lose the heart of why you do this."
Then she pauses, turns reflective and, with a warm smile, offers a timeless piece of advice before leaving the coffee shop: "Just be true, I guess."