Keeping Wit in the Family

When actress Kaitlin Hopkins first told her mother that she had been cast as Gwendolen Fairfax in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Hopkins got a dual reaction.

Her mother was pleased, of course, that Hopkins would be starring in another Pasadena Playhouse show. And, she added, she’d love to play the role of Gwendolen’s mother, Lady Bracknell.

Since Hopkins’ mother happens to be Tony-winning actress Shirley Knight, director Sheldon Epps was immediately receptive. His reaction, he says, was “unalloyed joy. She’s obviously so right for the role, and to have the added juice of mother and daughter playing mother and daughter was too delicious an idea to pass up.”

Knight joins Hopkins, Patrick Dempsey, Robert Curtis Brown, Lina Patel and company in Wilde’s 1895 classic comedy of manners, opening tonight at the Pasadena Playhouse. After nearly four decades of interpreting such legendary American characters as Tennessee Williams’ Blanche du Bois and Amanda Wingfield and, more recently, Horton Foote’s Lily Dale, Knight will inhabit Wilde’s witty, haughty and equally legendary Lady Bracknell.

Few fictional characters offer dramatic actresses--and, sometimes, actors--such an attractive shot at comedy. The scene-stealing British matriarch has been played by everyone from Glynis Johns and Judi Dench to Ellis Rabb; Edith Evans played her in the 1952 film.

The chance to do comedy also attracted Knight, she says, and so did the opportunity to show Lady Bracknell’s human side. “Not that Lady Bracknell isn’t eccentric or odd or angry,” Knight says, “but our image of her has been completely distorted by a kind of grotesque idea of who she really is. What I’m discovering working on it is that you start with the human being that she is.”

Hopkins does the same with her character, says Epps, who is artistic director of the playhouse. “No matter how outrageous or comic something becomes, they’re both intent on grounding that in an emotional reality,” the director says. “And they’re both kind of wonderfully silly, crazy women, willing to take a chance and leap at whatever curious choice I throw at them or ask them to try. They’ve very daring in that sense.”

Chatting on the patio outside the rehearsal hall, the two women appear well-suited to a play its author called “a trivial comedy for serious people.” Knight, 62, is demure in an oatmeal-colored sundress and jacket; Hopkins, 34, is less demure in her dark sundress, forget the jacket. Leaning back in her chair as her daughter leans forward in hers, Knight appears perfectly willing not only to share but also to quietly yield the spotlight.

Yet neither holds court very long without interruption. Knight feeds Hopkins a line, adds a comment, punctuates a thought, while Hopkins serves as almost a Greek chorus for her mother, amplifying or highlighting whatever she might have just said. It may be an interview, but the two actresses talk as much to one another as to the interviewer.

Knight, for instance, gets about halfway through a story of how she and her sister and all their friends got jobs as extras on “Picnic” when the film was shot in Sterling, Kan., about 12 miles from her hometown. When she mentions she saw William Holden, Hopkins jumps in to say “who you worked with years later,” and with a slight smile, Knight finishes the story.

Theirs is a special relationship, confirms Kaitlin’s younger half-sister, Sophie Hopkins. “Mother wasn’t 100% behind Kaitlin becoming an actress, since it’s a hard career, but when she saw how much Kaitlin loved it, she knew it would be fruitless to deter her from that path.”

Sophie, a writer like her father, playwright John Hopkins, continues: “My parents were never opposed to our having artistic dreams. They both always wanted us to think artistically and creatively.

“The first thing Kaitlin ever acted in with Mom was ‘The Children’s Hour.’ Kaitlin played one of the schoolgirls, and at a very young age became Mom’s peer as opposed to just her daughter. Their world of acting is almost private, a connection between the two of them that they share. I love watching them.”

Most people would. “I was watching Shirley watching Kaitlin, and she was watching her really critically,” observes co-star Dempsey. “Then she just sort of turned and nodded her head, approving what Kaitlin was doing and laughing quietly to herself.”

They’ve worked together several times now, including an extended run of “Come Back, Little Sheba” at New York’s Roundabout Theatre in 1984, and “Another Mother/Daughter Act” cabaret performance at the Gardenia Club in Hollywood in 1989. In 1996, they played mother and daughter in George Bernard Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” for L.A. Theatre Works’ radio series.

“Shaw’s heroine and Mrs. Warren are very different in the play, but what they have in common is an indomitable spirit,” observes L.A. Theatre Works producing director Susan Loewenberg. “And that’s the way I think of Shirley and Kaitlin.”

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Knight acquired her spirit in rural Kansas, growing up in a large extended family. Many family members played instruments and, recalls Knight, there was always music in the house. Her mother wanted to be a singer and Knight, in turn, also briefly studied opera. She arrived in Los Angeles in the late 1950s and, among other things, took a few classes at the Pasadena Playhouse. She also almost immediately started working as an actress. Successful right away, she received an Oscar nomination for her role in the 1960 film “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.”

Kaitlin Hopkins says the first time she remembers watching her mother work on a movie set was during “The Rain People.” She chuckles at the memory of getting to ride on director Francis Ford Coppola’s motorcycle. “It’s funny when I listen to my mom talk about her growing up, because mine was so different. I remember going to the Cannes Film Festival when I was 4 or 5.

“I traveled a lot as a kid because I always went with Mom. My father, Gene Persson, produced plays [including the current Broadway revival of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”]. So between whatever he was producing and whatever Mom was starring in, I saw many original productions. And my stepfather, John Hopkins, was a writer, and I would see all his plays.

“I watched my mother work my whole life. I must have sat through every rehearsal and performance she did of ‘Landscape of the Body’ and ‘Kennedy’s Children.’ At ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ I used to sit with Tennessee [Williams] and whenever Mom did the scene where Stanley sort of beats her up, he’d always squeeze my arm really tight and say, ‘Yoh mothuh is such a great actress, she’s so brilliant.’ ”

It had to rub off, she says. “I just couldn’t wait until it was my turn. Watching [the original versions of] ‘Charlie Brown’ and ‘Hair,’ I thought, hurry up and get older. I just knew that was what I wanted to do more than anything. I wanted to be up there singing. When you grow up around artists, I don’t know how you cannot be seduced by it.”

Not that seduction always leads to success, Epps notes. “In the course of my directing career, I’ve frequently auditioned sons or daughters of well-known actors and actresses, and I can tell you that the son or daughter of the famous person is not always as gifted as the parent. However, in Kaitlin’s case, genetics have really paid off--she’s a deeply gifted actress.”

The two actresses work together offstage as well. “When I’m auditioning for things, I’m always running over to Mom’s and saying, ‘Mom, Mom, you’ve gotta run this scene with me,’ ” says Hopkins. “And when she was doing [the TV show] ‘Maggie Winters,’ I was always running lines and rehearsing with her.”

Knight says working with her daughter on “The Importance of Being Earnest” “is not like really working,” while Hopkins points out, “you can’t rehearse in four weeks 35 years of a mother-daughter dynamic. Obviously we have that built in, but the dynamic between Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell is so different than our dynamic. It’s really fun and interesting to sort of explore this family’s dysfunction.”

Epps hopes this production will move to New York or elsewhere. Meanwhile, Knight is preparing an evening of song called “Looking Back” that will debut here this fall before heading to New York, then plans to take the role of King Lear in a production here early next year. Hopkins, who last appeared at the playhouse as Wallis Simpson in the musical “Only a Kingdom,” is set to perform onstage in “Antigone” as well as to reprise her Actors’ Gang role in “Bat Boy” for a New York workshop this fall.

Knight often directs, and Hopkins produces, sometimes on the same project. Hopkins, who co-founded Be Brave Productions with her husband, actor-director Daniel Passer, has been an associate producer on recent L.A. Theatre Works’ radio drama productions and is now raising money to produce the film version of her stepfather’s 1978 play “Losing Time.” Knight, whose 32-year marriage to John Hopkins ended with his death last summer, plans to direct with Kaitlin Hopkins taking the role Jane Alexander played onstage and, Knight says, Nastassja Kinski playing Knight’s role.

The play, in which Knight’s character made her entrance stumbling through the front door, bloody, with torn clothes and smeared makeup after being raped, “was very controversial,” says Knight. “ ‘Landscape of the Body’ was like that, too, and I think that’s why I love doing new plays. There’s nothing exciting about people being comfortable. Audiences should always be uncomfortable and in anticipation. Otherwise, why do it?

“It has to mean something or it becomes frivolous. We only have two things that enlighten us and try to make us better people. One is religion and one is art. That’s all we have.”

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“The Importance of Being Earnest,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Opens today, 5 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends June 20. $13.50-$42.50. (800) 233 3123.