Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, presented by The Blank Theatre Company, continues Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through March 14. Tickets: $22-$28. Stella Adler Theatre, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood; 323.661.9827 or theblank.com.
Christine Estabrook is such a complete and consummate actress that she played all five adult women in Spring Awakening on Broadway. “Without a single change of costume!” she adds. “That certainly didn’t make it any easier.”
Mike Genovese and Estabrook
In her current role as Luella in Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, she plays one role but wears five different costumes. “They are identical ‘bridesmaids’ dresses in various pastel colors and they all arrived with broken zippers,” she recalls. “They had to cut me out of them at the dress rehearsal!”
In Spring Awakening, she says, “all the boys split their pants at one time or another but there were wonderful seamstresses backstage who sewed them up before their next entrance.” No such luck at the Stella Adler Theatre in Hollywood, though, where she is currently bringing down the house nightly as the theater-mad, impervious wife of Leonard (Mike Genovese), the latter-day Dr. Strangelove who is busy saving New Jersey from terrorists. Why Torture is having its West Coast premiere after first being seen at New York’s Public Theatre in the spring of 2009.
Estabrook started early. She remembers singing “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Age” as part of the East Aurora (New York) Players Summer Program when she was nine. And during high school breaks she remembers “putting google-eyes on pull-toys” at the Fisher-Price toy factory.
But after graduating from Oswego State University and the Yale Drama School, it was off to New York City and her first role, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. She played Dunyasha in The Cherry Orchard, taking over for another just-starting-out actress: Meryl Streep.
In 1994, just before the Northridge earthquake, she came out to LA to do TV. She started with The X-Files and then went on to Frasier where she played Lou, the owner of the restaurant where Frasier ate his dinner on the show’s first Christmas episode.
Then she was asked to audition for Desperate Housewives as a lady known as “Mrs. Chung.” Since this redheaded beauty is noticeably not Chinese, they changed the name to Martha Huber and provided the character with the distinction of being the first person to die on the show. Nevertheless, she says, “I love Marc Cherry and all the writers on that production.”
Estabrook, Rhea Seehorn and Sunhil Malhotra
Estabrook was trained in The Method, “but with a technique,” she says. “When I read a role, I start hearing it in my head. Then, as you assign personality to the character and fill in what she wants and how she intends to get it, you have to be prepared to defend your choices. The goal is to support the playwright and determine how your character fits into the play. You have to choose what’s best for the production, not for yourself.
“You have to get a conscious grip on the role and make sure you’re in the same play as everyone else,” she sums up.
Although she commutes back to New York to do theater work, she loves California. “I grew up near Buffalo, so I know weather,” she says. And there’s “a certain arrogance” about the way people feel about it. “People take pride in the worst conditions of where they live,” she says. She has invited her mother out west for Christmas and her mother consistently demurs. “I have to have snow for Christmas,” her mother insists. Nevertheless, Estabrook defends her yellow slicker “real weather” boots she brought from New York. “Fashion boots are a joke!” she exclaims.
She talks about growing up in the ’50s. “It was a Father Knows Best time,” she says. “A more innocent time. And that’s the time Christopher Durang writes about in Why Torture is Wrong. I went to school with Chris and found him a very generous person.”
She also considers Daniel Henning, her director in Torture, a “very generous” man as well. “I talk about acting in an intellectual way,” she acknowledges, “and I tend to deconstruct the role and try to shape the emotional through-line. And Daniel talks to me point by point.” It’s her first time working with him and, she says appreciatively, “He’s very smart.”
She says, “Since I started acting I haven’t done anything else. And now I’m aging into the great roles. It’s very freeing to be in a place where people kind of treat you like you know what you’re doing.” As for the next part of her life, she says she is “getting a handle on it.” She’d like to do a radio show with older actresses, performing plays “for people who are blind or bedridden, who can’t get out to the theater.”
But then she adds, “I’d really like to be a regular on a TV show. A sitcom. I love doing that.”
Until then, you can always find her practicing her Nichirin Daishonin Buddhism exercises because she heartily agrees with its philosophy: “The object of life is to be happy,” she concludes.
Feature image and article by Cynthia Citron. Story images by Rick Baumgartner.
