Up close and personal with Seana McKenna
Seana McKenna returns to Stratford for her 18th season after a winter and spring on the stages of the Manitoba Theatre Centre and Mirvish Productions (Medea) and the Canadian Stage Company (Doubt). In June she sat down in her splendid garden with Shira Ginsler to talk about Jean Racine’s Phèdre, in which she plays the title role. Phèdre tells the story of the queen of Athens, whose obsessive love for her stepson, Hippolytus, has tragic consequences.
You’ve already had an outing, of sorts, with Phèdre.
Yes, in 2007. Carey Perloff, the director, came to Stratford with Timberlake Wertenbaker, the translator/adapter, and Olympia Dukakis, who had read the role of Oenone in the first workshop, in San Francisco. We had a great week with them. It was a very heady, intense time; it was quite wonderful. At the end of it we did a reading, and people thought, “This can fly.”
When you were offered the part for this season, what made you say yes?
Phèdre is one of the great roles. And I’m thrilled to be back at the Tom Patterson. I love that theatre. It was the first theatre I played in at the Stratford Festival, in 1982, when I was a member of the Shakespeare 3 company. I’ve done a lot of plays there – some of which have later been translated to a proscenium, which is what we’ll do with Phèdre when it goes to ACT this winter. It’s very different: you can be much more still on a proscenium than at the Patterson, where you have to keep moving so you don’t give one part of the audience the back of your head for too long.
It’s also interesting to me to explore those passions again, the same yearning and love that are in Orpheus Descending, which we did in 2005, with Miles Potter directing it again in 2007 – with the difference that in that play the love is requited. In Phèdre it is not. She adores Hippolytus to the point of suffocation; she wants to die from the shame of having these feelings for her stepson. I find the complexity of their relationship fascinating. Those passions existed in Euripides’ time, they existed in Racine’s time and they exist today.
You and Roberta Maxwell, who plays Oenone, Phèdre's childhood nurse, go back almost as far as you and the Tom Patterson Theatre.
I met Roberta in 1983 when she was playing Lady Macbeth in Des McAnuff’s production and I was playing “Baby Witch,” as Des called her. She was also playing Rosalind in John Hirsch’s As You Like It, and I was contracted to understudy her; then Des asked me to understudy Lady Macbeth too, so I was Roberta’s shadow for the summer. I’d go up in the roof of the Festival Theatre and watch her every night. She is an extraordinary actress, and if you haven’t been lucky enough to see her stage work, her film work is equally stunning.
Phèdre is your third Greek heroine in a year, after Andromache in The Trojan Women and Medea. They seem to have something in common that appeals to you.
A young actor came backstage after The Trojan Women and said, “I love it – they’re so Greek!” Meaning the emotion is out there: it’s deeply felt and then released. There’s no holding back. Now Racine is different, because he wrote in the 17th century from a French Catholic viewpoint. There’s great repression in Phèdre – but the passions she’s repressing are enough to split the corset.
But in other ways Racine followed ancient Greek tradition.
There are a lot of scenes between two people; the most you have on stage at once are three or four. It’s a compelling story told quite simply. And the text is very spare, very pared-down. Sometimes that’s more difficult because you can’t hide behind flourishes of language. You don’t have a witty metaphor or an image to carry you; you’re speaking directly from the heart, so you have to fill those words with true emotion.
Previews of Phèdre begin August 6. See it in Stratford before it travels to San Francisco – get your tickets now!
Click here to read Carey Perloff’s director’s notes from the Phedre house program.
Buy tickets to Phèdre
Photos, from top: Seana McKenna photo by Erin Samuell; Seana McKenna as Phèdre photo by David Hou; The Trojan Women, 2008, photo by David Hou; Seana McKenna as Andromache; Orpheus Descending, 2005, photo by David Hou; Seana McKenna as Lady Torrance, Jonathan Goad as Valentine Xavier and Michelle Giroux as Nurse Porter, photo by David Hou; Macbeth, 1983, Elizabeth Leigh-Milne, Seana McKenna and Paddy Campanaro as the Three Weird Sisters, photo by Robert C. Ragsdale.