Jennifer Mendenhall

The harder the role, the more it turns her on

By Nelson Pressley

Washington, D.C.: Jennifer Mendenhall is showing her teeth.

The dentistry is fresh: She pulls up her lip with two fingers and, leaning down so I can get a close look, displays the result of an early afternoon drilling and filling. Since she’s a performer who necessarily schemes with her actor/stage manager husband about maximizing her Equity health weeks, naturally there’s no dental coverage.

“All out of pocket,” she shrugs as she prepares iced coffee for us in her comfortable Maryland home just past the D.C. line. Acting locally, it goes without saying, you’ll never get rich. But over two decades, Mendenhall has carved out both a satisfying family life and a reputation as one of the city’s most valuable actors—she’s fierce and funny (often at once) and endlessly flexible. The prism of the Helen Hayes Awards reflects the two-act structure in her professional life: From 1988 to 1995 she picked up four nominations plus a win, and then children inspired a kind of intermission.

But lately Mendenhall’s been back with a vengeance, working with her old gang at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (where she has been a company member for nearly two decades), taking on the title role in Sophocles’ Electra at MetroStage, and becoming a key player with the young lions just beginning to find a place in Washington. Along the way she earned one Hayes nomination in 2004 and two in both 2005 and 2006.

“The more difficult the part, the more turned on she is,” says Jeremy Skidmore, artistic director of Theater Alliance, another company that has been particularly attached to Mendenhall. “She’s almost a masochist in that regard.”

Durability, range: Mendenall won her Hayes as the impressionable young Lemon in Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, and, more than 15 years later, breathtakingly rendered the torrent of rage—not to mention the multiple languages—of Mahala in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul. Craig Wright tailored his Grace for her as the play was workshopped and premiered at Woolly two years ago.

“He very quickly ascertained what kind of person I was and made my character a Christian Minnesotan because he wanted to mess with me,” Mendenhall recalls with a wicked laugh. So what kind of woman is she? The actress blushes a bit as she describes how her six-year-old daughter Vivian, having spotted a book called How Not to Turn into Your Mother, figured she’d better read it. She confidently told her mother, “You’re a cussing, smoking woman.”

As an actress, Mendenhall likes to say, she’s Bottom (ready to play anything), though the work of late has had a fairly intense tone. At Theater Alliance alone, she’s done Naomi Wallace’s Slaughter City in the company’s debut season in its current home at the H Street Playhouse, then Daniel MacIvor’s You Are Here and Colleen Wagner’s hostage drama The Monument.

“Name a light comedy that I’ve done,” she challenges. There have been some memorably frothy performances—a dotty Lady Stutfield in A Woman of No Importance at Shakespeare Theatre Company, a riotously bizarre servant in Alan Ayckbourn’s The Revengers’ Comedies at Arena Stage more than a decade ago, parts that have taken advantage of her natural British speech (a product of being born in Brooklyn and raised in England by U.S. expat parents). She has an uncommon facility with accents, easily rolling from classically English R.P. (received pronunciation) to the hard “r”s of Irish speech as she illustrates the dialect class she just finished teaching.

It’s true, though, that Mendenhall is more frequently seen in edgier, harder stuff in D.C.’s midsized and smaller theatres. This month she’ll deliver the rude Irish monologues of Mark O’Rowe’s Crestfall at Studio Theatre’s SecondStage, and later in the year Skidmore will direct her in Sarah Kane’s Crave for Arlington, Va.’s Signature Theatre. At Woolly—where recent uproarious work has included the sexually perverse Cooking with Elvis—she has been cast in the upcoming world premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone. In theatres like these, “If they do a comedy, it’s going to have a dark edge,” she notes, her laugh now an explosive cackle. “There’s gonna be death and pedophiles, or something. It can’t just be funny.”

The actress did make a rare foray out of town to Florida Stage this past winter for the premiere of Melanie Marnich’s Cradle of Man after director Michael John Garcés (who first worked with Mendenhall on Grace) recruited her away from Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s The Velvet Sky at Woolly (with Woolly’s blessing). “That’s an example of the kind of career she could build,” reasons Woolly artistic director Howard Shalwitz, “with directors saying, ‘I need to take you with me wherever I’m going.’ Obviously she has all the skills for Shakespeare.” Yet Shalwitz observes, “From many vantage points Jennifer’s devised a very enviable way of creating a life in the theatre and keeping a strong sense of her values.”

It’s not quite accurate to say that Mendenhall is fearless about revealing her age (46) or what a friend calls her “fightin’ weight” (108), which is relevant because her acting is often so physical. (There was, for example, the much-discussed sex scene between Mendenhall and sometimes-actor Shalwitz in Lenny and Lou, a hilarious morning quickie that spiraled across the stage like a dirty Fred and Ginger movie.) She thinks twice before divulging her personal stats, and insists at the top of the interview that when it comes to managing her career in the conventional way, “I’m not smart” (pronouncing it “smaht”). But she and husband Michael Kramer make it work, thanks in part to the audio studio they’ve fashioned in their basement, where they manufacture books on tape, and to teaching and commercial voiceover jobs.

Mendenhall is almost evangelical about the many ways Washington theatre lifts her up and pays her back. For the past three summers she’s had a two-week gig with a playwriting workshop at the Kennedy Center, giving what she calls “my geeky speech on punctuation”—the clues dramatists can give actors by the way the writing lies on the page—and, with Rick Foucheux, demonstrating acting technique in any scene the playwrights can dream up.

“It’s like boot camp for actors, and it’s fabulous,” she says. “I get to do all different characters—doesn’t matter. Old black men, young Asian girls, anything. I love it! The students are falling over themselves to thank me for my generosity, and I’m looking at them like they’re nuts, going, ‘Don’t you get it? You’re feeding me!’”

Still, why not New York? She likes to tell the story of how she once accompanied her banker father to a financial soiree and lectured then Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker on his presumption that nothing was happening in D.C. theatre and that serious actors have to migrate like lemmings toward Broadway.

“I never felt that I’d be able to be smart enough to make my way in that sort of…process,” she says. “Get an agent? Schmooze people? Be a type? I don’t know what type I am. They wouldn’t know what to do with me.”

And L.A.? “Oh, no,” she says in a mortified baritone murmur. “Why?” She’s happier—the word comes up repeatedly—”working in a community where you’re embedded and everybody knows you and calls you on your shit and will say, ‘I’ve seen that choice, let’s try to get something else,’ as opposed to working with people who are all kind of climbing a ladder, where a big part of the rehearsal-hall ethic has to do with not jeopardizing the next job that might happen.” Her disgusted conclusion is barely audible: “I think I’d fucking go crazy.”

Yet other actors might go nuts doing what they feel is terrific work in a valuable piece that goes virtually unseen. (Skidmore ribs her that her three shows at Theater Alliance rank as the company’s three least popular productions—and the three he’s proudest of.) It happened to Alexander Strain, Mendenhall’s co-star in the harrowing two-character play The Monument.

“We had this conversation,” she says, “about how angry it made him. And I said: You can’t control that. You have to do it for the joy of doing it. And you have to know that those 15 people who saw you—you’ve changed their lives, and they will be we few, we happy few, who say, ‘Yeah, I saw Monument. You missed it. Too bad for you. That was an amazing production.’”

Nelson Pressley writes about theatre in Washington, D.C.