Unscripted

Actress Tara Rosling.

Tara Rosling has been acting professionally in film, television and theatre for just over 10 years. And this summer, she stars in two shows at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. I’ve watched her act many times, but associate her primarily with a performance I never got to see. For her first Stratford audition in 1999, she read her lines in a sundress and combat boots — and was cast as Viola in Twelfth Night.

Rosling, herself, is a mix of the vulnerable (sundress) and the strong (combat boots). But what’s important, and typical of the performer, is that the mixed-message outfit was thrown on as a lark. “I didn’t even remember that I’d worn it, but Antoni [Cimolino] reminded me of it years later,” Rosling says. “Moral of the story: if you want to be remembered, wear combat boots.” Throaty giggle. Second moral: follow your instincts. Rosling’s not studied, on stage or off. Her pose is never to strike a pose.

While so many of her peers fascinate themselves by discussing the acting process, the red-haired actress stops herself when she veers anywhere near earnest. Take her responses over the years to the standard interview question about offstage hobbies. At different times, she’s claimed that she’s learning to belly dance (“[I have] no hips, so it’s hard”), plays guitar (“I sing a mean version of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’”), dances freakishly (appalling the habitués of a Stratford dive) and cries (“I get overwhelmed, trying to get what the director wants in a scene, so I cry — or laugh.”) This summer, she informs me, she’s taken up bicycling through wine country (“gorgeous”) and encaustic painting (“not so gorgeous yet, but I gave a canvas to my director Joe Ziegler for opening night”). Rosling has that quality which is always, by definition, rare: originality.

Rosling’s offstage spontaneity lends her onstage work a rare, utterly in-the-moment charm. She’s usually cast in roles that take advantage of her expressive features that can conjure up a series of quick emotions, from dismay to delight. She’s served up many plucky women — Annie Sullivan and Eliza Doolittle — and she can light up a stage like Julia Roberts (for all her flaws) can a movie.

Michael Ball as Doctor Sloper and Tara Rosling as Catherine Sloper in “The Heiress.” Photo David Cooper. Courtesy Shaw Festival.

This summer, Rosling has to impersonate a different sort of character, which is an exacting performing challenge. Catherine Sloper, the title role of The Heiress, is far from incandescent. Even her father, a society doctor (Michael Ball), thinks that the only reason someone would marry her is for the considerable fortune she stands to inherit. In what may be a misguided effort to protect his only child, he attempts to drive away her sole suitor (Mike Shara), whom he suspects to be a gold-digger.

And so, for the first time, Rosling has to convey charmless, pluckless, drab. She does so convincingly, dulling her eyes, muddying her diction and consigning her light to the proverbial bushel. Rosling departs from the film interpretations by Olivia de Havilland and (the ever lousy) Jennifer Jason Leigh. Both found a strange triumph in the girl’s jilting, but Rosling refuses to convert the heiress’s plight into a victory. “I think it’s a tragedy, because she’s lost her capacity for love, but others — the audiences have been really vocal — clearly see it as a win for her.” The play and the exquisite book on which it is based, Henry James’s Washington Square, leave this question open, and Rosling’s performance suggests, but doesn’t dictate, an answer.

From the stalls, it’s something of a downer to see an actor with such an ability to uplift, essaying this dreary part, but the Shaw has her playing closer to type in another drama: she’s a high-spirited South American woman in The Magic Fire — opening in June. “In The Heiress, I inhabit the Gothic, subdued, corseted world of 19th century New York,” she says. “I get to breathe out in Magic Fire [as] the daughter of these flamboyant, crazy, opera-loving parents in Eva Peron’s Argentina.”

Her own upbringing (the child of woo-woo West Coast hippies) was closer to the latter than the former. Though, Rosling admits, “I felt a deep connection to Catherine Sloper, because I perceive the women in my family as having faced a similar sense of abandonment — that they often felt orphaned, like Catherine does, always looking to others to feel validated.”

Rosling’s parents separated in the early 1970s, shortly after she was born in Seattle. She and her art therapist mother headed north to British Columbia, roaming the province and living in a different place each year. For her 13th birthday, Rosling’s grandmother gave her acting lessons, and it proved a fit. (The Rosling matriarchy — grandmother, mother and a four-year-old niece — travelled from B.C. for The Heiress’s opening on May 5.)

After studying theatre at Toronto’s York University, Rosling swiftly made progress, landing some lucrative, but mainly lame, television and film projects (terrorist No. 3, ass-kicking female spy, etc.), as well as a few quality parts — most notably, in Jeremy Podeswa’s The Five Senses, and Jim Allodi’s The Uncles. And she’s never had to scrounge for stage work, having three Dora Award nominations to her credit, and a one-woman play, 1,002 Nights, written expressly for her.

Finding the balance between stage and celluloid work hasn’t been easy. After two seasons at Shaw, she took last year off. “I wanted to keep the film door open,” she says. “They forget about you pretty quickly, unless you remind them.” Having suffered through made-for-television movies with the say-no-more titles of Time Bomb and Murder in the Hamptons, Rosling is now prepared to focus more exclusively on stage work. “They were financially fantastic, well, maybe not fantastic, but pretty good,” she says. “But I’ve realized that the theatre is my real love. [It’s] where I’m going to channel my energies.”

Rosling is in good company here. There’s a gang of six potent female performers, all between 30 and 40, who have what can best be described as the full package. The group includes Rosling, Waneta Storms (who co-stars in The Magic Fire), Caroline Cave, Yanna McIntosh, Liisa Repo-Martell and Kristen Thomson. Together and individually, they have barnstormed the country’s stages, often playing opposite each other and hanging out together off the boards, becoming a theatrical brat pack. Of the sextet, Rosling is the most gut-driven, the least likely to seek intellectual justifications for her acting choices.

These actresses aren’t spending the bulk of their time on stage merely because they love it, or because they can’t get work on screen. They’re opting for the theatre because of the quality of the roles. “I’m starting to think film and television aren’t really actors’ mediums,” Rosling says — and I’ve heard other members of the group voice the same opinion. “I’ve seldom felt the same sense of ownership that you do with a play part.”

But we’re entering earnest territory, now, so we tiptoe back to the tulips. Does she like spending the summer in rustic Niagara-on-the-Lake? “I’d much rather live with rabbits and raccoons, than people packing guns,” she ventures, presumably taking a page out of the parental back-to-the-garden book. “But it’s so pristine here, that I miss the loony factor and have to go back to the city regularly. You know, I miss the nut-bars.”

The Heiress plays until Oct. 7 at the Royal George Theatre; The Magic Fire plays from June 11 to Oct. 8 at the Court House Theatre.

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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