WHAT’S in a title? A lot, laughs Lauren Ambrose, the 26-year-old American actress best known for her role as Claire Fisher, the sparkily sardonic art student in the TV series Six Feet Under, about a family-run funeral home in Los Angeles. But now she is about to make her British stage debut at the National Theatre in another morbid sounding piece, the Sam Shepard play Buried Child.
“Everyone says, ‘What’s going on with this?’ ” says Ambrose in a deadpan manner, her conversation charged with the same sweet-tempered sassiness that distinguishes her performance as Claire. “I can’t get away from this thing. I knew I’d be asked that, and I’ve been thinking about responses: that maybe I only deal with big topics, big issues . . . death? But there is a little of Six Feet Under in this play.”
For Ambrose, her stage role as Shelly, the girlfriend visiting her boyfriend’s family farm that is festering with secrets, is “a very different character”. Shelly may be, like Claire, more than your average 19-year-old, but she is enmeshed in a rural Midwestern landscape that is even spookier and more threatening than modern-day LA.
Shepard’s play won a Pulitzer prize in 1979 and was later rewritten, to acclaim, for a Broadway production in 1996. But Matthew Warchus’s National production, adopting this later script, could be the most interesting yet. For one thing, it’s rare to find a cast of an American play that mixes English and Irish actors (Brendan Coyle from The Weir among them) with three visiting Americans: the Tony-winner Elizabeth Franz, the veteran film actor M. Emmet Walsh, and the relative novice of the group, Ambrose.
“That’s what so funny about this job,” says Ambrose, scrunching up her nose. “The play is very weird and very funny on many levels and kind of great because of all its incongruities. We immerse ourselves for eight hours a day, and then I do it again at night in my little hotel room, immersing in this American sensibility all about the country, the farm, generations of American men, cowboy boots, the incredible American plains where the language mirrors the landscape.” She pauses. “Then you open the door, and here we are in London, and it’s so incongruous: St Paul’s, St Bride’s, the Thames — really weird and funny.”
Advertisement
One senses that Ambrose is deeply engaged in teasing out the meanings of the play. “I wanted to do this job because it was a mystery to me and I don’t understand it and I didn’t understand it and I still don’t, quite. Yet it gets closer every day, and different things get illuminated.”
Shepard’s play, with its incest-driven narrative, is often taken to be one further chronicle of the crumbling American dream — Six Feet Under with an even greater emphasis on secrets and lies. Ambrose paraphrases Shepard: “He said, ‘I wrote a comedy and gave it a dark title, a grave title’. This is not exactly a laugh riot.”
Nor, especially recently, is Six Feet Under, whose creator, Alan Ball, could be said to bow to Shepard in his doom-laden and eccentric view of things. At the end of last season, Ambrose’s Claire had an abortion, an event that temporarily killed her artistic muse. In the current season, now showing on Channel 4, Claire is exploring friendships with women, including one played by Mena Suvari, and growing as an artist.
Ambrose sees Claire as a likeable figure who is now becoming self-centered as a college student. She admires Ball and his fellow writers for not being afraid to give Claire some unattractive qualities.
“Alan has created this thing, I call it Alan Ball world: these incredible moments of reality — just a brother and sister talking, or mother and son. And then there are these wild, heightened moments of high comedy, then these cuckoo dream sequences, and they somehow all meld together to create a vision of reality: so I guess the Sam Shepard play has that element, too.”
Advertisement
Ambrose is currently in between filming Six Feet Under. For eight months of the year she is in West Hollywood with her husband Sam, a photographer, filming 12 episodes a season. “I’ve been saying it’s like this experimental art form, working in TV: I mean, not to elevate it too much, but it really is this weird art form because they write it fast and they produce it fast and they barely rehearse it, unless it’s something big.”
For Buried Child she has the luxury of a five-week rehearsal period. Her interest in the stage, she admits, has been further fuelled by having a TV cast made up largely of theatre folk, starting with the musicals veteran Michael C. Hall, who plays her brother David, and Peter Krause, recently on Broadway in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, as the stricken Nate.
How much more Six Feet Under is she up for? “The producers made this vow — and hopefully they’ll stick with it — about not wanting to run it into the ground: they want to have their story to tell and tell it rather than keeping this thing going but dying on the vine. That’s what I love about The Office — they just did two seasons of it.”
Besides, she says, there comes a limit as to how much longer you can keep playing 19-year-olds as you move towards 30.
“I’ll love it as long as I can,” she laughs. “Stick with it as long as I can. I don’t know if I can get away with it any more on film. Maybe on stage — from afar.”