 Neil
LaBute’s blackly comic take on the events of 9/11, The Mercy Seat, has definite resonance for actor Jane Badler, she tells Michael Magnusson.
“I’ll be honest,” Badler confesses. “This
is probably the hardest thing I’ve done.”
The Brooklyn native achieved cult
status with her role in the 1980s sci-fi series, V, playing the rat-eating alien lizard queen, Diana, but has also
had a varied career in theatre and the cinema. Having travelled to Australia for
the 1980s remake of the TV series Mission
Impossible, Badler fell in love and settled here permanently.
“So first thing was to get my beautiful New York accent back
full throttle for the play,” she laughs.
Although set the day after September 11,
2001, as the grim sight of the collapsing towers of the World Trade Centre was
replayed endlessly around the world, the real drama of The Mercy Seat is
driven by the clandestine affair between Abby (Badler) and her subordinate
co-worker, Ben (Simon Wood). Finding himself on the ‘missing, presumed dead’ list,
having been lucky enough to be at Abby’s apartment when the planes struck,
instead of at work, Ben debates taking advantage of the situation in order to
leave his old life, and family, behind.
It was a bold decision for LaBute to use
the sacrosanct events of 9/11 as a backdrop to a play about self interest.
“It’s the idea that Americans like to think
that everyone was a hero,” explains Badler, “that everyone was out there helping
and doing honourable things [when disaster struck]. These two people are not
heroes. The play is about two deeply flawed individuals who are battling out
their own issues against this national catastrophe.”
LaBute’s plays are famous for the cruelty
of their central relationships. His characters are invariably psychologically
and sexually humiliated, and an enormous challenge to an actor.
“Abby is such an amazing character. She is
strong, intelligent, an attractive corporate woman but incredibly fragile,” the
actor says. “She’s never married, she has no children and is having an affair
with a married younger man, and she puts herself into humiliating situations,
like in Edward Albee’s Virginia Woolf,
you know, with those battles of the sexes.”
In The
Mercy Seat, LaBute’s script demands that the battle be fought sexually, and
for Abby and Ben to relate their struggles for power and submission in graphic
detail.
“Honey,” gasps Badler, “when they handed me
the play, thank God my family were on holiday! I’ve been so terrorised waking
up every day to the script.”
Rehearsing the play, her first with Melbourne’s renowned Red
Stitch Actors’ Theatre, has been a rewarding experience despite its caustic and
confronting subject matter.
“They’ve asked me to do something that will
stretch me as an actor. So I think ‘come on baby’, just jump in, don’t be
frightened. I’m working with an amazing co-star and the director, Alex Papps,
doesn’t allow any untruths to go by. He’s pushed but it’s been a beautiful rehearsal
process.”
“The part is a gift, let me tell you; it’s
uncompromising.”
Having trained at the prestigious Stella
Adler studio in New York,
Badler loves plays that stretch an actor’s versatility.
“It makes them look at themselves in a
different way,” she explains. “And I
think deep down people love watching them too. We all have fantasies, let’s
face it, and actors are lucky because they live them out on stage every night.”
The
Mercy Seat at the Red Stitch Actors' Theatre until March 8.
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