Staging a Story of Survival

During World War II, Londoners still went to the theater, even during the Blitz when German bombs were falling. Actors and audiences had to find their way to shelters, sometimes in mid-performance. When an all-clear sounded, the show often went on.

It is something that puzzled Helen Mirren for a long time. “I never understood how it could happen,” the British-born actress says. “I asked my mother, and she said, ‘Well, you just did it.”’

For Mirren and other Broadway actors, the answer became clear following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. After the grieving and remembering, “you get on with life,” Mirren says, “doing your job as well as you possibly can.”

That means going on stage eight times a week at the Broadhurst Theatre where a new adaptation of August Strindberg’s “Dance of Death” is in preview performances, fine-tuning for Thursday’s opening.

It is something you would expect from a performer best known to American audiences for her portrayal of no-nonsense, coolly efficient Police Superintendent Jane Tennison in public television’s “Prime Suspect.” Tennison is quite unlike Mirren, who, in real life, comes across as personable, funny and eager to work again on Broadway, a place she last visited in 1995 in a revival of Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country.”

On a bright blue fall morning, Mirren sits outside a Chelsea restaurant where she orders scrambled eggs, drinks coffee, downs vitamins--”I’m terrified of getting a cold”--and ponders the events that have shaken the country over the last month.

“Dance of Death” is an unnerving title in this city these days. Yet Strindberg’s dark comedy about a viciously combative couple, a military man and his wife, is, Mirren says, ultimately about love and survival.

She stars with Ian McKellen in this new version by American playwright Richard Greenberg, author of “Eastern Standard.” The production is not a London import, despite the presence of its high-profile actors and English director Sean Mathias, who first scored a New York success six years ago with “Indiscretions,” a highly theatrical take on Jean Cocteau’s “Les Parents Terribles.”

Because of its stars, “Dance of Death” is one of the most anticipated shows of the season and one with a sizable advance sale that should help cushion the show during the first few weeks of its run.

Broadway box-office receipts fell dramatically after the attacks, although “Dance of Death” suffered less severely than other shows because it is new and not as dependent on the tourist audience.

The show, with its high-voltage histrionics, is not easy to perform, according to its star.

Mirren calls it “a knot of a play--a lot of prancing about as my husband would say,” referring to film director Taylor Hackford.

On Sept. 11, cast and director were still in rehearsals, planning to do a run-through that day for the show’s producers.

“The next day we were due to move into the theater and start our technical process,” recalls Mirren, describing the time in any stage production’s life when lighting cues and sound levels are tested. “Of course, we didn’t do a run because nobody’s mind could get that together, but we worked on the play. I think it was the only thing to do.”

Preview performances began exactly one week later, and Mirren wondered how audiences would take to the production.

“Plays do take on different notes or have different echoes according to what’s going on in the world outside,” she says. “So there are lines in the play that have a very different meaning now than they would have had before Sept. 11. One of Ian’s is, ‘Let’s X it out and move on.’ You think, ‘What does that line mean to people tonight?”’

Mirren has been a stage performer since the early 1960s, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company and other troupes. So she knows how to get a sense of the people filling those seats out front, even if she never sees them.

“What you learn is how smart an audience is--from, obviously, the kind of response you get. The kind of listening you get. Their quickness to respond,” Mirren explains.

The actress is now a U.S. citizen, living with Hackford for part of the year in Los Angeles. Yet she still maintains a home in London and will probably return to England after “Dance of Death” closes in January. There’s a new edition of “Prime Suspect” to be filmed, the first in several years.

She accepts her American celebrity with good humor. And there’s more than just the “Prime Suspect” groupies. Mirren has fans from her quirky film career that includes such quality movies as “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” and “The Madness of King George.”

And then there is the teenage contingent. “I get a lot of kids who yell out, ‘Hey, Mrs. Tingle,”’ she says, cheering her on even though she played the teacher from hell in every adolescent’s favorite revenge fantasy, “Teaching Mrs. Tingle.”

Now she’s basking in the adulation of New York theater audiences, who have been cheering her every night. Yet she graciously deflects the applause back to those who brought “Dance of Death” to Broadway.

“It’s a courageous and bold move on the part of an American producer [Gerald Schoenfeld] to think of doing this play as a Broadway production,” Mirren says. “No wonder I was looking forward to coming back to do a play in New York.”