Dramatic Turn

Photo by John Anderson

She stares into the spotlight with more brass than The Music Man's much-ballyhooed 76 trombones. And there's more than a trace of the bright, clarion sound of those horns in her voice as this resolute performer, in the guise of a perennially sozzled Jazz Age socialite, musically urges the audience before her to "Keep your eyeball on the highball in your hand." The one in hers, it's worth noting, is brandished much like the sword of Teddy Roosevelt leading the charge up San Juan Hill, and she builds this anthem to the well-lubricated life, to getting pickled, pie-eyed, and blotto, with such brio that you'd gladly follow her to a saloon at the ends of the Earth.

That's how we like to think of Meredith McCall ... not the drinking part, that is, but the singing. In the 20 years that she's been gracing the stages of Austin, McCall has distinguished herself as one of the city's finest performers of musical theatre. In roles from the ridiculous (man-eating plant victim Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, Suzy Homemaker-gone-Broadway-bitch Judy in Ruthless!: The Musical) to the sublime (Salvation Army straight arrow Sarah in Guys and Dolls, epistolary romantic Amalia in She Loves Me) to the, well, perverse (whip-cracking alien Magenta in The Rocky Horror Show, pay-to-pee enforcer Penny Pennywise in Urinetown: The Musical), she's employed her strong sense of character, showmanship, style, and those creamy vocals to memorable effect, winning applause, awards, and the hearts of audiences again and again. It's likely no coincidence that Chronicle readers voted her Best Actor/Actress (along with co-star and friend Martin Burke) while she was triumphantly leading that hymn to tippling in the title role of the musical The Drowsy Chaperone.

Still, as gifted as McCall assuredly is in selling 11 o'clock numbers, there's more to this actress than the size of her belt. Alongside her numerous musical successes are a string of nonmusical performances that have been just as affecting and memorable – and in some cases, more so. Her saucy, tough Billie Dawn gave Zach Theatre's 1996 revival of Born Yesterday a delightful kick in the keister. She brought a raw vulnerability to the unstrung Mormon housewife Harper Pitt in Angels in America and a deep-in-the-marrow ache and anger to the disaffected love partners in Kirk Lynn's The Jinn and Craig Wright's The Pavilion. She aged gracefully from 10 to 90 as the English Channel swimmer of Pride's Crossing and played nine different Wyoming townsfolk, all movingly, in The Laramie Project. And she raised the stakes for madcap behavior and sibling rivalry – again opposite Burke – in John Boulanger's absurdist comedy House of Several Stories. Not for nothing did the Austin Critics' Table honor McCall with its John Bustin Award for Conspicuous Versatility. Even when she isn't carrying a tune, her grasp of character and remarkable range make her an actor of note.

All of this is a long way round the playhouse to inform you that this week McCall opens a new show, and while she has no songs to sing in it, past experience suggests fans of fine acting should make their reservations now. The play is Fiction, a three-hander by Steven Dietz, the prolific and widely produced author of Shooting Star and Becky's New Car and a playwriting teacher in the University of Texas' Department of Theatre & Dance. In it, McCall plays Linda, an acclaimed author who learns that she has only weeks to live, a circumstance which leads her to suggest to her husband – also a writer, and an extremely successful one – that they read each other's journals. Needless to say, the exercise yields more information than either partner was expecting. And thus a third character – another writer and, where Linda is concerned, another woman – enters the picture, causing Linda to reconsider her relationship to the man she's loved for the past 20 years.

The character joins the gallery of women that McCall has played who believe they're in one marriage only to discover that they're in another: Harper in Angels in America, Trina in Falsettos, Jill in Jack and Jill, Jen in The Jinn. But while these characters share a similar kind of pain rooted in marital strife, there's something different about Linda. In McCall's eyes, the other women she's played have had to deal with the ramifications of their discovery, to hold on to something or make something stable so they could move forward in life. Linda, however, is not going to have to deal with that; she has no future ahead of her. "She gets this huge bomb right at the end, and she doesn't have to decide, 'Do I leave this man?' because she's leaving this man anyway," says McCall. "To come at something so life-altering at the end of life is a strange situation to find yourself in. I suppose some people might choose to end it even sooner, but she certainly doesn't do that. She fights for every inch she can get. There's something really admirable about that."

Indeed, that toughness is what McCall finds most appealing about Linda: "What I really love about her is her unwillingness to crumble in spite of everything that life has thrown at her. She's just not willing to give in to that."

Don't assume, though, that such indomitability is a quality McCall shares with the character she's portraying. Were she facing the crisis Linda does in her own life, the actress says: "I think that I would probably fall apart rather than fight. The very idea of being handed a death sentence like that – I'd like to believe that I'd rally forth and make sure I saw all my friends, but I don't know that I wouldn't just sit in my bed and cry."

And yet McCall's performance résumé is crowded with women who have steel in their spines, who refuse to give in, from Billie Dawn and Channel-swimming Mabel Tidings to life-of-the-cabaret Sally Bowles and that gin-swilling chaperone. So, in playing such characters, where does the actress find inspiration? Where will she find it for Fiction? Close to home ... literally. "I think there's a little of my mother in [Linda], actually," McCall says. "She certainly provided an example of that [toughness]. She was always very independent. She's single and has been for 20 years or more, and she goes camping and hiking and is gone for three months on the road and lives out in the country. She's very tough. She's very resilient. I probably do have a lot more of her in me than I give myself credit for."

And as if finding her way into the skin of a woman facing both her own mortality and the painful revelations of her husband's infidelity weren't challenge enough for McCall, she's doing so without the support system she has come to value so at Zach, the artistic collaborators and dear friends with whom she has worked repeatedly over the past two decades. In Fiction, she doesn't get to be directed by Artistic Director Dave Steakley, who slapped an oversized wig on her for Beehive all those years ago and then just kept casting her in musicals. No acting opposite Martin Burke, her Yuletide partner-in-crime for nine productions of The Santaland Diaries, or Jamie Goodwin, with whom she's made comic hay in Present Laughter, Urinetown, and The Drowsy Chaperone. And as this is a straight play, she gets no musical support from keyboardist Jason Connor or bassist Brad Shelton, who have accompanied her on at least a couple dozen shows. Don't think McCall doesn't recognize what it means to be performing without her creative family. "We are incredibly spoiled as a group because we've all been working here together for so long," she admits. "It's invaluable. It means that you can get things done very quickly. So it's a little scary when you first start in it, because you don't have that history. You don't know that that person thinks you're really great [laughs]. And in this show, I've never worked with the director [Charles Otte]. I've never worked with either of the other two actors [Robert Gomes and Sydney Andrews]. I've never worked with Steven Dietz before. So I've got home court advantage, but I'm still on the visiting team. How did that happen? [laughs] But it's good. It's good for me to meet new people. And Charlie is a very kind man. I do enjoy his direction. It's very thoughtful, and he's able to cut to the heart of things."

Even if her creative partners are new, the boards on which she's treading are not. She's still at Zach, and except for her sofa, she says, "nothing feels more like home than these two stages." To underscore the point, she compares it with the place where everyone else goes for the holidays. "I've spent every Christmas for 13 years in this arena with my adopted family," she adds. Sure enough, that sounds like home.

Having an artistic home is bound to affect an artist's growth, but when McCall is asked how she's changed as an actor since she came to Austin, she says, "I'm afraid of looking at my process too closely, because I'm afraid I'll break it." She laughs again, before allowing that she's more comfortable onstage. "I feel like I know more about myself. I'm a little more open to myself in performance. I don't feel like I have to push it."

That's evident from where the audience sits, and it doesn't matter whether she has a musical number to stop the show or not. Still, would it be helpful if there were a song for her to sing at some point in Fiction?

Yes, she jokes. "Something. A pratfall. A spit take."

Fiction runs Feb. 10-April 10; Wednesday-Saturday, 8pm; Sunday, 2:30pm; at Zach Theatre's Whisenhunt Stage, 1510 Toomey. For more information, call 476-0541 or visit www.zachtheatre.org.