Smooth Ride

Photo By Bret Brookshire

She doesn't just sit on the barstool, she teeters on it, as if in the sway of a stiff breeze. When she ventures from her perch, she doesn't walk so much as reel. When she talks (which she does incessantly), the words slip-'n'-slide out of her mouth, consonants and vowels slurring together into strange new words. She is speaking to a man beside her, but her gaze has that glassy, into-the-middle-distance quality of someone on the telephone. When she makes eye contact with the man, she attempts a flirtatious wink, but her eyelid lowers in slow motion. She's blitzed. Blinkered. Blotto. In sheets to the wind, she's four. This woman is drunk.

Well, she certainly appears drunk. In truth, however, this woman is only acting drunk in a play called Wandering Through the Night, written by Mary Lou Pilkinton. When Pilkinton brought her one-act to the stage in 1993 for the very first FronteraFest, she had the good fortune to have Lana Dieterich portray its lead character, a major-league barfly. The actress delivered a performance that was not only convincing but one of the most finely nuanced depictions of inebriation seen on a local stage.

Now, playing a drunk is tougher than most people realize, and many, many actors do it poorly. They don't distinguish between degrees of drunkenness -- say, being tipsy as opposed to snockered -- and leap immediately from sober to playing the end result of an eight tequila-shot bender, i.e., loud and sloppy. Or they lean too heavily on cartoon drunks for models, shlipping an "sh" into every word that hash an "s" in it or belching every five shecondsh. Or they work too hard at it, lurching into the portrayal like the undead stiffened with rigor mortis.

There was none of that in Wandering Through the Night. Dieterich's drunk was dazzlingly rich in variety: high to loaded, light to wrecked, flighty, weepy, solicitous, pushy, woozy, weaving, cheery, abusive. She was never quite sober, but you could see her get progressively more soused as the play went on. The performance captured every level, every aspect, of intoxication, and did it so memorably that it netted Dieterich a B. Iden Payne Award for Actress in a Comedy and end-of-year honors on two Chronicle theatre critics' top 10 lists for 1993. Recalling that performance today, what may have been most impressive about it was the way it just glided along. Nothing seemed calculated or forced, no step appeared false. Dieterich's work was smooth as glass, as silk, as a ride on the bike that the actress can be seen pedaling regularly around her Hyde Park neighborhood.

Nine years later, Dieterich teases us with another drunk scene in Vigil, the play she is currently performing with Ken Webster at Hyde Park Theatre. In contrast to her earlier part, Dieterich plays a woman who's said to be at death's door and who rarely ventures from her bed or says a word. Still, when the character imbibes a little champagne on New Year's Eve, Dieterich effortlessly embodies the looseness and lightheadedness of the alcohol-besotted again. When her Grace is tickled by a joke that Webster's Kemp makes, Dieterich goes giddy, her eyes lighting up like twin 100-watt bulbs, her body whirling as she tries to suppress a fit of giggles. She looks lost in the champagne bubbles, and it's done so smoothly.

But then that describes the rest of her performance in the show, too. With next to no dialogue, the actress must build her relationship to Webster and communicate to the audience everything they need to know about her character through facial expressions and body language. She does it, making each and every reaction of Grace's crystal clear and telling, and she does it with remarkable fluidity and finesse.

Those qualities are the hallmarks of this actress' artistry in general. It is always natural, easy, no matter the demands of the role or the peculiarities of the production (and Dieterich has appeared in her share of peculiar productions). Combined with an enthusiasm for her work and her dependability, it has earned her the respect of her colleagues, the affection of audiences, critical praise and awards, and more than 70 roles in 20 years.

Dieterich has come a long way since St. Agatha's High School in Meadville, Pennsylvania, where her theatre career began. According to Dieterich, the senior speech class was staging a drama called The Book, "about a girl whose sickly aunt tells her the story of her own girlhood and why she never married. She had been jilted by a boy who never showed up on the agreed-upon time for their elopement. Instead he sent a book to her, which she put on the shelf and never opened since that day. Of course, when the girl takes the book down off the shelf, out falls a note from the fiancé that says if the aunt really loved him, she would meet him at the train station, and if she didn't show up he would know the engagement was off. When she hears the news, the aunt dies."

Although she was still a freshman, Dieterich and a friend were, as she says, "dying to get into that class, and we begged the nun (Sr. Mary Louise, who was also principal) to let us sign up. By the time we got ourselves registered into it, the play had already been cast. Peggy Brinker, a senior, had the part of the aunt, but one day the nun announced that Peggy had fallen ill and would be unable to play the part. I had anticipated the announcement after noticing Peggy's absence from class for several days, and when the nun asked who would like to play the part, my hand shot into the air. The rest is history. For my first role, I got to die onstage."

Despite such a promising debut, Dieterich had fallen away from stage work by the time she moved to Austin. She was teaching composition for the English department and taking classes in the Education department when she went with her folks to see a comic riff on Robin Hood at the Melodrama Theatre, then in the Village Shopping Center. "My dad saw an audition notice for their next show, Murder in the Red Barn, and told me that I ought to go for it," Dieterich recalls. "As it turned out, it was the best thing for me to get back onstage and pull me back out of the exclusively cerebral world of graduate school." She was cast as the mother of the heroine and has been enlivening Austin stages ever since.

Dieterich's debut role and first part locally pretty much set the stage for her acting career. She's spent most of her time onstage playing this character's mother or that one's grandma or so-and-so's maiden aunt. Some of that can be traced to her innate facility with such roles, bringing them to life with comedic invention or the sageness of long life. But Dieterich suspects her limp -- the result of a childhood bout with polio -- kept her from playing her fair share of romantic young ingénues. Such a prominent physical characteristic might have discouraged some performers from pursuing stagework, but not this one. "I'm never nervous about the limp per se," she says. "Never have been. I mean it's there and I can't hide it, so either a director is going to use me in spite of it or not use me because of it." It's more tribute to Dieterich's talent and skill that she has worked so steadily -- make that prodigiously -- over the past 20 years.

When she's been able to break free of maternal parts, Dieterich has proven herself capable of playing damn near anything, be it flirtatious barfly or Shakespearean wench, literary wit Dorothy Parker or a scheming, murderous man-trap, as she did in The Artificial Jungle, Charles Ludlam's send-up of James M. Cain-type noir thrillers. "I think my favorite role of all was Roxanne in The Artificial Jungle, directed by Norman Blumenstaadt," she says, "because I was something of an ingénue ... OK, not an ingénue, but at least a sexy woman with a lover! I reveled in being able to vamp it up and make out with a guy onstage! Woo hoo!" (See facing page sidebar for a critical take on her performance.)

When asked what performances she is especially proud of, Dieterich refers to those in which "the director has worked with me in a very concentrated way, both time-wise and intensity-wise. A lot of times you can get into a role and be taking it too far maybe, and you can't see it because you're so immersed in it. I like it when a director can pull me back and set me in the right direction again. I know a lot of actors would say that they like to be given free rein, but I have to say that I really like specific direction and making sense of the role."

Wandering Through the Night comes up again in this regard. "It was only a 25-minute piece," she says, "but we spent five or six weeks of rehearsal on it, including doing it at Deep Eddy Bar and Grill and almost getting kicked out and at the airport bar, where I broke a glass! I felt fabulous going out on stage because by that time I was in that character's skin. Mary Lou had a very concrete picture of what the woman should be like. She coached me on every single line and sometimes words, although she never gave me a line reading. She knew that character so well (her mother had died an alcoholic) that she molded me into it. I've had alcoholics in my life, so I was very familiar with how they do, trying to be as serious as you can when you simply don't have all your faculties, such as the ability to form perfect syllables, and refusing to acknowledge that you're in any way impaired. In a restaurant I saw one of my ex-husbands, drunk, cutting a steak that shot off his plate onto the floor. In one motion he stabbed the meat and swooped it back onto his plate, continuing to cut it as if it had never been on the floor! Mary Lou made it so that playing my drunk was like sliding down a banister."

Again, a sense of smooth motion. Dieterich glides along, making the art of acting look like child's play -- which is just what guides her as an actress. "It's playing like you did when you were a kid, but for keeps," she says. "I can remember playing 'orphanage' when I was a kid and getting into it so much that I cried, and wondering why the other kids weren't as serious about the task at hand! It's being up there on stage with others who are taking it as seriously as you are and, well, being there for them and for yourself and just making it as real as you can get it. That was what playing was for me as a kid and it's still that way for me now. I'm still playing, but I'm way more into it."