By Angela Barbuti

Maura Tierney has a lot to feel lucky about. Not only has she moved back to NYC, but she won a leading role in Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy, where she gets to work alongside Tom Hanks every night. The 48-year-old, who has been on screen with roles in television and movies, now graces the stage in her Broadway debut. A Boston native who studied theater at NYU, Tierney said, “I love theater, so hopefully I’ll do some more theater at some point.”

How did you get started in the business?
I went to NYU and studied theater. And then I moved out to LA for a couple of months for fun after I graduated – and I ended up getting a job in a television movie.

This is your Broadway debut. What made you want to do a Broadway show?
I’d never done it before, so it’s something, as an actor, I’ve always wanted to do. And I really wanted to work with George C. Wolfe and Tom Hanks. George has directed some really amazing plays and Tom is – as everyone knows – a wonderful actor.

Can you give us a synopsis of Lucky Guy?
It’s a play about a journalist named Mike McAlary. He worked for the New York Post and Daily News in the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. He was a very accomplished, ambitious, raucous rousing tabloid reporter who then won a Pulitzer Prize.

You never met Nora Ephron.
No, I never did. I wish I had.

Tom and Nora were friends and he is paying tribute to her with this role, which she wrote for him to play.
I just think he’s a great actor and a really hard worker. I know they were very close, so it’s a nice thing.

What was moving to NYC for college like for you?
It was really fun. When I was looking at schools, I saw New York City and said, “This is where I want to be.”

Where are you living now?
I live in the West Village.

What are some of your favorite places in the city?
I love Hudson River Park all the way down to where you get the ferry. I go there all the time. I think it’s a really beautiful part of the city. I’m always downtown; I hardly ever come uptown. The Highline, I think, is really beautiful. I really like the East Village, and I don’t get to go there very often. I think it’s more of an alive place than the West Village, even though where I live is very pretty.

I saw on Twitter there was an ER reunion at the show the other night.
Oh – cause Angela Basset was there. We worked together on [the television show] ER.

You are very open with your own battle against breast cancer, which you were able to beat. Do people come to you for advice?
Sometimes. A lot of people, unfortunately, get diagnosed with cancer and a lot of them are okay. There are people in my personal life I’ve talked to, and sometimes I meet people in the street, but not so much.

You were recently on The View, and they called you “the thinking man’s sex symbol.” Is that going to keep coming up now?
I don’t know, but Joy Behar said it used to be Margaret Thatcher and now it’s me. I thought that was a pretty funny joke.

What are you future plans?
I don’t know. I have been working on this play since January and will be doing it until July. I don’t know beyond that. My head is very much into what we’re doing right now.

To learn more about Lucky Guy, visit www.luckyguyplay.com

Many are familiar with Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, one of the most cutting seminal works of modern theatre. It has been a mainstay of dramatic study since it debuted, with many a performer cutting his or teeth on the playwright’s sharply-fanged roles, some to better success than others. But the current Woolf revival, imported from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and directed by Pam MacKinnon, does just what the term implies, breathing new life and insight into this warhorse of a play.

Much of the credit goes to the quartet bringing these storied characters to life: Carrie Coon and Madison Dirks are perfectly matched as Honey and Nick, while Tracy Letts’ George turns the tables on Amy Morton’s Martha as we’ve never seen it before. It’s a reversal that sheds new light on the relationship between these warriors of words. But Martha gives as good as she gets, and Morton’s performance adds credibility to the character in ways never before seen. Her Martha likes entertaining, and loves holding court over new people. A Woolf production has never made it clearer as to just why Nick and Honey don’t just go home from the party that precedes the play’s action and instead enter George and Martha’s den of depravity – or why they find it so hard to leave.

“We had a lot of discussions about why they haven’t left,” Morton explained. “It always kept us from getting too insane. They have their reasons for staying, partly having to do with who [Martha’s] father is. Nick’s ambition is there, but George and Martha also keep these people in the room. Their fighting is too interesting for them to leave.”

And how. Morton acknowledges, like everyone, a familiarity with the both the role of Martha and the play itself. “I saw the movie on TV when I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven, watching it with my dad,” she recalls. “I was really enthralled and really confused. I thought, ‘Why are these grownups so mad at each other?’”

Subsequent study of the play, however, brought greater enlightenment Morton’s way. “I think she is incredibly sad and smart and witty, probably just a riot to be around,” she says. And she understands why a seething Martha has gone to seed. “I think her spirit in her early years was very intuitive, very gutsy, very earthy. If she was around today, she would be at the top of some career. But that wasn’t what women did back then for the most part.

“That’s the frustration of her life,” Morton continues. “She’s living life through her husband, and her ambition was large but his was not. That’s where a lot of her pain comes from, her thwarted ambition. If you can’t have kids or a career, Jesus!”

But a lot of the reason why this production shines – and it is scintillating – is the interplay between longtime friends and colleagues Letts and Morton. The two Chicago-based performers may be best known for their collaboration on the mammothly successful awards baiter August: Osage County – he wrote and had a featured role, she took on perhaps the show’s most demanding leading role – but they go way back. “Tracy and I have worked together for so long, I think this is the fifth or sixth time we’ve been married,” Morton jokes. “We’re so familiar with each other, which helped us make sure the baseline in this play was of a relationship about love. This is a couple who, underneath it all, all the vitriol, love each other very deeply.”

Morton and Letts’ understanding of the show – which Morton describes as “seriously deep writing” – comes from a long time of attachment to the play. Morton herself directed it nearly a decade ago at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, and the production ran at Steppenwolf and Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage. Playwright Albee came to Chicago during the rehearsal phase.

“He talked about the play,” she says, “which was illuminating, it was great. He watched some scenes and had some discussions with Pam. Some were more dramaturgical, and some were ‘This is how I see George and Martha.’”

And what was it like running the show in front of its creator? “Absolutely intimidating,” she acknowledges. “I don’t know anyone who would say he watched us and were perfectly fine; you’d need nerves of steel. But it was also very exciting.”

Morton confirms that the role of Martha is definitely a workout. “I don’t do much during the day because I am constantly conserving energy. I kind of lay low, I sleep a lot, I eat a lot, I basically live like a monk.”  And she acknowledges being homesick for Chicago while Woolf continues its open-ended Broadway run. “I miss my house and my friends and my family,” she admits, which includes her husband Rob Milburn, who did sound design for Woolf but spends most of his time in Chicago. “I’m sequestered by the show. But I am also really busy and I love New York and I have friends here. And I treat myself on Sundays with a great massage and go someplace fabulous for dinner. I’m always asking people ‘Where should I go?’”

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is running at the Booth theatre. More information can be found at virginiawoolfbroadway.com.

A cruel social joke around the play is that upon first seeing Charlie (Shuler Hensley), one might think that Hunter’s title refers to his protagonist. Charlie, an online English instructor, is morbidly obese (costume designer Jessica Pabst has crafted an eerily convincing padded costume to make him appear to be around 600 pounds), and doing himself no healthy favors. He rarely leaves the couch we see center stage of the Idaho one-bedroom apartment in which he lives. Charlie lives alone, but spends most of his time connected to a variety of people, mostly the students he instructs – only via audio, so they have no idea of his size – and his nurse neighbor, Liz (Cassie Beck), who enables him as much as she cautions him about his unhealthy habits.

Hunter re-teams with director Davis McCallum, who helmed his last work, A Bright New Boise, which was as close to a perfect play I’ve ever seen on the New York stage. Both works are uniquely stylized ruminations on what both family and faith can do for people, and do to people. Charlie still aches from the loss of his lover Alan, who slowly lost his will to live out of Mormon guilt over his homosexuality. And while Charlie seems to feel that he is on borrowed time (every movement and breath requires a herculean amount of energy from Charlie, which Hensley manages with painstaking grace), he creates a de facto family by reaching out to people from both past and present, in the form of his nasty estranged daughter Ellie (Reyna de Courcy), from an early marriage to Mary (Tasha Lawrence), and to Elder Thomas (Cory Michael Smith), a nineteen-year-old Mormon missionary who ended up at Charlie’s door and keeps getting invited back.

Whale could easily show the erasure marks and indentations of an emerging playwright in a less visionary writer’s hands, but Hunter’s work, set over the course of five days and with multiple nods to Melville and the Biblical story of Jonah, never feels overly tidy nor pretentious. He even manages to find dramatically necessary ways to provide exposition, thanks to his skill with dialogue. McCallum guides a superb ensemble to fully-realized, humane performances. His supporting cast skirts cardboard characterizations: on paper, Ellie comes off as insensitive and nasty to the point of disbelief, but de Courcy creates an understandably wounded modern teenager who knows how to use language as a weapon. She often provides needed humor for the play, allowing it to bend but never break. Smith ensures that Elder Thomas, a contemporary Ishmael, never feels like plot contrivance, shading in youthful confusion and naïveté instead of caricaturing it. Beck and Lawrence, too, show complicated connections to Charlie. These are all real people, suffering but surviving, and finding their own ways to have questions answered.

And then there’s Hensley, a force of astonishing physical and emotional bravery that, well, grounds the play at every well-constructed turn. Earning, never courting sympathy, the sight of Charlie reminds of something that this character, himself an English grad student, has always known: that everyone, regardless of appearance or (mis)fortune or decisions, has a story worth being told.

The Whale

Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 564-1235. www.playwrightshorizons.org. Through Dec. 2.

Harvey

Hot on the heels of last year’s debut in The Normal Heart, two-time Emmy winner Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) returns to the stage in this revival of Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic. Parsons is Elwood P. Dowd, the role immortalized on screen by James Stewart, a middle-aged man whose best friend is a 6-foot-tall rabbit. Is Harvey real or a figment of Elwood’s imagination? You’ll have to head over to the Studio 54 Theater to find out. Co-stars include Larry Bryggman (Doubt), Tracee Chimo (Circle Mirror Transformation), Jessica Hecht (A View from the Bridge), Carol Kane (Wicked), Charles Kimbrough (TV’s Murphy Brown) and Rich Sommer (TV’s Mad Men).
In previews now, runs June 14-Aug. 5; $37+. Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St., roundabouttheatre.org

Democracy 

This June-long event, running at Williamsburg’s Brick Theater, is dedicated to the idea of putting on a summer theater festival of the people, by the people and for the people in this election year. Eight candidates will campaign against each other in a series of public appearances for the title of “President of the Brick.” The elected official will be given reign over The Brick for two weeks next January and will be entrusted with curating all Brick programming during this time period. Shows include works from Matthew Freeman, Eric John Meyer, Jeremey Catterton, Zack Calhoun and Roger Nasser. Attendance is mandatory, as all voters must cast their ballot in person.
May 31-July 1; $15. The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, bricktheater.com.

Uncle Vanya

Some of New York’s finest actors have signed on to this world premiere reimagining of the Chekhov classic about a visiting professor and his alluring younger wife at Soho Rep. The winning team of director Sam Gold and writer Annie Baker (The Aliens, Circle Mirror Transformation) have recruited a top-notch ensemble that includes Reed Birney, Maria Dizzia, Georgia Engel, Peter Friedman, Matthew Maher,  Rebecca Schull, Michael Shannon, Paul Thureen and Merritt Wever. Take note: a June 19 benefit performance will include a post-show vodka reception with the cast and creative team.
Opens June 7; $0.99-$40. Soho Rep Theatre, 46 Walker St., sohorep.org.

Sovereign

The conclusion to Mac Rogers’ Honeycomb trilogy is off-off-Broadway’s answer to The Return of the King, and not just because of the similarities in the title. This play, part of Gideon Productions in collaboration with the BFG Collective at the Secret Theater, will confirm the fates of the characters we’ve come to love in Advance Man and Blast Radius, particularly Ronnie (Hanna Cheek), now a hardened governor lording over a slowly rebuilding human race and her defiant brother Abbie (Stephen Heskett). Rogers’ trilogy, directed by Jordana Williams, has offered so many surprising turns, it’s hard to predict where this tale will end—but incredibly exciting at the same time. It’s safe to say that by now, the Secret is out.
June 14-July 1; $15-$18. The Secret Theatre, 44-02 23rd St., Long Island City, www.gideonth.com .

Into the Woods

The second of this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park entries (following As You Like It) is this James Lapine-Stephen Sondheim favorite, in a production based on the acclaimed 2010 staging at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, London. Woods was just mentioned this week on Glee as the most vocally demanding of Sondheim’s canon—so why revive this tale of what happens to fairy tale characters after their happy ending? With three-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams onboard as the Baker’s Wife, two-time Tony-winner Donna Murphy to play the Witch and current Tony nominee Jessie Mueller (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever) playing Cinderella, why wouldn’t you?
July 23-Aug. 25; free. Delacorte Theater in Central Park, accessible via 81st St. & Central Park West or 79th St. & 5th Ave., shakespeareinthepark.org.