Word: stevensons
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THEATER Juliet Stevenson's U.S. debut is triumphant...
...BOTTOM LINE: In her U.S. stage debut, British actress Juliet Stevenson proves she is truly, madly, deeply talented...
EMMA THOMPSON HAS THE OSCAR and Miranda Richardson had a nomination, but as Tinseltown audiences are discovering, the most interesting British stage actress of the under-40 generation has long been a waif-eyed, bassoon-voiced, ironhearted daredevil named Juliet Stevenson. U.S. audiences are apt to know her only from the cult film Truly, Madly, Deeply. But on the boards in London, her range is astonishing, from the hoydenish Rosalind in As You Like It to the nihilistic Hedda Gabler, from the sexually awakening adolescent of Troilus and Cressida to the avenging victim of Death and the Maiden. She approximates...
Topping off all these assets is a startling capacity to commit herself to the fullest. Stevenson had to skip the show's final preview at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum after being rushed to a doctor with back spasms that rendered her unable to stand up. Yet on opening night, she made her first exit the way she always had, unhesitatingly hurtling herself across the stage, up a flight of stairs and almost colliding with a wall. Pain be damned, the play's the thing...
...play, also in its U.S. debut, opens with Stevenson sitting near a naked male lover, calmly sketching -- and discoursing on the merits of -- his thighs and butt. She plays a Venetian Renaissance painter with a gift for epic scale who is commissioned, despite her gender, to commemorate the city's most glorious naval victory. The city fathers want patriotic myth. She insists on painting the horrors of battle, the pathos of the defeated and the dehumanization of the victorious, and sees this as woman's contribution to culture. "No man," she remarks, "honestly hates murder...