Interview: Lily Rabe Comes Home to the Delacorte in The Winter's Tale

Lily Rabe admits she was “nervous, actually,” the first time she set foot on the stage of the Delacorte Theater following its $85 million renovation.

“I was so happy that the theater was going to become more accessible and that it would be easier on the crew to have AC. All of those things are wonderful,” Rabe says. “But I was nervous about it feeling different. When we first moved back to New York last September, we took our kids to see the renovation, and they ran around the stage, and we ran around the stage, and we thought, ‘This is the same. This is home.'”

Returning to that home has been a long time coming. It has been well over a decade since Rabe last graced the stage of the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park, having decamped to Los Angeles with partner (and fellow Delacorte stalwart) Hamish Linklater shortly after starring together in Cymbeline in 2015. Her homecoming this month comes courtesy of another longtime collaborator, director Daniel Sullivan, who asked her to play Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. For Sullivan, Rabe says, “it would always be a yes.”

The pregnant Sicilian queen jailed by her paranoid husband for an affair that never happened sits comfortably alongside the other Shakespearean heroines she has tackled at the Delacorte, including Portia, Rosalind, Beatrice, and Imogen. “With all of these women, it’s not even that they’re ahead of their time,” Rabe explains. “The plays are always current and speaking to the time that we are in.” Hermione, in particular, “feels like such an amazing voice to have right now in the current political climate. She is so connected to the truth. She is so true to who she is, and she only gets more so as she goes through what she goes through. She’s forced into a place where she has to choose to value certain things that no one should ever have to choose, but she makes all the right choices.”

While some struggle with the play’s tonal shifts, strange magic, and that famous exit, pursued by a bear, “it all makes complete sense” to her. “I don’t think Shakespeare made any mistakes. It feels like one spectacular, perfect play.”

Shakespeare is a natural part of the landscape of her life, both on stage and at home. Given Rabe and Linklater’s theatrical lineages (she is the daughter of playwright David Rabe and actor Jill Clayburgh; he is the son of famed vocal coach Kristin Linklater) it is hardly surprising their children, ages nine, six, and four (alongside Linklater’s 19-year-old) have an developed an affinity for the Bard. “The way they think about it and talk about it doesn’t feel fancy or elevated or outside of the dinosaurs they’re learning about or the stories they’re reading in school. I love hearing the names of the plays and characters out of their mouths. We’ll tell them the story of a play, and they’ll summarize it and sort of mirror it back.”

The Winter’s Tale marks the first time their children will be old enough to see her perform at the Delacorte, a milestone she is anticipating with joy and fright. “I said, ‘Don’t tell me when you start coming in with the kids.’ I don’t think I can know until afterward.”

Sharing the performance with her family is sweet reward after a rehearsal process disrupted by unpredictable summer weather, with delays from the severe air quality alerts across New York City this past July.

“When you’re doing Shakespeare in the Park, there really is that mentality of pushing through whatever you can,” Rabe says. “Acting in the rain is something that I really don’t mind at all, especially when it’s Shakespeare. There is so much generosity in the language and the connection to the elements and nature, so it can be incredibly magical. But I’ve certainly never experienced air quality like that. That was new and terrifying. There’s no pushing through that, so that was heartbreaking on all sorts of levels.”

Yet that connection to the elements, and the shared resilience of the audience, is precisely what brings her back to Central Park. It is also a quality she will carry with her when The Winter’s Tale closes and she transitions straight into rehearsals for the Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities. Joined by Joe Keery as her brother, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ed Harris as their parents, and Allison Janney as their aunt, Rabe once again finds herself drawn to material that is close to the political bone. Fifteen years after its original Broadway run, Baitz’s dark comedy about a powerful Republican family guarding heavy secrets feels even more prescient than it once had.

“It’s remarkable how many of these plays, for better or worse, are really speaking to the time that we are in,” she says. “It was so timely then, but because we’ve been in [this political climate] for as long as we have, there’s something really profound about it.”

Before trading the sky for the proscenium, though, Rabe is savoring every night under the stars.

“You feel connected to every single person in that audience, and you can’t quite put your finger on why,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s because you’re all in it together with the weather, or the fact that people have paid with their time, but the bond that you feel with every member of that audience is entirely singular. Even if it’s the love of your life or a person you’ve never met sitting next to you, it’s a shared experience. It’s a magical place.”