After wrapping her last full season on the NBC series “ER” in May 2008, the actress Maura Tierney placed a phone call that would prove prophetic.Eager for a rigorous acting experience after nine years on that fast-paced melodrama, Ms. Tierney arranged to visit the Wooster Group, the New York theater troupe known for experimenting with language, movement and multimedia. She ended up spending two days watching the company’s actors improvise with a Tennessee Williams play, “Vieux Carré,” and left hoping to work with them someday.A year later, in the summer of 2009, the Wooster Group began planning a revival of its 1983 play “North Atlantic,” an absurdist portrayal of life on an aircraft carrier during the cold war, and reached out to Ms. Tierney about playing the sexually frisky role of Cpl. Nurse Jane Babcock. What no one in the ensemble knew was that Ms. Tierney had been given a diagnosis of breast cancer that June, underwent surgery in July to remove a tumor and planned to begin chemotherapy in the fall.
In her first interview since undergoing treatment, Ms. Tierney said that she quickly accepted the Wooster Group’s offer, seeing it as a chance to challenge herself physically and artistically after cancer. She said she thought that the theater company’s aesthetic, which emphasizes technical precision and stylized line reading over emotionally wrought acting, was a good fit with her mood at the time.
“What appealed to me was that the focus of ‘North Atlantic’ was more about performance rather than emoting, because I was at a point in life where it was nice not to have to emote all over the place,” Ms. Tierney, 45, said during the conversation at a restaurant near her home in Greenwich Village one afternoon before a performance. “North Atlantic,” which had a brief run in Los Angeles in February, concludes its New York run on Sunday at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.
“A theater role was also a much better fit for me last fall than television,” she continued, referring in part to her decision to drop out of the NBC series “Parenthood” last September after her diagnosis. (Lauren Graham replaced her.) “I felt terrible leaving the ‘Parenthood’ team in the lurch, but doing the show would have been very stressful because I didn’t want that phase of my life documented on film. There is no HD in the theater.”
Ms. Tierney lost her long brown tresses to chemotherapy; her hair is now a short salt-and-pepper. (She declined to be photographed for this article but said that the treatment went well and that she was healthy.)
She was also drawn to playing a role that was a sharp departure from the serious-minded characters that she is known for, like Abby Lockhart in “ER” — a recovering alcoholic with a tumultuous personal life and medical career — and her roles in films like “Primary Colors” and “Scotland, Pa.” Only an occasional stage actress, she appeared Off Broadway in the roles of an ex-girlfriend in Neil LaBute’s “Some Girl(s)” in 2006 and a distressed Manhattan wife in Nicky Silver’s “Three Changes” in 2008. She also once played Rosencrantz in Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” at her Roman Catholic high school near Boston.
Nurse Babcock is the most whimsical and sexually curious of the women on the “North Atlantic” warship; she also frequently joins other female characters, played by Kate Valk and Frances McDormand, among others, in a kind of flirty Greek chorus that makes coquettish and lewd comments in unison to the men on the ship.
“What’s been so fun for me is that you learn all of these acting muscles in television, so much that it can become facile, but the Wooster Group’s approach is about letting go of control and just doing the play and not caring about making the audience feel something,” Ms. Tierney said.
Elizabeth LeCompte, the director of the Wooster Group, said in an interview that she did not know who Ms. Tierney was before she showed up at the theater company’s home in SoHo in 2008. Ms. LeCompte, who also directed “North Atlantic” and is known as a tough, blunt-spoken artist, said that she came away from that first meeting feeling that Ms. Tierney was impatient to be tested creatively.
“Our actors were telling her, ‘You have to be able to do everything and anything if you work with us,’ and she just perked up right away,” Ms. LeCompte said. “I remember thinking that she wants that experience, whatever it is. I remember that, and I remember her very beautiful hair, because the next time I saw her she didn’t have any hair.”
Ms. LeCompte and Ms. Valk, two of the founders of the Wooster Group in 1975, said they were a bit worried at first about whether Ms. Tierney was up to the physical rigors of “North Atlantic,” which takes place largely on a stage tilted at a 45-degree angle. But Ms. Tierney was determined to power through, even as she dealt with the death of her father in mid-December during the final weeks of chemotherapy.
“I said to Maura once in January that I found it so moving, the fact that she was working with us,” Ms. Valk said. “And she said, ‘You don’t know how grateful I am to have this play to come to.’ ”
Ms. Tierney said she had no work projects beyond “North Atlantic,” though she has taped appearances on the FX series “Rescue Me.” The Wooster Group experience has been by far her best in the theater, she said, partly because the actors’ collaborative style helped lift the stage fright she felt in other theater work.
“I was often so nervous onstage before this play, and at first I felt like some TV actress dilettante trying to prove that I was up to a theater challenge,” Ms. Tierney said. “But Liz and Kate and Fran helped me to stop worrying, to trust in the collaboration, and that has been incredibly freeing for me.”
nytimes.comGood to see her doing so well after such a difficult year. Glad to have you back Maura!.
