A Close Look at Herself

In the opening scene of Athol Fugard’s new play, “Sorrows and Rejoicings,” Judith Light appears alone on a dark stage. A sob begins to rise in her throat. But her character, who has just returned home from her husband’s funeral, quickly stifles the sob when her maid enters.

Light’s face flattens into an opaque mask as she controls her emotions. And she maintains that steely control until the play’s conclusion, when emotion finally takes over. It is a transformation that Light has been trying to achieve in her own life.

“I want to control everything, and it’s silly,” says the self-described control freak. “I’m really working to let go of control and to let myself be guided.”

So far, that strategy appears to be paying off. The former star of the TV sitcom “Who’s the Boss?” has returned to the stage. She won raves two years ago for her performance in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Wit,” and critics responded last year with equal enthusiasm to her portrayal of the title character in Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.

Now comes “Sorrows and Rejoicings.” The play, about two women confronting each other following the death of the man they both loved, is running at the off-Broadway theater Second Stage. Light portrays the uptight widow, Allison; Charlayne Woodard co-stars as Marta, the maid who was the lover of Allison’s estranged husband.

During a break in the production’s harried schedule--rehearsal during the day, preview performances at night--Light, 52, is relaxed and confiding. She wears Allison’s inky black suit and corporate-style hairdo, layered and streaked with frosty blond highlights.

“I see Allison as a universal symbol for the way most of us go through life until something stunning stops us in our tracks, and we realize that we have lived and are living closed-down, frightened, in regret, in sorrow,” Light says.

Light’s career began smoothly enough. After graduating from the theater program at Carnegie Mellon University in 1971, she spent five years in repertory theater, then moved to New York. A steady stream of roles followed, beginning with a Broadway production of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” in 1975.

But a few years later, the offers began to dry up, and Light found herself out of work for about six months. “I started to get really tight and really frightened,” she says. “I didn’t know when the unemployment was going to run out.” Despair began to paralyze her, and she considered abandoning acting altogether.

Although she had vowed never to do television, she was forced to relax her standards, taking a job as an understudy on the soap opera “One Life to Live.” Soon she was a star of the show, winning daytime Emmys in 1980 and 1981 for her portrayal of a prostitute. “Who’s the Boss?” followed in 1984.

Working in television was a humbling experience, she says.

“I was on my big high horse and I was only going to do theater or feature films, but that’s not the way it happened,” she said. “I made a conscious choice to be open to what was coming my way.”

After “Who’s the Boss?” ended in 1992, Light appeared in a slew of TV movies and starred in an ill-fated sitcom, “The Simple Life,” in 1998. But the work began to feel stale, and critics and audiences were becoming increasingly indifferent.

It was one of Light’s side projects--her work for charities supporting AIDS victims and gay rights--that inspired her to make a change. After doing the TV movie “The Ryan White Story,” which chronicled the struggles of the young hemophiliac who got the AIDS virus from a blood transfusion and died when he was 18, Light became a speaker on the fund-raising circuit.

Eventually, the gulf between her public activism and private life began to bother her. “I said, ‘I’m not going to talk to everybody and say how inspired I am by the gay community and live another way.’”

She vowed to audition for the next play she was offered. As luck would have it, the play was “Wit,” in which she was required to shave her head and appear nude on stage.

Deciding to take the role wasn’t easy, says Light, who was afraid she would embarrass herself. However, her fears of humiliation proved unfounded. Reviewing “Wit” in the New York Times in 1999, Peter Marks wrote that Light’s performance “cuts poignantly close to the bone.”

Fugard has only the highest praise for Light’s performance in “Sorrows and Rejoicings,” which he is also directing. He chose her for the play after what he calls a “very long and very wonderful” lunch last year in Los Angeles.

“A friend said of Judith’s performance that she walks onto the stage at the beginning of the show like a perfect ice cube and then you watch her melt down into a glass of pure and very sweet water by the end of the play,” he says. “It’s a glorious image, and exactly what Judith achieves. When my friend said that, I thought, ‘Well, at least I got one thing right.’”

After “Sorrows and Rejoicings” closes, Light will spend March and April in South Africa, where she will participate in a seven-day trek to raise money for AIDS research.

As for her career, she plans to resume her dogged pursuit of no control.

“You know that thing I told you about asking the universe for guidance?” she asks, laughing. “I’m going to do that.”