The Indelibles

Oh - right! Her. 

I recently attended the workshop production of three one-act plays. Only one was good, despite some stellar actors, but that's not unexpected. It's similar to the success batting average of the much more fully produced plays I see around town.

But as I took my folding chair in the first cramped studio, I was totally distracted - by the sight of one of my fellow audience members.

She was tall and striking-looking, but also very familiar, in a way that instantly engendered feelings of sympathy, almost sadness. But why? From where?

I knew this much: she was an actress, and that whatever I had seen her in, she had been new to me, which is always cool, when you can just accept a performance on face value without the baggage of having seen them in something else.

But it also means it might take a while for me to remember from where, even longer to recall a name. (Thank God for IMDB and IBDB; I see so many plays, movies, and TV shows it can take me a couple of different performances for even the face to stick.)

So I wracked my brain.
In the swamp of dozens of TV series or movies or plays I had watched in the past year, she had made a vivid, moving impression. But I couldn't remember: Was it...some Noah Baumbach or Wes Anderson movie? An otherwise forgettable off-Broadway play? A TV drama...or comedy?

As the lights went down for the first one-act, I mustered this much: the mystery woman had been a male protagonist's girlfriend, who loosened him up in important ways, but she had ultimately been rejected as too extreme.

And though the writer clearly wanted us to ultimately agree and cheer the protagonist for ending up with a more "matched" partner, I remember feeling at the time, her character had been dealt with unfairly by the exigencies of the plot/limitations of the lead character.

That is the kind of performance that sticks with me, especially in the current morass of streaming. A new face who brings that something unexpected, extra -- indelible.

Ben and Jesse, roles not just defined but expanded by their performers

Sometimes - as with Michael Emerson as Ben Linus on Lost or Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad - the actor is so good that the writers end up rejiggering the entire series to accommodate them. (Vince Gilligan had actually planned Jesse would be killed off in Season 1).

Tim. Blake. Nelson. 

Other times, even when their onscreen presence "pops," like Tim Blake Nelson did in O Brother Where Art Thou alongside Clooney and Turturro - it can still take years for other TV/movie writers/roles to properly utilize their talents. This past season he shines in both Watchmen and Just Mercy (right). (The Coen brothers have always had a particular knack for elevating underutilized/theater actors, including Fran McDormand, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, Michael Stulhbarg, and Steve Buscemi.)

For me, recent indelible "new" performers have included Taron Egerton in Rocketman, and Kaitlyn Dever in Booksmart and then Unbelievable (though it turns out I had seen her years earlier on Justified).

Kaitlyn Dever in Justified, 2011

In this year's batch of award-season movies, both  Julia Fox in Uncut Gems and Ana de Armas in Knives Out both gave noticeably indelible performances, despite being surrounded by much more seasoned and well-known actors. 

Fox and de Armas, matching Sandler and Craig

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By the time the lights came up after that first one-act. It dawned on me where I'd seen my fellow audience member, and why she'd evoked such a singular response.

She'd "recurred" on an HBO half-hour I was late to watching, Crashing, created by Christian stand-up comedian Pete Holmes, loosely based on Holmes' real-life saga, in which he came home to find his wife, the only woman he's ever slept with, in bed with another man. It sends him on a downward spiral of crashing on other people's couches, but ultimately helps him find himself and his comic voice.

[Side note: why hadn't I discovered this warm, humane, original and funny series when it first aired?
It premiered 1) a month after Trump was inaugurated, so I was distracted, and 2) soon after, I attached myself to Showtime's hour-long series set in the stand-up comedy world, the unjustly underpromoted and underviewed I'm Dying Up Here about the L.A. scene in the 70s. So I didn't feel the need to check out another show about stand-up.

If you haven't watched THAT, I also totally recommend it. Not the least of which for its amazing, endearing and yes indelible ensemble of mostly "unknown" or little-known actors, acing a most difficult balancing act - convincing both as comedians in various stages of careers, and as sympathetic characters in dramatically extreme situations.]

Anyway - the actress who I had recognized memorably inhabited "Kat" on Season 3 of Crashing. Kat is unapologetically ambitious, comfortable in her own skin, and sexually forthright compared to Pete's usual comfort zone. And for a while, he allows himself to be subsumed, stretched and elevated by her spirit.

Until he isn't. Boo!

Her name? Is Madeline Wise. I looked her up and she has done a lot of theater, none of which I had seen, and since Crashing did a Fox pilot and a sci-fi movie. Her website includes a series of self-tapes of things President Trump has said. I now see on her Twitter page she wishes to be referred to as "A Lovable Badboy Actress." 

Done. I wish her a long and full career.

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It goes without saying - and yet here I am saying it - that actors have very little control over the vicissitudes of their careers. Even if they even get to audition for a project, even if they get chosen, even if that project turns out well, even if it gets seen. And it's worse for female actors. 

The ghost of the Ambassador. Demolished 2005

Back in 2003 between TV gigs, I did a piece accompanying an Elle magazine fashion shoot at the asbestos-laced Ambassador Hotel in LA.

It had been shuttered since 1989 and was supposed to be turned into a school but was in a limbo that had given it a creepy post-apocalyptic Addams Family vibe, which wasn't helped by the fact that it had been where RFK was gunned down in 1968.

The magazine's editors had selected a bunch of up-and-coming actresses proffered up by the latest set of projects and publicists. They included Zooey Deschanel, Mischa Barton, Jessica Alba, Rose Byrne, Naomi Harris, Diane Kruger.

I remember thinking at the time, who of this crop will make it? (P.S.: The hotel was demolished two years later.)

Had you asked me back then, 17 years hence, which one would be playing a modern version of Medea at BAM, would I have guessed right?

I just saw the second preview of a play at the Atlantic, Anatomy of a Suicide, by Alice Birch, a writer on Succession whose previous work I liked.

Though Carla Gugino is the marquee name, she's matched and then some - partly because of what the script demands - by the actress playing her frazzled, when not besieged, daughter, Celeste Arias.

Celeste Arias with Richard Topol in Anatomy of a Suicide

I actually recognized her, because I'd seen her just last year as Elena in Richard Nelson's recent low-key, contemporary rethink of Uncle Vanya. But this performance is the one that I will long remember.

Will she headline as Medea in 17 years? Well - that's not up to me.