A Touch of Magic, a Touch of Fire

Lillian Garrett-Groag sits in a corner booth of a mildly fashionable Los Feliz eatery. Seeking refuge from painters who have invaded her nearby home and dutifully awaiting an interview, she’s enjoying a brief break in a schedule that has, of late, required her to shuttle back and forth between San Diego and the Bay Area. On Thursday, a new staging of her latest play “The Magic Fire,” first seen in March at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, opens at the Old Globe.

Dressed casually in a dark-blue shirt and black leggings, with a few pieces of arty jewelry, she is striking but doesn’t call too much attention to herself. Indeed, she looks comfortable here; she could be any kind of artist, writer or intellectual.

In fact, she’s all these things. Raised in Argentina and Uruguay, educated in Europe and the U.S., Garrett-Groag is the kind of person for whom the term “multicultural” seems woefully inadequate. A multilingual, multitalented woman, she is equally at home discussing 17th century French literature, Wagnerian librettos or Latin American electoral politics.

What’s more, her career, too, has more than one side. Garrett-Groag is one of the few women in American theater today who enjoy the kind of successful hyphenate career usually reserved for men--the Sam Shepards and Athol Fugards of the world. She has had success as an actress on Broadway, at the Mark Taper Forum and South Coast Repertory, among other theaters, and she is also known for her work as a director of theater and opera and as a playwright.

An erudite and volatile conversationalist, Garrett-Groag tends to careen between topics both grand and quotidian. Listen for a while, however, and leitmotifs emerge. She is fascinated by the complexities of man, the social animal; questions of collective ethics, in particular, seem to occupy the space closest to her soul.

“I think that any kind of easy description of a human being or culture is false,” says Garrett-Groag. “We are extremely paradoxical people. I believe that a certain kind of thinking, if it’s really complicated and wonderful and interesting, has so many sides to it, and among them are some that are very dangerous. That’s the way we are, and that’s what interests me.”

Jack O’Brien, artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, where Garrett-Groag is an associate artist, describes her as a “fascinating, compelling, interesting woman.”

“The odd thing about Lillian is that she seems always to have been in my creative life here,” O’Brien continues. “She’s acted, directed, translated, adapted and written [plays]. There’s practically nothing that she hasn’t done.”

“I consider Lillian to be one of the really great theater treasures in this country,” agrees Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Libby Appel, who has known Garrett-Groag since both were graduate students at Northwestern University in the late 1960s. “She’s a marvelous actress, a witty and brilliant director who does classical work with great style and understanding. And I couldn’t be more thrilled with her turn toward playwriting. In each one of those fields, she excels. She’s an extraordinary woman.”

O’Brien and Appel should know. Both have directed Garrett-Groag, the actress; hired Garrett-Groag, the director; and staged “The Magic Fire,” an autobiographical portrait of a family of European immigrants in 1952 Buenos Aires. Named one of Time magazine’s 10 best plays of 1998, the play was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where it premiered in 1997 before traveling to Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center last year.

*

The title “The Magic Fire” refers to the circle of fire that the Norse god Wotan erects to shield and entrap Brunnhilde, leader of the Valkyries in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. In Garrett-Groag’s play, Otto, patriarch of the Berg-Guarneri family--a clan of Austrian and Italian immigrants living in Peronist Argentina--tells the ring of fire story to his young daughter, Lise. Wotan’s strategy also serves as metaphor for the father’s efforts to protectively surround his family in a world of literature, culture and, most of all, opera, sheltering them from the ugly political realities just outside their door. Inevitably, the external world intrudes, primarily in the person of a next-door neighbor who shares the family’s love of culture but is also an officer in the oppressive regime.

Narrated by an adult Lise, the play is an attempt to reconcile recollections of girlhood experiences with what may actually have happened. It is a memory play, but not simply a memory play, and the role of Lise presents a formidable challenge according to veteran actress Kandis Chappell, who takes the role in San Diego.

“When we started, Lillian said to me, ‘It’s an impossible role,’ partly because my character talks a lot to the audience, which is always tough, and she goes through a very odd emotional journey,” says Chappell. “It is a very difficult, rich, wonderful script. It is harder than I thought, but much more fulfilling than I expected. The language that she uses is as hard as doing Shakespeare. My character does most of the speaking for the first 10 pages of the play. So it’s a wonderful journey for me personally.”

Indeed, Chappell isn’t the only one who finds the play’s complexity to be its virtue. “It’s both a memory play and a family play,” says O’Brien. “The form of the play, which is not only ensemble but mythically autobiographical, is not the kind of play we hear a woman write ordinarily. I cannot think of another instance in which a woman writer has delivered basically a Chekhovian canvas.

“The thing that separates this play is that it’s layered,” O’Brien says. “It’s highly political. On another layer, it’s cultural. And on another layer, it’s historical. And somehow, it comes out to be one play. But she keeps shifting her voice as she tells it.”

For the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Appel, “The Magic Fire” is “a crowning glory” of Garrett-Groag’s writing career. “It expresses to the world not only her biographical information, but her tremendous wit, scope of intelligence, depth of knowledge and deep touch with humanity.”

In fact, Garrett-Groag concedes that the play is indeed “99 1/2% autobiographical.” Yet, she says, “People usually think the play’s adorable, and I think it’s a very troubling story of a family that ends up not only in exile, but wondering about their self-respect.”

For the playwright, the play’s central questions are complex moral dilemmas. “What are the duties of the individual toward the community? Can a man really say, ‘I want to live privately and in peace,’ which is what Otto says? ‘I don’t want to get involved in politics.’ Is that a sayable thing? Is it moral to live that way?

“These are important questions for me,” Garrett-Groag says. “I tend not to participate as I should, and to not, perhaps, take any kind of action as I should. I don’t think that action is always possible, and I think that that is what ‘Hamlet’ is about, and that’s why ‘Hamlet’ is the great Western play.”

That Garrett-Groag dwells on such questions--not only as regards her own life, but also in her writing--is a mark of her upbringing and education. Born in a middle-class Argentine household, she is the daughter of an electrical engineer of mixed Jewish and Catholic descent, who emigrated from his native Vienna in 1938. Her mother, who lives near the playwright, is of Italian descent but was raised in Uruguay. The playwright also has a younger brother, who is a businessman residing in Redondo Beach.

When Garrett-Groag was 5, the family moved from Argentina to Uruguay to escape the Peron dictatorship. Yet though the family lived in Latin America, European culture was at the heart of their lives. “My father had that very conflicted relationship to Vienna,” she says. “Basically he was a Viennese at heart, but he had experienced a tremendous betrayal. Remember, the countries on the other side were not the only ones that allowed Hitler to happen. That’s what ‘Magic Fire’ is about, the tension of a great love for a culture and, at the same time, a great distrust for that same culture that was not able to stop something like Hitler.”

Garrett-Groag, who is divorced and refuses to give her age (“That’s a horrible question! I’m an actress!”), lost her father when she was 14. By that time, however, she had already spent a good deal of time on her own, at school in France.

“My parents believed that an education is all we can give you,” she says. “They thought that--and I think this comes mostly from Diaspora Jews--that education is all there is, and you have to get the very best. Especially if you’re not rich, if you don’t know what’s going to happen to a country.

“I think they were frightened people,” she adds. “They had escaped one country for the other, and they truly believed that all that they could be sure of was a violin and a book and Shakespeare and Keats and Schiller and Hegel, and then, you know, who knows what else? They thought that was civilized. They wanted me to know the world, and to have a place to go to if Uruguay went down the tubes, as it indeed did in ’68.”

Because of the peculiarities of academic years in Europe and South America, plus a certain scholarly precociousness, Garrett-Groag ended up in college at the tender age of 15. She attended the Universite de Dijon and completed her bachelor’s degree in French literature and theater at Lake Forest College, just north of Chicago.. She then went on to receive both an M.A. and PhD in French literature and theater from nearby Northwestern University.

Although she knew she wanted to be an actress from the start, she continued her education “for my parents,” she says. Even her choice of what country to go to school in was, in a way, an homage to her late father’s sensibilities. “My father thought that the U.S. was the cradle of all freedom and democracy: FDR, Adlai Stevenson, the American flag,” she says. “Whenever we would go see ‘Madame Butterfly,’ and they’d quote ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ my father would weep.”

*

Determined to pursue an acting career, Garrett-Groag (whose name is a hyphenate of an Anglicized stage name and her family name) moved to L.A. in 1975. She has since amassed an impressive list of credits, including roles in “The Kentucky Cycle” (at the Taper and on Broadway) and in numerous productions at the Globe, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Rep and other major regional theaters. In the late 1980s, however, Garrett-Groag began to feel that acting wasn’t enough. She wrote her first play, titled “The Ladies of the Camellias” in 1987; it imagines a meeting between the legendary rival late 19th/early 20th century actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, although Garrett-Groag says the story really is about the theater and Marxism. “The Ladies of the Camellias” was staged at the former West End Playhouse in L.A. in 1988 and at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1992. Her second play, “The White Rose,” which premiered at the Globe in 1991, tells the true story of a group of German teenagers who stood up to Hitler’s regime and were martyred. Those same themes of moral culpability and individual-versus-society are explored further in “The Magic Fire,” Garrett-Groag’s third play.

She has also written a number of adaptations and translations, as well as the Spanish libretto for the Thea Musgrave opera “Simon Bolivar.” She was one of the founding members of the L.A.-based Antaeus company and began directing professionally about 10 years ago, first in theater and, more recently, in opera.

Yet while Garrett-Groag continues to take acting and directing assignments, writing appears to be her greatest passion at this point. She is working on a play, co-commissioned by the Taper and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, about the origins of courtly love in the practices of 12th century French troubadours. The topic may not sound like a recipe for theatrical success, but neither have the ones that came before.

“My subjects are not mainstream, but I’ve been very lucky,” Garrett-Groag says. “I don’t have anything unproduced.”*

*

“The Magic Fire,” Old Globe Theater, Balboa Park, San Diego. Opens Thursday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends July 3. $23-$39. (619) 239-2255.