Up in the Air

Playwright-actress Ellen McLaughlin may have her feet planted firmly on the ground, but there’s a recurrent flight motif winging its way through her life. An occasional devotee of such airborne pastimes as hang-gliding and small-plane excursions, she’s also done more than her share of theatrical flying.

Best known for the years she spent suspended from wires as the original Angel in Tony Kushner’s groundbreaking “Angels in America,” McLaughlin has now written a play that centers on the exploits of a search-and-rescue pilot scouring the Adirondacks in search of an abducted girl. During her mission, the pilot confronts the girl’s mother, her own Polish grandmother and, most disturbingly, her complex relationship to the memory of her own late mother.

“Tongue of a Bird,” which opens at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday, is directed by Lisa Peterson and features an all-female cast led by Cherry Jones. The piece has been staged in Seattle and London, and will move East to its co-producer, the Public Theater in Manhattan, after the Taper outing.

It is the fifth entry in a body of dramatic work that wins McLaughlin soaring praise from such highly regarded colleagues as Kushner. “She’s an important playwright and someone who really can’t write a dishonest word,” he says. “Her plays always have these moments of terrifying clarity. She has turned the exigencies of life into art more spectacularly than anyone I know.

“As an actress and a person and a writer, there’s a remarkable beauty that surrounds her,” Kushner says. “She’s very brave, politically committed, a real mensch.”

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Peterson calls “Tongue of a Bird” a “very musical” play. “A lot of its power comes from tonal shifts,” says the director, who also staged the work’s premiere in Seattle in the fall of 1997. “The narrative is present, but the journey is a psychological journey. It is about a kind of accumulation of experience around the central character.” One of the drama’s key subjects is flying, in more than one sense of the word. Flight can suggest both soaring above and running away, and both meanings are present in the central character’s journey, as well as in the “emotional autobiography” that it represents for its writer.

“I wanted to actually come to terms with myself, that I had been managing to keep an enormous amount of my own feelings at bay,” explains the quietly composed McLaughlin, 41, seated in a Taper conference room one recent afternoon.

“I likened it to being able to fly. I’m very comfortable in the air. And if you’re really in love with flight, you’re in love to a certain extent with being outside of the body, not grounded.

“The problem is, if you’re not in your body, you can’t actually feel anything particularly authentically,” says McLaughlin, who lives in Nyack, N.Y., with her husband, performance artist Rinde Eckert.

“There are lots of problems with the feeling, as lovely as it is, and I wanted to write about that. I wanted to write about a flier who, on some level, lands the plane.”

This persistent feeling of being ungrounded is, in fact, one that McLaughlin traces back to her early years. “In all of the memories that I do have of my childhood, I actually see over the back of my own head, which is sort of odd,” she says. “I think that what I learned as a kid was how to get out of the body, so I’m really comfortable that way.”

Raised in Washington, McLaughlin is the child of two professors. Her mother, a novelist, taught writing and literature, and her father, American history and humanities. She attended the Sidwell Friends School and received early exposure to the arts and culture through family outings to the Arena Stage and elsewhere.

She began exploring writing as a child, but was also drawn to the visual arts. “When I was in high school, I was going to be a painter because I had a facility for painting,” McLaughlin says. “I could do it, but I didn’t have anything to say in that medium.”

That skill, however, led her to spend some time building sets and painting scenery for her school’s stage productions--including one that proved particularly profound. “They were doing a production of ‘Waiting for Godot’ and I watched that show probably a dozen times,” she recalls. “That play went into the bloodstream like no other play. It not only made me want to do theater, it made me want to write for the theater.”

As an undergraduate at Yale, McLaughlin started out studying studio art. She then went through a series of other majors before ending up back in theater. “I just realized at some point that I was hopelessly in love with the theater,” she says. “I fought it for a long time because I thought theater was for, you know, insufferable actors.”

She chose to pursue both playwriting and acting, completing senior projects in both disciplines, and setting the precedent for the dual career that would follow.

Moving to New York after college, McLaughlin supported herself for eight years by painting scenery. Meanwhile, she went out on auditions and continued writing plays.

Although she worked as an actress from time to time, she found herself struggling as both an actress and a playwright until the mid-1980s. “I wrote this play and Actors’ Theater wanted to do it, and suddenly I was a playwright,” she says, referring to “Days and Nights Within,” which was a co-winner of the Great American Play Contest when it premiered in the 1985 Humana Festival at the Actors’ Theater of Louisville.

That same year, McLaughlin’s “A Narrow Bed,” which was commissioned by the Actors’ Theater, also premiered in Louisville. Two years later the play was produced by the New York Theater Workshop, where Kushner was then associate artistic director.

Thus began a friendship and professional relationship with Kushner that has been one of the most sustaining of McLaughlin’s career. “We became fond of each other and stayed in touch,” she says. “Part of the reason that Tony and I have always responded to each other as writers is that we have similar sensibilities on some level.”

In the late 1980s, McLaughlin moved to San Francisco. There she began working less as a writer and more as an actor, in particular at the Eureka Theater and the American Conservatory Theater.

Kushner was then in the first phases of writing “Angels in America,” a project that was launched by then-dramaturge Oskar Eustis, who was at the Eureka at the time.

“I was summoned by Oskar to San Francisco,” Kushner says. “He wanted to hear a reading, just to keep everybody’s hopes alive. [Actor] Stephen [Spinella, who would create the role of Prior Walter] wasn’t flown in from New York, so Ellen was the first person to read Prior Walter.”

“We did a really rough reading in the greenroom at the Eureka and I realized, even as rough as it was, that this play was going to have a huge effect on the American theater, on world theater,” McLaughlin says. “I also thought, ‘We’ll be performing this in people’s basements for the rest of our lives, because it’s too good.’ It really changed the way that I think about the theater public.

“I watched this thing develop all the years that he worked on it and it was an amazing experience,” she says. “It’s certainly one of the most important plays written in my lifetime.”

During that trip, Kushner also saw McLaughlin perform the lead in “Hedda Gabler.” “I’ve seen lots and lots of Heddas, and no one has ever made sense of that character the way that she did,” he says. “She made it clearly a play about a woman who was being driven crazy by the society she was living in. It was incredibly brave and extremely painful, funny and frightening.”

“There are strong similarities between her as an actress and as a playwright,” Kushner says. “There’s an incredible intelligence and sensitivity to text. She’s very elegant and can be very lyrical. She’s a very specific and precise writer, and that’s always true of her onstage.”

McLaughlin ended up originating the part of the Angel in “Angels in America”--a role initially written for her friend, Sigrid Wurschmidt, who died of breast cancer in 1989--and appearing in every U.S. workshop staging and production of the piece, through its Broadway run in 1994.

Meanwhile, while she was flying and flipping through the air and crashing through ceilings as the Angel, McLaughlin the playwright was also suspended in midair. She had been given a commission by the Taper to write a play about aviator Amelia Earhart, but she wasn’t making much progress.

Although she was able to complete an adaptation of Greek tragedies--”Iphigenia and Other Daughters,” which was staged at the Actors’ Gang here in L.A., as well as at the Classic Stage Company in New York, in the early 1990s--McLaughlin found that her “Angels” duties were inhibiting work on her flight play.

“The problematic effect for me as a writer is that I know that play [“Angels in America”] better than I know any of my own plays, because I heard it hundreds of times,” she says. “It’s etched on my brain cells. I can do the entire play verbatim, and that does have a dampening effect on one’s own creative voice.”

She’d been writing pages and pages of dialogue, and shifting the concept away from Earhart. But she was keeping the results to herself. “It was the first play that I’d written since I extricated myself from ‘Angels,’ ” McLaughlin says. “It was just fighting me every inch of the way. I’d never had an adversarial relationship to a play like I’ve had with this one.

“Ultimately, it was Lisa Peterson who made me write it,” she says. “She had just started work at the Taper and called me up and said, ‘You know, we gave you a commission six years ago. . . .’ ”

Peterson had joined the Taper staff in 1995. “I looked around to see what was hanging back there somewhere,” she recalls. “It’s not true that I made her write it, but I made her start to show it to people.” By the time Peterson asked McLaughlin to show some work, the playwright had indeed written hundreds of pages. “It was like throwing meat off the back of a sled as the wolves were coming up across the tundra,” McLaughlin says. “I faxed some pages. I really just wanted to slow her down. And she called me back and said ‘Did you realize you only sent me 10 pages?’ And so I sent 10 more.”

As it turned out, “Tongue of a Bird” was just in need of a spine. “It had loads of ideas and imagery, but it didn’t have story for a very long time,” McLaughlin says. “And finally I found the verb that made it into a play, which was the search for this child.”

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“Tongue of a Bird” received mixed yet largely positive reviews when it was staged in Seattle and London. Typical was the response from Benedict Nightingale, writing in the Times of London, who called the piece “bold but uneven.”

Yet McLaughlin is less affected by the public reaction than by the internal dynamics that have always presented the greatest obstacle to the necessary struggle of her writing.

“I have to write because it’s the only way that I can make meaning of how I think,” she says. “It’s amazing that nobody can stop you from writing. I can stop me from doing it, and I’m very good at that. Years go by that I don’t write. But when you’re at your desk, [writing] is yours to do. That’s where the work happens, whether the thing ever gets produced or not.

“The more you head into the maelstrom, the more vulnerable you are, of course,” she says. “But it’s what you owe to whatever gift you have.”

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“Tongue of a Bird,” Mark Taper Forum, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens Thursday, 8 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 7. $29-$40. (213) 628-2772.