Elizabeth Norment is a self-proclaimed professional cannibal. It's an odd declaration for a middle-aged woman whose sensitivity and thoughtfulness are readily apparent.
But Norment is not referring to her diet. She is the quintessential distinguished regional theater actor, and she does not shrink from using the good and the bad moments in life to create the characters she plays on stage.
"There is nothing I won't cannibalize, including my own life, to make art out of it," she recently said over her favorite maple scone.
While it is not unusual for actors to mine personal experience for authenticity in performance, Norment has been going to some of the darkest places in human experience to give depth, texture and understanding to her work. Death -- not her own but others' -- has been on her doorstep.
The New York-based actress first visited Milwaukee in 1990 to appear in the Milwaukee Rep's production of "The Early Girl," and she has been returning every few seasons to do a guest shot in a major role. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Norment built a career notable for its connection to the country's top-tier non-profit theaters. She was a founding member of the American Repertory Theatre in Boston, a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and has worked at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater and New England's Berkshire Theater Festival among others.
Eight years ago Norment played an exquisitely literate college English professor dying of cancer in the Milwaukee Rep's Stiemke Theater production of "Wit." She spent the entire drama onstage in a hospital bed. Always slender, the actress lost weight to appear emaciated, and she ate only 1,200 calories a day during the course of the show's run.
Norment is back at the Rep, rehearsing the one-woman dramatization of author Joan Didion's best-selling reflection on the death of her husband, "The Year of Magical Thinking," which opens Friday, Oct. 16 in the Stiemke. This time she is a survivor, portraying the narrator, Didion, agonizing over the sudden fatal heart attack suffered by screenwriter and novelist John Gregory Dunne in their New York apartment. A fiction writer and political essayist who had never before written for theater, Didion adapted the book to the stage, and Vanessa Redgrave played her on Broadway and in London.
Written in Didion's trademark style -- cool, poised and terse -- "The Year of Magical Thinking" is a narrative of the author's attempt to come to terms with her husband's death in the 12 months following it. She is simultaneously dealing with critical health problems facing her daughter. Playwright and director David Hare, who staged the adaptation of the book for Broadway and in England, described "Year" as a woman admitting her helplessness when confronted by the harshest reality of being human.
Norment considers the Rep production to be her Mount Everest, a staggering challenge that has come after a series of mid-career tests. "I have been in the you never leave the stage phase of my career that started when I did 'Wit' here," she said. That period has also included portraying Eleanor Roosevelt in a one-actor show and performing the hour-long monolog from Tony Kushner's "Homebody/Kabul."
"This is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life," the actress continued. "It is 62 pages of text. I am onstage for an hour and 40 minutes. It requires that I be simultaneously engaged at many levels.
"I have to control my breathing. I have to make sure I swallow. The most mundane things become important when onstage alone for that length of time. And I have to maintain intensity of concentration and embed the right amount of layers at the right time."
Those are all technical concerns. Norment also has the emotional issue of returning to the subject of death that was central to her work in "Wit." Her father died of cancer, and she used her experience with that to build her "Wit" character. Back to the cannibal image.
"To borrow from him seemed to me to be a way of honoring him. I had to give myself license to revisit the world of death with my father. I will probably go there again for this play ("Year"). I have to scavenge from the truth in order to be authentic."
Norment doesn't leave all of her character behind in the dressing room when she goes home following a day of work. "Some of the play often filters into my life," she explained. "I feel the vulnerability, the fragility. It is not always easy to turn off the faucet. I don't think my organism knows the difference between pretending and reality."
"Wit" attracted an audience of cancer survivors and close friends and relatives of cancer victims. Some were so emotionally affected by the production, they lingered in the theater and lobby long after the curtain call. Norment took the unusual step of mingling with them. "People were so cracked open by that play," she said.
"These plays are a good rehearsal for life. It is digging down deep into the viscera of what it means to be a human being. These plays allow me to roll up my sleeves and do really meaningful work."
Rep artistic director Joe Hanreddy explained why Norment is so successful in roles that would overwhelm some actors. "Elizabeth has the ability to be so specific and so clear and so truthful. Her (acting) choices are rarely wrong."
While Norment concedes that heavy topics and a constant presence onstage are personally taxing, she insists they do not exhaust her. "Dull, boring, stupid theater does that. It drains your battery and does not recharge it."
"The Year of Magical Thinking" runs Oct. 16 through Nov. 8.
Damien has been around so long, he was at Summerfest the night George Carlin was arrested for speaking the seven dirty words you can't say on TV. He was also at the Uptown Theatre the night Bruce Springsteen's first Milwaukee concert was interrupted for three hours by a bomb scare. Damien was reviewing the concert for the Milwaukee Journal. He wrote for the Journal and Journal Sentinel for 37 years, the last 29 as theater critic.
During those years, Damien served two terms on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, a term on the board of the association's foundation, and he studied the Latinization of American culture in a University of Southern California fellowship program. Damien also hosted his own arts radio program, "Milwaukee Presents with Damien Jaques," on WHAD for eight years.
Travel, books and, not surprisingly, theater top the list of Damien's interests. A news junkie, he is particularly plugged into politics and international affairs, but he also closely follows the Brewers, Packers and Marquette baskeball. Damien lives downtown, within easy walking distance of most of the theaters he attends.
