Now pay attention
YOU’VE got to wonder: What would she be like without the Prozac?
No one would admit to being anything like the selfabsorbed, openly obsessive-compulsive parent portrayed by Johanna Day in Lisa Loomer’s “Distracted” -- onstage at the Mark Taper Forum through Sunday -- but everybody knows her. At least that’s what Day always hears after the show.
Day’s Vera could be the advice-dispensing sister-in-law, the too-blunt neighbor, the over-scheduled ex-wife, the guy in the adjacent cubicle whose pencils must be arranged by color and in descending length. People never want to mention names -- but they probably shouldn’t worry because such types are usually too clueless to recognize themselves and stopped listening five minutes ago anyway.
Those working with Day -- in her early 40s, the youngest of nine children from small-town Sperryville, Va., in the Blue Ridge Mountains -- say that the tall, laid-back, strawberry-blond woman with the hearty laugh is the polar opposite of the OCD poster child she portrays in Loomer’s play.
Day is better known for stage work than for roles on-screen. She appeared at the Taper in 1999 in Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive,” netted a Tony Award nomination for “Proof” and recently won the Helen Hayes Award for “The Rainmaker.” In “Distracted,” she’s never onstage for long. Day jokes that by the time you glance up from consulting the program notes to find out who she is, she’s gone again.
But as one of the opinionated chorus of characters that Mama (Rita Wilson) consults about her child, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder, Day is making the most of Loomer’s brief script description of Vera: “A neighbor with no people skills and little affect. Obsessive but helpful.”
Critical mentions of Day’s performance have been short but positive. Variety’s Bob Verini wrote, “Particular kudos accrue to Johanna Day’s Supermom neighbor with an obsessive disorder of her own.” And audiences have been responding with delighted applause at Vera’s near meltdown when Wilson’s character upends her inner sanctum by casually dumping out the contents of Vera’s purse.
Some of the details of Vera’s persona, such as the ready supply of Xanax she offers like Tic Tacs, are dictated by the script -- but it was Day’s idea to have Vera clutch and click a pen at all times; you never know when you might need to write something down. It was also Day’s idea for Vera to keep the items in her purse carefully separated in plastic zip-lock bags.
“I just sort of ran with it,” Day said in a recent conversation at the labyrinthine Oakwood Apartments on Barham Boulevard, where she and her tail-less Himalayan cat, Missy, are housed for the duration. “People who are obsessivecompulsive, it doesn’t mean that their lives are in order at all. I decided her hair should be sort of crazy. She wants control of her things, but she can’t find anything. She’s a wreck.”
Director Leonard Foglia says that Vera was the most difficult role to cast. “It never stands out when someone plays it for laughs,” Foglia says. “Johanna approaches it as a serious role, a person with real problems. We know these people in life, people who are not hearing anything -- they are only thinking of the next thing they are going to say. The most interesting people to put onstage are the ones who sort of live in extremes.”
Wilson points out that a day with Day is ever so much more relaxing than a day with Vera. “She’s just so much fun and so always in a good mood -- she’s joyful.”
Wilson adds, “When I first met her, I said, ‘What’s your e-mail address?’ and she said, ‘I don’t have e-mail.’ I said, ‘Oh, come on.’ And she said, ‘No I don’t. Why can’t people just pick up the phone and call?’ ”
Day admits that she recently did get an e-mail address, but she’s not going to give it to anyone unless she has to. And after many years of stage work -- broken up by an actors’ rite of passage, a guest role on “Law & Order” -- she and Missy the cat are hearing the call of Hollywood.
“The word on the street lately is, I gotta come back out and do it, because you know what, I’m ready to make some money,” she says cheerfully. “I have 15 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I’m ready to build a house.”
Actually, Day never thought she’d leave the Blue Ridge Mountains in the first place. “Even when I was little, I’d say, ‘I’m going to be an actress,’ but I had no idea how I was going to do that, living in Sperryville. There was, like, one play a year at my high school, a tiny, tiny high school, and it always seemed like it was ‘Hello, Dolly.’ And it was always during track season.” For the 5-foot, 10-inch Day, track and basketball always took precedence over the stage.
It was almost on a whim that Day applied to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts -- and got in. “My mom brought me to New York for one day to audition for the school. I’d never been to New York, never,” she says. “That’s what started it all.”
Now, she says, the next move may be to try Los Angeles. “Both of my parents died over the past four years, so my life has changed completely,” Day says. “For most of those four years, I just kept working in plays because I love it, but I wasn’t really thinking about my career. I was just trying to grieve and get over it. But I think I’m a better actress for it now.
“I know I’m not 20, but I have all of my original parts,” she says with a laugh. “I’m not too worried about that. I think I’m ready.”
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‘Distracted’
Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday
Ends: April 29
Price: $42 to $55
Contact: (213) 628-2772