The curtain rises again on Kristin Flanders
It took Kristin Flanders awhile to get the lay of the land in Seattle. "All those hills," laughs the actress. "New York is so flat. And here the water isn't just in one place — it's everywhere."
Today, roughly a year after moving to the Emerald City, Flanders is getting oriented. She and her husband, Intiman Theatre artistic head Bartlett Sher, are settled in a new home with their first child, 8-month-old Lucia. As she deals with the rigors of new motherhood, Flanders is recharging her career as a stage actress also.
A petite, delicate-boned woman who vibrates with alert intensity, Flanders is tackling one of the more challenging roles in the Henrik Ibsen canon: the isolated, emotionally torn housewife Ellida Wangel in "The Lady From the Sea," a lesser-known 1888 work by Ibsen, staged at Intiman by rising young director Kate Whoriskey.
Flanders has teamed with Whoriskey before, in a Boston version of Ibsen's "The Master Builder." And the résumé of this intent, doe-eyed actress is dotted with the many other major classical roles she's essayed, under such adventuresome directors as Garland Wright, Andrei Serban and Sher.
|
"I've always taken work based on the play and the director," she declares. "I love the classics, and the new plays, too, that ask really big questions. I just find that more rewarding than trying to play someone more like myself, which you do a lot of on TV. I'd rather work through myself, and get to the core of important issues through the mask of someone else."
Flanders' love of literature and drama flared during a childhood spent in London, where her father was posted as a chemical engineer for an American firm. At a private school, young Kristin was needled by classmates ("English kids are mean, mean, mean, especially to American kids"). But she took inspiration from "a fantastic history teacher, a brilliant man who wrote plays with us, and taught us how to learn by asking questions and examining things thoroughly, from all sides."
Back in the U.S., Flanders attended Yale University, "thinking I'd be a double major in theater and chemical engineering. That didn't last long. Acting became a passion, something I had to do."
Armed with an MFA in acting from Yale, Flanders landed coveted spots in the acting companies of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, and the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., tackling such plum roles as Ariel in "The Tempest" and Iphigenia in "Iphigenia in Aulus," Masha in "The Seagull" and Portia in "The Merchant of Venice."
"I did get typecast a bit," she laughs. "At one time I thought, `If I have to play one more princess I'm going to scream!' And it was strange, but I often played young women who had no mothers, and a lot of trouble with their fathers."
At the Guthrie, Flanders began a long-term, often long-distance relationship with Sher, then a free-lance director: "Bart and I hooked up and unhooked and rehooked, until the idea of living with him finally just became unbearable."
Eventually, the pair settled in New York. But then came the Intiman job, and the move to Seattle — a city new to them both.
Flanders admits it was a hard adjustment at first, especially because she was pregnant. But with surprising swiftness, she soon became part of the local acting scene. She was a bright ray last season in the dismal Intiman comedy, "The Smell of the Kill," and a strong link in the cast of "Dinner With Friends" at A Contemporary Theatre this summer.
Now, wearing hair extensions, she's exploring the symbolic-psychological realms of "Lady From the Sea." The Intiman staging places Ellida and the men she's torn between — her solid husband (Philip Goodwin) and an enigmatic stranger (Jason Cottle) — in an elaborate, abstract setting by famed scenic artist John Conklin.
"The set is divided, reflecting the polarization and division of Ellida's psychological reality," says director Whoriskey. "The play is about people wanting to stay in the realm of possibility, but being unable to. Once you commit to something, you have to acknowledge the death of other possibilities."
For Flanders, the task at hand is to make Ellida's depression, grief, indecision and ferocity emotionally coherent to a modern audience.
"The question of how to live an authentic life is at the core of every Ibsen work," she asserts. "That's the kind of question that really gets me going. At this point, if a play doesn't have that, I'd rather be home playing with the baby."
Misha Berson can be reached at mberson@seattletimes.com.