4-28-06
The Midlife Success of Rondi Reed
For the latter, witness Rondi Reed. Walking into her dressing room at the Oriental Theatre, one immediately encounters a lush leopard-print chaise lounge, smothered with an assortment of colorful throw cushions. But before her guest has even settled in, Reed, still in her full Madame Morrible maquillage for Wicked (she’s taking time between the matinee and evening performances for this interview, and has already conducted a between-the-shows backstage tour for another group of visitors) sweeps aside the pillows and regales me with the story of how the chaise came to be.
She was looking for a simple unpretentious little sofa, something to rest on between shows, and went shopping at the State Street Marshall Field’s with fellow cast mates, including Kristoffer Cusick, who plays Fiyero. He spied the lounge in question, and fought hard to convince her to buy it. “I told him, ‘Don’t you think it’s a little too much, maybe a little over the top?’ And Kristoffer said, ‘You’re in Wicked! If you can’t be over the top for this show, when can you be?’” And so the lounge occupies a place of honor in the dressing room, along with a string of red-hot-chili-pepper lights around her mirror and an Annie Leibovitz photograph of the Steppenwolf ensemble at 25 on the wall.
At a time of life when many actresses struggle to find roles that will stretch them beyond the narrow confines of “supportive wife-mother-neighbor,” Reed has been knocking one item after another off the “some day” list of dream projects—and begun to reap the accolades that came earlier to many of her Steppenwolf peers. In addition to achieving her girlhood dream of being in a big Broadway-style musical, Reed has, in the last two years, also appeared in her first professional Shakespeare play—as the Nurse in Chicago Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in spring 2005. That role won her a Joseph Jefferson supporting actress nomination. (She also received a nod in the same category on the musical side for Wicked.) Reed garnered a Joseph Jefferson Award—her first—for best actress for her blistering 2004 performance in The Fall to Earth at Steppenwolf, written by Joel Drake Johnson, one of her best friends from high school days in Dixon, Illinois.
She’s earned the right to relish some of the grander perks, but Reed seems focused on the work ahead. Though willing to ride the Wicked wave for the time being, she’s taking a break in May to appear in Northlight’s production of William Nicholson’s disintegrating-marriage drama, The Retreat From Moscow, directed by BJ Jones. (Reed’s Steppenwolf colleague, John Mahoney, was originally supposed to co-star, but has bowed out for health reasons, with the role now filled by Matt DeCaro.)
Reed in Steppenwolf's 2004 production of A Fall to Earth
She met the core members of the original Steppenwolf ensemble at Illinois State University, but Reed resisted joining the company until four years into its existence. She and her then-boyfriend Stephen Eich (the two were married for several years and divorced in the early ’90s) worked and lived in Minneapolis after graduating from ISU—she had a daytime gig as a bank teller, and he earned his MFA in directing from the University of Minnesota. Then Steppenwolf moved from that infamous church basement in Highland Park to Chicago, and they made another pitch to Reed. “They said, ‘We don’t have any character women, and we really want you to come and join.’ And then [Eich] came in and said, ‘Well, I’ll do the business end of things.’ So we came as a package.” (Eich served as the company’s managing director from 1979 to 1995. He currently holds the same post at the Geffen Playhouse in LA.)
From the beginning, Reed was identified with roles that often required her to play much older than she actually was. “I think part of my growth as an actor has definitely been because Steppenwolf has afforded me roles and plays and things that I would never have been cast in anywhere else. I think in the early years, it was because we didn’t cast outside of our own group. Everyone did everything, and we didn’t even think twice about it.”
But despite appearing in highly lauded Steppenwolf productions like 1981’s Balm in Gilead, and traveling to Broadway with The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Reed wasn’t one of the ensemble members who reaped the higher public profiles and paychecks of a Hollywood career. Ironically, Reed now credits that awkward time for building her chops as an actor and preparing her for the life in the theatre she now enjoys.
“I remember having an epiphany at one point. It was when all our bigger stars were getting noticed, and it was like I wouldn’t even get a mention in a review and I was getting so frustrated and so upset. There came a point when I thought, ‘You know what? I’ve got to get over this ego kind of thing. I need to do my work. And clearly, if my work was better, I might get noticed.’ And my husband also said to me, ‘Maybe you just have to work harder than other people.’ To which I responded, ‘What?!?’ I was so upset and so indignant. But that was a big turning point, and I lost a certain amount of self-consciousness. I had just done so many plays back-to-back that I really didn’t have anything to lose. And I began to take bigger risks, and I began to work harder.”
For many, Reed’s performance as Faye in The Fall to Earth, the complicated and conflicted mother at the heart of Johnson’s family tragedy, remains indelible. Reed’s fearless and ultimately heartbreaking take on the overpowering matriarch is more remarkable, given her own family history. “I lost my mother when I was 12 years old. So I have no frame of reference for a mother-daughter relationship. It was kind of like I was a blank slate where that was concerned. What that did was give me license. I would talk to anybody and everybody I would meet about, ‘How do you feel about your mother? How’s your relationship?’ It was like I just had to dive into it. I had no judgments against Faye, because I didn’t really have a personal bias or a personal experience. And in a way, I think that let me go some places that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to.”
Though Reed and Johnson were what she describes as “theatre geeks” in Dixon, and would plan road trips during their school vacations to see shows in Chicago, she didn’t bring the play to Steppenwolf’s attention. She directed an early reading of the script at Chicago Dramatists at Russ Tutterow’s invitation, with Deanna Dunagan playing Faye. “Then the next thing, Martha [Lavey] calls me up and says, ‘We’re going to do this play and we want you to do the lead.’” Reed, who had been working extensively with Rick Snyder and knew that he wanted to take on more directing opportunities, suggested that he helm the show. “It sort of came together very fortuitously. For years, I had been trying to work with Joel on something.”
Asked if she feels that she is in a position to suggest plays to Lavey that contain good roles for her (as Mahoney has done with The Drawer Boy and as Kevin Anderson did with I Never Sang For My Father) Reed says, “Yes, I do. If you have a project you believe in, she’s always begging us to let her know. She will take a leap of faith with an actor or a certain project that somebody is passionate about.”
Says Lavey, “Do we think about Rondi as we shape a season? Yes. She’s one of the stalwart members, and since she’s in Chicago, she has the ability to commit more time. She can do a four-month run with The Cherry Orchard.”
Lavey adds, “Rondi is a stage creature. She loves the theatre, not just the performance aspect. She brings so much to a rehearsal room, a cast. The society of theatre folk is one she is very comfortable with and adds to immeasurably. She brings treats to the cast and cares about them.”
During the interview, a fellow cast member pops in to borrow some makeup, but unfortunately, Reed is out of the shade he is looking for. “Mac stopped making that color,” she sighs.
“These kids who I came into Wicked with from New York, they didn’t know who I was, but they knew Steppenwolf,” Reed says. “They come in here and they see this Leibovitz photograph and they say, ‘You’re a part of this?’ They know the name and the brand and the history and what it stands for.”
Reed did take a stab at living and working in Los Angeles in the early ’90s, after her divorce from Eich. She logged some episodic television work and a few films, and also took time out for an extended tour with Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, including the off-Broadway run. And then the film offers started to dry up, and Reed returned to her artistic home with Steppenwolf.
“It was actually Sheldon Patinkin who said, ‘If you come back here, you’ll never stop working.’ And I said, ‘From your mouth to God’s ear, Sheldon,’ and it actually worked out.”
Asked what advice she would give to an aspiring actor hoping to build a satisfying theatre career, Reed recalls an acting teacher she had at ISU. “She would come in and she’d throw down the newspaper and she’d say ‘Has anyone read the newspaper today? Do you know what’s going on in the world?’ and we’d all sit there, because of course we didn’t. All we cared about was plays and drinking and whatever else. She’d say, ‘How can you get up on stage and present human life if you don’t know what’s going on in the world? What’s happening? Do you have any political viewpoint? Do you know any pieces of music? Have you been to a museum?’ I was shocked, because I thought, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’”
“You cannot shut yourself out of life,” says Reed. “Stop bitching to me about why you don’t have a career and go volunteer at a homeless shelter. Or go deliver food for AIDS patients. Get yourself out of yourself. The thing with doing that is that when you’re asked to play a role, you don’t have this incredibly self-absorbed and, to me, boring persona.”
Says Lavey, “The beautiful irreplaceable quality about Rondi is a sense of emotional connectedness and truth. She is very unfettered in her performances. Not every actor has this. She is disinhibited. She does not protect her vanity. That’s an incredible ability as an actor, and it takes incredible courage.”
“It’s getting older,” explains Reed. “You have less investment in appearing foolish or stupid, or in taking big chances. You realize, ‘Well, what have I got to lose?’”
And if the roles should stop coming, or if she decides to take a break from the stage, Reed has another plan in mind. Some day, she swears she will get around to writing a personal history of Steppenwolf, patterned after Harold Clurman’s memoir of the Group Theatre, “The Fervent Years.”
“The fact that we’ve lasted 30 years blows my mind,” she says. “I’ve been incredibly lucky to be a part of a group like Steppenwolf. I certainly realize that I’m not like the actor who has to go out and pound the pavement. I don’t know if I’d still be in theatre if I were. I look at people my own age and people younger than me and what they have to go through and I find it incredible. I know how good I have it. I have an artistic home, and I do not take it for granted.”