A Role That Really Hits Home : Art Imitates Life for Jane White

SAN DIEGO —  For Jane White, the role of the groom’s mother in “Blood Wedding” was an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Oh, she tried to after her husband of 25 years, master chef and restaurateur Alfredo Viazzi, died of a heart attack Dec. 28, 1987. She knew that doing any play would be hard so soon after his death, but it would be especially hard to play the part of a woman who is inconsolable over the loss of her husband.

The whole thing struck too close to home, White said, a few hours before a recent performance of the Federico Garcia Lorca play at the Old Globe Theatre.

“Gerry, I don’t think I can do this,” she told Gerald Freedman, who co-directed the show with choreographer Graciela Daniele for the Great Lakes Theatre Festival and the Old Globe.

But Freedman felt he needed someone like White, a veteran of Shakespearean and Greek tragedy, for the pivotal female role.

While the play is ostensibly about a bride who runs away with an ex-fiancee on her wedding day, it is the groom’s mother whose obsessive thirst for vengeance empowers the play, setting her own son on a fatal course with an equally obsessed ex-fiancee.

“He said, ‘I wish I could say I could put it off, but I can’t’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I tell you if you pull out, I won’t be able to do it.’ It was one of the toughest things I ever did in my life . . . . I called up a friend and said I have never understood tragedy on stage as I did here. I have been faking it in the truest sense, because while I have had deaths in my family, I have never had a death like this, and never will again. But in the old Greek sense, it was cathartic. The play was of use to me to mourn him.”

But that hasn’t made it easy. After playing two matinee and evening performances last Saturday and Sunday, she “blew her gaskets” on what she describes as the scene on which the whole play turns: one where she sends her son out on the chase that will lead to his death. She spent all Monday recovering.

“I felt dizzy and weak and drained. I have played a good many heavy ladies. But this is the only one for whom there is total intensity whenever she is on. Garcia Lorca doesn’t build slowly. It is making me use everything I have so I can sustain this piece of work. At the end of the show, I am spent in a way I never was before.”

White’s passion was noted by the critics who singled out the actress for praise in a production they generally panned as bloodless. White says she doesn’t care what critics say. She doesn’t read reviews “because they hurt my feelings.” And she is convinced the show has a future after it leaves the Old Globe Dec. 4 for a month-long run at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami. She said she hopes a New York showing will precede one in Spain.

White believes that even though she and the cast are not Spanish, Spaniards would be “capsized” by their interpretation of Garcia Lorca’s classic.

She wasn’t always so sure she could capture the essential Spanish flavor of the mother. Then, she remembers, Daniele told her that she was “incredibly Spanish.”

White protested: “But I don’t know the Spanish. I know Italian women, Greek women. Black women.’ And she said, ‘They’re all the same women of the earth. They endure, they suffer, they understand death very well.’ ”

White comes by her knowledge of Italian women from her husband’s family, the Greek from her stepdaughter’s in-laws, and the black from her parents who also provided her with a mixture of German, English and Indian blood. Although White looks white, she identifies with the black part of her heritage as did her father, Walter White, who was only 1/64th black.

Walter White was the executive secretary of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

It’s an identity that the actress says has caused her to lose many parts in a 35-year theatrical career.

“People wanted to cast me as something but couldn’t jump over the hurdle that they knew I was black. ‘She’s too white to be black. She’s too black to be white.’ One of the ways it has created problems is that I hardly ever play a black role.”

There was the time she had a scene with Lou Gossett Jr. in “Take A Giant Step” on Broadway. There was great anxiety behind the scenes because the lights needed for Gossett, who has very dark skin, gave White an even-whiter look.

“So they kept darkening my makeup. They were afraid the subtext would be ‘Here is a white girl with this black fellow.’ It was so ridiculous,” she said.

In television, she was typically cast as a Puerto Rican or Mexican. In her one movie role, in “Klute,” starring Jane Fonda in an Oscar-winning role, she was a madam.

Her breakthrough role was as the comedic queen in “Once Upon A Mattress,” the musical version of The Princess and the Pea fairy tale that also established Carol Burnett, who played the princess.

After that Obie-award winning performance, which she reprised twice for television (once in color and once in black and white), she was offered more than half a dozen queen roles. That threw her casting karma in the realm of the classics, where most queens are found. Then, finally, directors starting seeing her as a classical actress, and she performed Shakespearean heroines for the New York Shakespeare Festival, Greek for the Williamstown Theatre Festival and non-singing dramatic roles at the Metropolitan Opera.

Still, early years of rejection left a toll. She seems to make a peace of sorts with being black in this “white” part by pointing out that her character might have descended from the black Moors who lived in Spain for 600 years.

But most of her early wounds were healed by her loving marriage.

“As a child. it was a show-offiness about me that was the motivation to do theater. For most of my life I was so needful. It’s taken all these years to get to the point where I am truly proud of my work.

“My husband had this enormous grasp of living and giving and being unafraid. Anything good I learned that I have inside myself I learned from him. I believe that unless you have loved, you cannot play love. It has to be experienced to be fulfilled on stage . . . I want to be a good actress. I want to be better and better in whatever years remain to me. I want not to act, not to pretend, but to be on stage.

“Even his death has given me something--I don’t know what it is--that I will never lose . . . It was like one more of his gifts in a strange way.”