Lenehan: Actress in Search of Her Characters

Nancy Lenehan has become a quick-change artist. In Larry Shue’s “Wenceslas Square” (set in Czechoslovakia and playing at the Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood), the actress moves seamlessly from character to character: early 20s Katya in cheerful vest and loafers, 40-year-old Illinova in a tight maroon suit and four-inch pumps, and the older Smocekova--in saggy bathrobe, granny glasses, babushka and beat-up men’s shoes.

The play centers on an American professor’s 1974 trip to Prague (where he’d visited six years earlier, finding an artistic community in full bloom of social protest) and discovering how those old comrades have changed. James Sloyan and Richard Murphy play the professor and his assistant, with Lenehan and Adam Arkin in multiple roles (the latter has 12), characterizations that go a lot deeper than wardrobe.

“There are subtle variations on the accent,” Lenehan said. “Each woman has a different facility with English. And all three have totally different ways of coping with the (politically tense) situation.”

Katya, who’s been interpreting for the professor, has deep misgivings about a book that he’s written about Czech activists he befriended and the book’s eventual publication: “She’s very young and fearful, her husband’s important to her. And she’s seen people disappear. She doesn’t want to take risks.”

Illinova--flexing her calves with sensuality and assurance--runs the national museum. “She keeps track of writers and artists,” Lenehan noted, “the cultural world of Czechoslovakia. She takes care of herself, she doesn’t make waves. She’s a survivor.” Translator Smocekova “wants to stay and fight, but she’s old. She wants the book to be published. She knows it’s a risk, knows people might get hurt. But for her the truth is important.”

Lenehan claims no favorites.

“I respect each character’s choices,” she said firmly. “I don’t judge Illinova. And even though it takes place in 1974, the issues are relevant today. I’m not a very political person. But being in this play has made me recognize the freedoms that we have and how many of those freedoms are now being questioned--like what’s going on with the censorship question,” about government funding of controversial arts projects.

Emotionally connected as she is to her characters, Lenehan admits that a great part of the early work was mapping out those accents--and those clothes changes.

“The night before the audition, I rented some films to listen to Czech accents. I didn’t want to sound like Natasha from the ‘Bullwinkle’ cartoons.” As for adjusting to the merry-go-round of roles, “It was like those plate-spinning acts on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’ I’d start to understand the world of one character, then it was time to change. The shoes helped a lot. And before we had costumes, I was miming the changes between scenes, getting used to what it would be like.”

The response to her work in “Wenceslas” has been virtually unanimous: Critics love her. But the actress hasn’t read the notices--and doesn’t intend to, at least till after the run. “I don’t read reviews,” she said matter-of-factly. “You work on a play for a month, you invest everything you can in it. Then if someone says, ‘Well, I liked that, but I didn’t like that,’ it starts to pull it apart. I’m not saying I wouldn’t agree with them. But it disrupts the wholeness of it.”

Born in Long Island, reared in Stuart, Fla., and educated in South Dakota (at Miss Harrison’s School for Young Ladies, she said cheerfully, “I was co-valedictorian--out of a class of two”), Lenehan gravitated toward acting early on.

‘I don’t feel that I know how to do anything else,” she shrugged. “Actually, in school I wanted to be a math major, but after a short time the teacher took me aside and said, ‘Do you really want to do this?’ The truth is, I really love acting. And the process of learning it is exciting too: learning how to make-believe, how to get out of your own way. Children do that naturally. But as you get older, you start thinking of all the reasons why you can’t.”

Although she’s appeared locally in “Bullshot Crummond” (Coronet, 1979) and “El Grande de Coca Cola” (Pasadena Playhouse, 1982), “Wenceslas” marks Lenehan’s first stage role since the Garry Trudeau/Elizabeth Swados satirical revue “Rap Master Ronnie” (at the Odyssey Theatre, 1985). In it the actress played, among other roles, a simpering, dead-on First Lady. “That was another fun show, and another quick-change,” she said. “Political too. Nancy Reagan’s hairdressers came to check it out.”