More Than Just a Stage Mother

An offhand comment sends Marcia Mitzman Gaven into peals of laughter. Her hazel eyes flash, and her smile dazzles like the sun on the Pacific.

It’s a side of her the public doesn’t usually see.

As Mother in “Ragtime,” she plays a wealthy turn-of-the-century woman whose untroubled brow furrows with a world of cares when she discovers a newborn buried alive in her flower garden.

Before that, she appeared in a small Hollywood production of “Chess,” playing a chess pro pushed to emotional extremes when she’s swept into a Cold War brouhaha and forced to choose between her champion American playing partner and his Soviet challenger, with whom she has fallen in love.

And in “The Who’s Tommy” before that, she originated the role of the guilt-ridden Mrs. Walker, whose young son--upon witnessing her boyfriend kill her long-lost husband--becomes deaf, dumb and blind. And that’s just the beginning of her problems.

“I am a happy person by nature,” the actress says. “I wake up and the glass is half full. And yet I play all these intensely dramatic roles.”

Mitzman Gaven’s recent win at the Ovation Awards makes life look all the rosier. She collected a frosted-glass statuette for “Ragtime,” to go with her 1995 award for “Chess.” She and sound designer Laurence O’Keefe (who works across town with the Actors’ Gang) share the distinction of being the first theater artists to rack up two wins in the four years that the awards have been determined by a vote of industry peers.

“It’s wonderful to get a little pat on the back,” Mitzman Gaven says, her voice hinting at the mezzo soprano--with its powerful belt--that she lets loose in song at the Shubert Theatre in Century City. “And I think it’s wonderful for the theatrical community to come together and celebrate the proliferation of theater--and the excellence in theater.”

In addition to the Ovations, she owns a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award plaque, also recognizing her work in “Chess,” as well as a framed citation naming her a 1993 Tony Award nominee for the Broadway presentation of “Tommy.”

Frank Galati, who directed Mitzman Gaven in “Ragtime,” thinks she has the potential to become a name-in-lights headliner. “She seizes the stage with energy,” he says, praising her “grace and beauty and magnificent voice,” as well as her “extraordinarily keen intelligence--she’s a very deep reader of text.”

It’s a Monday, Mitzman Gaven’s one day off from an eight-performance-a-week schedule. No big wig or big hats today. No body padding to make her look more matronly. Today, she is entirely herself, dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt that enhance her fresh-scrubbed, girl-next-door qualities. She is curled, barefoot, on the family room couch in her Studio City home.

She jokes at first that her current role is a mother of “a little different bent” than the one in “Tommy.”

Tommy’s mother--rattled by World War II and the presumed battle death of her husband--allows herself a romantic fling, only to find herself paying for it endlessly. The affluent, turn-of-the-century mother in “Ragtime,” on the other hand, is obliged to play the demure, deferential wife. With her husband away on distant travels, however, she resolves to care for the abandoned infant and its frightened mother--in addition to her own young son. Flushed with confidence, she becomes an emancipated woman.

Delving more deeply into the characters, Mitzman Gaven shifts from their differences to their similarities:

“They’re both very committed and loving mothers, who would do anything for their children.” And although both are, in most respects, ordinary women, extraordinary circumstances compel them “to rise to meet challenges that they might otherwise never have thought themselves capable of.”

Mitzman Gaven is contracted to perform in “Ragtime” until it closes March 8. She knew going in that Marin Mazzie, who originated the Mother role in Toronto, would play that part on Broadway.

Director Galati says he would like to see Mitzman Gaven perform in other cities or on tour. Yet, should the opportunity arise, the actress says she’s reluctant to leave her new home, her new husband (Seth Gaven, a creative director and editor of movie trailers and advertising) and her lucrative career doing television and radio ad voice-overs (“I can make in an hour what I make in a week doing theater,” she says).

Mitzman Gaven, who is in her mid-30s, grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., not far from New Rochelle, where her “Ragtime” character lives. Her father, Newt Mitzman, was a director of television specials and commercials. Her mother, Patricia, had made quite a splash in visual art before setting it aside to raise her three children.

Young Mitzman studied at New York City’s famed High School of Performing Arts, although she wasn’t eligible to be there because she didn’t live in the city. Once, nearly caught in her lie, she pressed her training into quick service to improvise an elaborate explanation.

At 19, Mitzman landed her first Broadway role, as a replacement Rizzo in “Grease.” Subsequent roles in touring productions and New York City Opera presentations brought her into contact with the likes of Tommy Tune, Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim. On Broadway, she played Svetlana, the jilted Russian wife, in “Chess” (much smaller than the role she later played with the Blank Theatre Company in Hollywood), as well as a leading role in Cy Coleman’s 1989 musical “Welcome to the Club.” Both shows were, well, bombs--”Trevor Nunn and Cy Coleman’s only flops,” Mitzman Gaven dryly observes.

She moved to Los Angeles in 1991, when she was cast as the countess in Gordon Davidson’s Ahmanson-at-the-Doolittle staging of “A Little Night Music,” remaining here until “Tommy” took her back to New York.

She returned to Los Angeles after an allergic reaction to a fog effect forced her to leave the show after just a few months.

This was one of the biggest disappointments of her life, and clouds cross her face for the first time in the conversation. She glances across the room at the Tony citation--recognizing her nomination for best featured actress in a musical--as she describes how her throat became infected due to a reaction to the oil in a haze-making compound that designers pump onstage to enhance lighting effects. She missed a lot of performances, and an untold number of Tony voters missed her performance. She can’t help but wonder how that affected the outcome.

Vocal cords are notoriously temperamental, even when there are no exotic compounds in the air, and--on this afternoon, at least--she is tired of babying them.

“You have to give up so much of your life,” she laments. No eating in noisy restaurants, for instance, or she’ll go hoarse from shouting. Even a night out at the movies can spell disaster, because a stray cold germ can put a voice out of commission for days on end. “Somebody coughs behind me and I immediately say to my husband, ‘We may have to move.’ ”

Every now and again, she finds herself vowing she won’t put herself through it all again.

“Then something like ‘Ragtime’ comes up, and how can I say no to that?” she asks, laughing. “I grew up singing along to ‘Follies’ and ‘Anyone Can Whistle.’ The magic of theater does addict you, to some degree.”

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“RAGTIME,” Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. Dates: Wednesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m.; Wednesdays, 1:30 p.m. (Altered times for Christmas and New Year’s weeks.) Ends March 8. Tickets: $35-$75. Phone: (800) 447-7400.