VALERIE MAHAFFEY ‘LOOTS’ HER INGENUE IMAGE
“It’s very irreverent--and there’s a dead body in it that people are irreverent with. Actually, they’re quite rude.” So said actress Valerie Mahaffey of Joe Orton’s dark comedy “Loot” (at the Tiffany through June 21).
“I play the dead woman’s nurse,” she explained. “I’m supposedly going to leave this household because my job’s finished--but we learn very quickly that I have designs on her widower, and that my main passion in life is money. That’s true of most of the characters in the play. The exception is the widower. He’s passionate about the Catholic Church, law and order, roses, right and wrong. He has to be there to be sacrificed, so that the rest of us jerks can have a good time, get the money and get away with it.”
Yet the actress makes no apologies for her character.
“She’s pretty immoral,” Mahaffey noted. “I was scared of playing her at first, because I usually play ingenues, people who have things happen to them, who get to come out and be sweet and wonderful. But Fay is definitely a whirlwind; she gets things going. And as soon as she sniffs out another opportunity, she keeps that going. It’s like she’s twirling plates. Actors always want to have great parts, be the doers--but you never realize the energy it takes! I’m the first one who talks in the play and I don’t shut up for 15 minutes.
“I’m onstage the whole time, except for a scene between the two boys, and then I’m changing costumes--fast. One day in rehearsals I just laid down on the floor and said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m out of breath, I’m out of ideas. I’m wiped out.’ It’s tough work being a driving force. And Fay is very overt, even though she has to cover it up in (polite) society. If she wants to have sex with someone, she does. She wants to marry the widower, but she makes it very clear she’s after money: ‘Does he have his bank statement on him?’ ”
Playing this hard-nosed, “curvy,” multi-married woman also represents a whole new physical image for the actress. “I’m not complaining (about being oft-cast as the ingenue),” she noted. “Just in terms of film: It’s what you see is what you get, and they don’t really care too much that you can act. But a friend of mine, Jeffrey Jones, came to the play the other night and said, ‘It’s great to see you doing this part, because we don’t expect Valerie Mahaffey to be remotely sexy--and then when you are, it’s like, ‘Whoa, how nice.’ ”
Mahaffey has less fond memories of her last local stage outing, playing Emily Dickinson (a role she originated at the New York Shakespeare Festival) in the 1986 Taper staging of Peter Parnell’s “Romance Language.”
“It was not a good production,” she said bluntly. “I cannot tell you what happened; I mean, I really don’t know. I took my own performance and sort of slotted it in. Concetta Tomei and I had our own little story: It went from the small theater that Charlotte Cushman was playing in and Emily’s little poems to the plains, where it just got bigger and bigger--I was an Indian and she was out there doing ‘Hamlet.’ I love the play. I just don’t think we did it very well.”
Such low points have been rare. Born in Indonesia to a Texas oilman father and Canadian mother, Mahaffey was introduced to theater at an early age. “All the people out there had to make their own fun. If they wanted theater, they had to do it themselves. So my dad would act or direct, my mother made costumes and danced in the chorus. I thought it was great, I was just so amazed by them. I knew it was something I wanted to do.”
However, not until her senior year at an English boarding school did Mahaffey work up the courage to audition for a play--and much to everyone’s amazement, she got it. “I didn’t know the basics,” she said with a grin, “I didn’t know that you had to listen to the other actors. But confirmations like getting that part made me say, ‘OK, you’re special enough to do this.’ It was an advantage to have been brought up all over the world, have a great knowledge of many things. And there are so many British plays. I had the accent down pat so that was very impressive: ‘Oh, she’s got the accent. Let’s hire her.’ ”
And indeed, the roles have come plentifully. In New York, Mahaffey appeared onstage in “Play Memory,” “Dracula” and “Top Girls” (for which she won an Obie). Since coming to California last year, she’s appeared in Peter Parnell’s “The Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket” on PBS, in the CBS movie “Women of Valor” and the miniseries “Fresno” (in which, she says, proudly, “I got to play Carol Burnett’s daughter--not too shabby, right?”).
Any lingering East Coast theater elitism? “Oh no,” she said, giggling. “I think that’s hooey. You dig down real deep inside a ‘theater’ actress: If she were offered the lead in some movie, it’d be ‘Take me, take me.’ The only thing I don’t want to do is be in something that I don’t think is great for a long period of time. But otherwise, hey, I’ll do just about anything.”
