Stockard Channing (#305) - February, 2011 Tony Award Winners on Downstage Center

Stockard Channing (1985 Tony Award winner for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play for “Joe Egg”) discusses her work in Jon Robin Baitz's new play “Other Desert Cities”, acknowledging the ambiguity of the character for the audience and explaining whether she has defined her character's secret motivations with certainty. She also talks about her years breaking into theatre at Harvard, alongside other students like John Lithgow and Tommy Lee Jones, and her subsequent work around Boston before coming to New York and getting her increasingly bigger break in the Broadway musical “Two Gentlemen of Verona”, which also began her association with John Guare; her years in Los Angeles, including a film gig she did simply because she needed money, namely “Grease”; her return to the stage in successive productions of “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” at Williamstown, Long Wharf, Roundabout and finally Broadway; being given the opportunity to choose between playing Bunny and Bananas in the Lincoln Center Theatre revival of “The House of Blue Leaves”; how it felt, as a native Upper East Side New Yorker, playing an Upper East Side New Yorker in “Six Degrees of Separation”, and how her performance had to change when she acted in the film version; whether she knew how divided response would be to Guare's “Four Baboons Adoring the Sun”; why she wasn't daunted about stepping into the shoes of Rosemary Harris or Katharine Hepburn for “The Lion in Winter” in 1999 -- and what about doing the show did give her pause; what it was like to do “Pal Joey”, her first musical in over two decades (having previously followed Liza Minnelli into “The Rink”); and how she approached the role of Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest” for a production at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, Ireland last year.