Flame-haired and lustrous-eyed, cool and cute, Alicia Witt sips a restorative Pimm’s in the Royal Court Theatre bar after a day of hard rehearsal, and lays out the magnitude of her current assignment. It is somewhat removed from the Hollywood movies and sitcoms in which the 31-year-old Massachusetts-born actress has hitherto plied most of her trade.
“I portray a stammering, shy agoraphobic girl who plays the piano as her only way of expressing herself,” she says. “But at the start of the play her piano is locked.” Symbolically locked or really locked? “Well, both. She needs to get over whatever it is that she’s trying not to express and begin to play again.”
Does she? “Oh yes,” says Witt, who supported herself as a 16-year-old Hollywood wannabe by tinkling the ivories in a Beverly Hills hotel. “I have to play two Rachmaninov preludes — the famous C sharp minor one, and another which I learnt for this production. And I also play Ravel’s Pavane, a really sad piece that Terry especially wanted.”
Terry is Terry Johnson, and the play is the latest to come from the pen that gave us Hitchcock Blonde, Hysteria and Insignificance. It’s called Piano/Forte, a rather clever title because it refers not just to the instrument on stage but also to the nature of the drama. The play contrasts two adult sisters — one unnaturally repressed, the other unnaturally extrovert — who are both, in their polarised ways, struggling to get over the death of their mother when they were very young. But there’s a lot more besides.
“Our father is a disgraced Tory politician who recently met his fiancée on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!” Witt giggles. “The play begins a few days before the wedding. All sorts of merriment ensues. It’s completely mad, a brilliant play — ridiculously funny in places, unspeakably sad elsewhere. I have a feeling that some nights the audience will fall off their seats with laughter, and other nights they will go down the dark side.”
But how did a Hollywood glamourpuss come to be mixed up in an edgy British stage drama? “I met Terry three years ago, after watching Hitchcock Blonde, which was one of the best things I’d ever seen on stage,” Witt replies. “I’d heard a rumour that they might be going to Broadway with it, and I was hoping to audition for him.”
In the event, Witt and Johnson talked for about ten minutes about Hitchcock Blonde, and then for two hours about another idea fermenting in Johnson’s quixotic mind. “He wanted to write about how two siblings who grew up in the same household could be fractured halves of the same being. And also about how musicians often use music to communicate what they can’t express in their own voices,” Witt says. Johnson wanted to know about Witt’s own history as a pianist. “I found myself telling him about my childhood,” she says. “Then I went back to LA and thought I would hear nothing more, but last year I got an e-mail that said: ‘Here’s the play. Let me know what you think.’ Well, you know what I think. So here I am.”
Witt is that rare creature: someone who has survived being a child prodigy without carrying lasting psychological scars or developing acute chemical dependencies. That’s all the more remarkable when you consider that she qualified twice over as a prodigy.Once was through music.
“I began learning the piano at 7, which isn’t excessively early,” she says. “But once I started to play, I played excessively! By the time I was 10 I was practising four hours a day and having four lessons a week. Then came the point when I had to make a decision about whether I wanted to try for Juilliard.”
A tough decision? “Not really. By the time I was 13, I knew that I couldn’t become a professional pianist without giving up everything else. The amount of dedication you need to go down that route is incredible — much more than with being an actor.”
And it was as an actor that the infant Witt achieved her other claim to fame. Pushed by a mother who read sonnets to her in the cradle, she was reciting Shakespeare on a TV show called That’s Incredible! at the age of 4. Three years later, a casting director was hunting for a child actor who had an exceptional command of words for a movie by an up-andcoming director called David Lynch. The casting director saw a tape of Witt doing her Shakespeare party-piece, and gave her the part. The film was Dune.
“So through a weird chain of coincidences I found myself at the age of 7 in Mexico City on the set of the biggest-budget movie made up to that time,” she says. “The strangest thing was that I couldn’t believe that grown-ups were acting for a living! Making up stories and playing different characters were what my brother and I did for fun.”
Educated at home by her teacher parents, Witt gained her high-school diploma at the precocious age of 14 and took herself off to LA, determined to become an actor. Her break came a couple of years later when she landed the role of Cybill Shepherd’s stroppy teenage daughter in the sitcom Cybill. “Well, that was my big break financially,” she says. “But I had already made an independent movie. It was one of those strange things. The director spotted me when I was playing the piano in that hotel. I thought: ‘Hmm, this never happens in real life. He’s probably a creep, and this probably isn’t a real project, and what am I getting myself into?’ ” Her fears proved unfounded. The movie, Fun, won her an award at Sundance, and she was in business as an actress. Since then, she has made upwards of 25 films, a mix of arthouse projects and mainstream fare including the “slasher” film Urban Legend, Two Weeks Notice, Last Holiday and the (not yet released) psychological thriller 88 Minutes, in which she plays opposite one of her greatest acting heroes — Al Pacino. “Landing that audition put me into a state of total euphoria and total panic,” she says.
And now? Witt has added yet another string to her bow. She has just directed for the first time: a 16-minute short film called Belinda’s Swan Song, which she wrote herself. “It’s about a singer giving her final performance,” she says. “But what it’s really about is the love-hate relationship between the artist and the audience. It has already been accepted for three festivals. I’m very proud of it.”
Witt admits that she financed the movie herself (“I’m trying to avoid the shops now”). But could this be the start of a long-term move towards directing? “I wouldn’t want to stop acting. But I’ve discovered over the past few months that I love being in control.”
Piano/Forte, Royal Court, Sloane Square, London SW1 (www.royalcourttheatre.com 020-7565 5000), Thur to Oct 14
