JoBeth Williams Is a Night Person

In Charles Randolph-Wright’s The Night Is a Child, which begins performances on August 28 at the Pasadena Playhouse, JoBeth Williams adds another fascinating character to the gallery of women she’s played over the years in films, television, and on stage in such works as The Big Chill, Grand Canyon, Baby M, and Body Awareness. She plays Harriet Easton, a Boston-area housewife and widow who suddenly flees to Brazil, where she meets a beautiful if mysterious young woman, Bia, who acts as her guide — and who is eventually followed there by her two surviving (and rather screwed-up) adult children, Brian and Jane. (The fate of her other son, Michael, is the play’s lynchpin.)

“Sheldon Epps, the theater’s artistic director, sent the script to me and I immediately thought it was really interesting,” says Williams. “It was taken by a combination of the character and the story. I love the idea of this woman who’s going to an alien place in order to find herself, and I love the idea of this other person from another culture helping her find her way back home.”

Still, Williams adds that another aspect of the script spoke to her the most. “The family relationship felt so real to me,” she says. “The play asks how much responsibility can we take for our children — and as a mother of two sons, I know we tend to take a lot. Letting kids go and grow up is really tough for any mother — it is for me — and with Harriet, her children were really her life’s work. And, like so many baby boomers, I’m dealing more and more with issues of grief and loss, which is another major theme of the play.”

The show is set primarily in Rio de Janiero, but on-the-scene research wasn’t in the cards. “We’ve all whined about how much we need to go to Brazil, but they just bring in picture books instead,” Williams says, with a laugh, adding that she did film one movie, Jungle 2 Jungle, in Venezuela. “Charles has been to Brazil a lot and loves it. And he has a really different personal perspective, because when he’s there people see him as Brazilian and accept him, which is very different from Harriet’s experience.”

The script does call for the actress to speak a few phrases in Portugese. “I’m okay with languages, and since I don’t have to learn too much, it’s been fine,” says Williams, who was born and raised in Texas. “The harder part is that I’m also trying to incorporate something of a Boston accent into Harriet’s speech — my college roommate was from Waltham, so I’m using that — and speaking Portugese with Boston on top is a challenge.”

Williams may have gained fame on the big screen, but theater is her oldest — and still strongest– love. “I love rehearsals, when you get to fool around and try stuff and fail. To me, that’s the richest part of the creative process,” she says. “And for women my age, the roles are better in theater. If there’s a great part for an “older woman” in the movies, it gets offered to Meryl Streep, and she either gets it or turns it down and it goes to someone bigger than me. The irony is that I remember Diane Keaton once told me that you don’t become a really good actor until you’re in your 50s because of your life experience, and she’s right. But now that I have it, there are fewer places for me to use it.”

Ironically, Williams had planned to do the Arena Stage production of Jane Anderson’s The Quality of Life this fall — reprising the role she played in the show’s world premiere in Los Angeles — but she had to bow out when that show’s schedule ended up conflicting with Night. “I would love to do it again, maybe in New York,” she says. “And perhaps it’s better for Jane and the director, Lisa Peterson, since I would have been the only cast member from L.A., and now they have a fresh start.”

Williams also hasn’t given up on the idea of series television — although she readily admits the long hours when she filmed The Client wore her down — and she’d like to expand her directing career. (She received an Oscar nomination for the short On Hope). “Being married to a director, John Pasquin, I know the vicissitudes of that profession, but I do enjoy it,” she says. “With my career, I’ve learned that I have no way of knowing of why some things work and some things don’t.”