By her own admission, actress Kate
Mulgrew has a lot on her plate right now. She has just finished a well-received
run in the one-woman show “Tea at Five,” in which she portrays Katharine
Hepburn from ages 31 to 76. Her husband, former Cuyahoga County Commissioner
and Mahoning Valley native Tim Hagan, is running for Ohio governor this
year. So why exactly is she coming to Youngstown State University this
month to appear in an April 25 staged reading of “Dear Liar”?
Family ties.
“There’s a little too much on my calendar
at this moment to make me feel perfectly comfortable regarding everything
that I have to do,” she acknowledged during a telephone interview last
month, just prior to the closing of “Tea at Five” in Hartford, Conn., Hepburn’s
home town. “The play has to be a priority now and sometimes that’s a little
difficult, given the campaign . . . but I feel great.”
Mulgrew and her sister-in-law, Michelle Lepore-Hagan,
director of the Fine and Performing Arts Series at YSU, had discussed the
possibility of the actress coming to campus over the past two years when.
Last year, Mulgrew finally ended a seven-season run starring as Capt. Kathryn
Janeway on the television series, “Star Trek: Voyager.”
“Finally it works so we’ll be able to combine
a great many things while we’re down there,” Mulgrew said, including a
fund raiser for her husband’s gubernatorial campaign. “It’s a wonderful
way to support the university,” she added.
“We knew she wanted to do live theater again
and she would be working her way back to the East Coast to New York City,
and then eventually we’d get her to YSU,” said Lepore-Hagan, who is married
to Youngstown area State Sen. Robert Hagan, Tim’s brother.
“Dear Liar” is adapted from the correspondence
between playwright George Bernard Shaw, played by Dr. George McCloud ,
dean of YSU’s College of Fine and Performing Arts, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell
(Mulgrew).
“[McCloud] loves George Bernard Shaw,” Lepore-Hagan
said. “Then when we talked about whether I would ask Kate to come in, then
we realized that she would be perfect for Mrs. Campbell.”
Mulgrew also is pleased about the choice.
“It’s of course very compelling,” she observed.
“How can you go wrong?”
During the two-day visit, Lepore-Hagan said,
Mulgrew also will do workshops and lectures with YSU students.
“When I asked her if she would be interested
in working with our students, she was so positive and so sweet about working
with young theater students studying acting,” Lepore Hagan said. “She wants
to work with them and do sessions with them for acting on stage and also
in front of a camera.” Money raised from the show will go to a scholarship
fund for theater students.
Prior to coming to Youngstown, Mulgrew will
return to Hartford for a one-week run making up some early performances
that were canceled when shows were cut back to one a day due to the strain
on her vocal chords. Mulgrew is the only actress in the two-act show and
in the second act said she has to do a “trick” to recapture Hepburn’s voice
in its full accuracy.
“I’m really riding my vocal chords for an
hour there,” she observed. “It’s obviously very damaging and one performance
a day is fine because I can breathe through it, but two is asking too much
of that muscle.”
Reflecting on her “Tea at Five” experiences,
Mulgrew described it as “one of those rare and marvelous moments in an
actress’ career where the match was perfect and the timing was perfect.”
The show was written by playwright Matthew Lombardo specifically with Mulgrew
in mind.
“Who would have known that Katharine Hepburn
and Kate Mulgrew would have fit so well, but we do – and at a time when
I think audiences are ready to sit back and look at a life like Hepburn’s,
and be entertained and elucidated and hopefully ennobled.”
Following the fall elections, Mulgrew said
there is interest in staging the show in New York, and she also said the
possibility exists for a staging at the Cleveland Play House.
“That’s what’s so beautiful about a one-person
play,” she observed. “I intend to take it everywhere.”
With “Tea” concluded in Hartford, though,
Mulgrew said her focus will be on Hagan’s bid for Ohio governor. She said
the campaign has been “catching fire” in recent weeks, with support coming
in from traditionally Republican areas of Ohio such as Cincinnati, Toledo
and Dayton. In late March, Hagan and Mulgrew had a conducted campaign events
featuring family friend Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, Cleveland Mayor
Jane Campbell and Robert Picardo, one of Mulgrew’s former “Voyager” co-stars.
She said she is looking forward to campaigning with her husband.
Later this year, Mulgrew will appear on the
big screen in a setting her fans in recent years will find very familiar,
reprising her role as Janeway – newly promoted to admiral – for a cameo
role in the upcoming “Star Trek Nemesis,” the latest installment in the
long-running movie franchise. “I did that in December,” she said. “Not
a great deal to say because it’s such a small little scene – Patrick Stewart
[Capt. Jean-Luc Picard] was off camera. It was a lot of fun and I was in
and out. I played an admiral telling him what to do, which was no end of
fun as you can imagine.”
