 |
GANGING UP: Ward, second from
left, in Tim Robbins's Embedded.
Michal Daniel |
at first, actor Lolly
Ward had qualms over doing a satire about the Iraq conflict.
“I didn’t want to forget what other people
are going through, in this war,” says Ward, ’93,
MA ’94, a member of the Los Angeles-based Actors'
Gang. When Embedded opened last fall, “I
thought, I don’t know who’s going to get
angry about this, what kind of conversations I’m
going to have out of this,” she says. “But
I knew I was fired up about it.”
Written and directed by the troupe’s co-founder,
actor Tim Robbins, Embedded hits out at the
Bush administration and at self-censorship practiced
by some journalists assigned to American military units.
It also portrays the thinking of the 19th-century neoconservative
philosopher Leo Strauss, who proposed that deception
is a necessity in politics. Given the tense political
climate in the United States, Ward wondered if protesters
would boycott the play.
Cut to a year later: Embedded has enjoyed two
successful runs in L.A.; its off-Broadway outing was
extended twice; and the Actors’ Gang recently
took it overseas to London’s Riverside Theatre.
There is talk of them touring other European countries.
Critics haven’t always been impressed—the
New York Times gave a nod to the “hard-working”
cast but said “the territory plowed here has already
been strip-mined elsewhere” in our 24/7 electronic
culture. Audiences kept coming, though.
Ward plays three characters: the mother of Jen-Jen,
a soldier injured in circumstances strikingly similar
to Jessica Lynch’s; Amy Constant, a well-known
reporter who accepts and writes what the Army and government
tell her (and often has to retract the stories after
fact-checking); and Woof, a member of the president’s
inner circle, a.k.a. the Office of Special Plans, based
on an amalgam of Bush officials.
Acting has been part of Ward’s life since her
childhood in Bethesda, Md., but she says she didn’t
take it seriously until Stanford. The English major
acted in and wrote for Gaieties and joined
the Stanford Improvisers.
After graduation, Ward moved to Los Angeles. Day jobs
taught her about the industry while she saved up for
stretches of full-time acting. (Embedded’s
long life has allowed Ward to quit her most recent job
as executive assistant at Paramount.)
Ward’s parents, avowed Robbins fans, alerted her
to the existence of the Actors’ Gang when she
arrived in L.A., but she didn’t have time to pursue
it. After seeing the Gang’s production of Oscar
Wilde’s Salome a couple of years later,
she was hooked. “It was so wonderful, so beautifully
acted. It was funny and smart, and I thought, I don’t
care what these people are doing next; I want to be
involved with this group,” she recalls.
Since joining them in 1999, Ward has had roles in Anton
Chekhov’s The Seagull, Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando and Klaus Mann’s Mephisto,
where she worked for the first time with Robbins, whom
she calls a “respectful” director. “With
all his experience as a director, a writer and an actor,
I feel like he really knows how to work with actors.”
Ward says she would like to act in films and do more
writing, but she loves the immediacy of theater. She
favors works “that are about an issue or a human
condition, something that makes people think and want
to talk about it afterwards.”
Something like Embedded. Ward says some of
the best moments of the New York and London runs came
during Q&A sessions after the show, when the cast,
Robbins or invited speakers interacted with the audience.
Guests included novelist Kurt Vonnegut, former Marine
Anthony Swofford (author of Jarhead) and broadcasters
John Simpson of the BBC and Amy Goodman of Pacifica
Radio. Discussion topics ranged from unbalanced TV coverage
on the eve of the war, to a firsthand account of journalists
relying on Iraqi stringers for their information while
they reported from the roof of the Palestine Hotel.
|
