Actress Zoe Kazan "Explodes" with "A Behanding"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Wednesday, 02 June 2010 12:13

Written by Brad Balfour

With A Behanding in Spokane on Broadway through this weekend (ending June 6) and recent feature films including The Exploding Girl, actress Zoe Kazan is one of today's busiest go-to talents. Though born in Los Angeles -- daughter of screenwriter Nicholas Kazan and actress/producer/writer/director Robin Swicord, and the granddaughter of film and theatre director Elia Kazan -- the Angelina-turned-New Yorker has really established a presence on her own.

While the pixie-faced Kazan doesn't look much older than a pre-teen, the 26 year old has played a remarkable range of characters from the epileptic college student Ivy in the New York-centric indie The Exploding Girl to the befuddled pot-dealing Marilyn in A Behanding in Spokane. And since the latter's star Christopher Walken got the Tony nomination for best actor in a Drama, the play's been heating up the hot list.

Having a playwright like Irishman Martin McDonagh enough of your fan to cast you in a four-hander along with Walken, Anthony Mackie and Sam Rockwell, is props enough but this "it girl" also finds time to write her own scripts, something she's getting known for as much as for her acting.

Though Kazan allegedly didn't know that her grandfather Elia was famous until she was 13, the genetic link is obvious. And with a movie by director Kelly Reichardt, Meek's Cutoff, coming out this year as well as the Josh Radnor-directed Happythankyoumoreplease -- a Sundance Audience Award winner -- also coming out in August, 2010, Kazan's star is ever on the rise. So it was particularly gratifying that she took time in both a roundtable and one-on-one interview to discuss both her film and theater career.

Q: You have a particular affection for playwright Martin McDonagh.

ZK: I did one of Martin's plays in college, The Cripple of Inishmaan, and had seen The Beauty Queen of Leenane when it was on Broadway when I was kid and I had read for it before, so I was already a big fan of his. Then I saw a play of his in 2005 and it just blew me away.

Truly, I think [doing A Behanding] the most exciting theater experience I've had, and I wonder if anything will ever top it for me. It's the most extraordinary play and that was the most extraordinary production. So when I head that he had written a new play I jumped at the chance. The fact that we've become friends out of this process is just an added bonus.

Q: It's a pretty dark black comedy.

ZK: Yeah. My dad has similar sensitivities to Martin's. My dad has a very dark sense of humor and definitely that was reflected in the bedtime stories that I heard as a child and the movies that were shown to me.

I have a gothic, and by that I mean Victorian gothic, sensibility myself. So many great stories, so many primal stories have both of those elements -- the humor and the terror.

If you look at something like Grimm's fairy tales, or even looking at stories in the Bible like Job, or Jonah and the Whale, or Noah's Ark. Most of the storytelling that gets absolutely at the root of our civilization has both of those elements.

Q: Having done more than one McDonagh play do you find that it's good, that you have a good idea of him and his work?

ZK: I was young when I did Cripple; I was in college, I was like 19 or 20 years old, and I don't want to belittle myself, I'm sure I was fine in the part, but it's just completely, completely different than anything that I'm doing now in terms of my command of language and my command of my body. I'm just a different actor than I was.

Q: Did it give you a leg up on understanding him, or do you have to approach it differently with each play?

ZK: It's different every play. He's writing different worlds. It would be one thing if it was all the same world, but the plays have so little in common.

Q: When you're working with a brand new play that doesn't have a history like Chekov, you're really defining the characters and defining them each night; it's not like something you can fall back on archetypes and things like that.

ZK: Absolutely. In some ways it's both more and less creative than interpreting a part that's been played before. When I was playing Masha in The Seagull, everyone knows my first lines in the play; they could practically say it along with me probably. Everybody knows who she is and if I deviate from the way that people normally play it Masha's not going to get lost in the mix. It's like you have a coloring book that's already half colored in, so if you color in the rest it's fine.

Whereas, if I play Marilyn against what Martin's written on the page no one's going to get to see the play. It's just a very different responsibility as an actor. It is amazing to be in a play with so few people; when we did our first run-through and I saw everybody afterward and it was just the three of them and me.

I thought, "Holy shit. That's not a lot of people to be pushing this boat forward." Especially being the only girl in the cast, I feel really lucky; they're such great guys and they all take really good care of me and I'm learning a lot.

Q: The only bad thing is you can't step outside yourself and watch yourself in the play.

ZK: It's true, but you can't really do that in any show because you can't watch yourself. You can watch the rest of the play and see how it's going but at a certain point you don't want to do that anymore because it takes you out of your concentration on your character. Like when I was doing The Seagull, there were large portions of the play when I'd be offstage, and I had to stop watching because when I went onstage I wasn't thinking about Masha, I was thinking about the play as a play, not as the real world I was living in. So I'd go upstairs and I'd put on my music and I'd knit.

Q: Once you've done a play once, it's not like each night after it's totally new. Doing a character in a movie is experiencing the experience as it happens. If you don't want to know anything about your character other than your experience of living it as it's happening you can do that. Does the theatrical familiarity make it easier or harder to come at it with the freshness of the experience as it unfolds?

ZK: Like you have to have perspective on it?

Q: On the one hand it's a good that you know the play so well that you go in and do it, but how do you make it fresh every time? Whereas a movie, if you want to you don't have to read the book, you don't have to read anything but your parts, and you can come into the whole movie like it's all new to you as things are happening to you.

ZK: I always read the whole script of whatever I'm doing, even if I have just a little scene, just to get the sense of where I belong and what the tone of the piece is like. So there's not a huge difference for me in what I know and what I don't know.

It is different though because you're doing the same thing every night, night after night, eight shows a week, weeks on end, for months at a time. That does get, I don't want to use the word monotonous, but it can become practiced or it can become my rote if you're not careful. You know how sometimes when you're tired and you drive home and when you get home you don't remember how you got there because you've done it so many times you can almost do it in your sleep?

Doing plays sometimes gets like that where you through a scene and all of a sudden you're like, "Did I say that line or did I not say that line? Did that part of the play already go by?" It can become disorienting in that way. And I think one thing that helps that is you usually get bored with yourself, right?

You are aware of what you're doing every night. But Sam and Chris and Anthony, my costars, are always infinitely interesting. They're always doing something different even if they're not aware that they're doing something different. Whenever I get bored I just plug into the people around me I guess.

Q: You're a writer as well. Does it helps you to work both in film and in theater? Or do you lean towards theater in your writing?

ZK: I grew up mostly being exposed to and loving movies. My love of theater is something that came a little bit later in my life. I love plays and I feel absolutely passionately about the theater, but in terms of where my imagination goes, I think more cinematically than I do theatrically, and writing a play is a very difficult thing.

It's not difficult for everyone, but for me the thing is getting people on and off stage and writing in a theatrical way, in a way that's specific for the theater and couldn't interchangeably be a short story or a movie. I get a great deal of pleasure out of it but it doesn't come as naturally to me as writing for the screen does.

Q: You'd think it would come naturally just because of genetics.

ZK: Right. Well, that's the other thing. I've been reading my parents' scripts since I was a little, little girl, like since I could read, since I was five. They gave me their scripts at that age to give them notes on it, so they were exposing me at a very early age to scripts. I've been reading scripts and learning about script structure since I was a little girl, so it's not in my blood but it's definitely upbringing.

Q: Did your grandfather have any influence; did you know him much?

ZK: He passed in 2008, so I was 24 then, so yeah, of course he was a big part of my life growing up. As for artistic influence on me, I think every actor working in a naturalistic way now is indebted to my grandfather. So I a professional sense of course he has had an impact on me, or his work has had an impact on me. But on a personal level, I didn't ask him for any advice or anything like that.

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