"It's hard to have 12 lines in a play." Twice Tony-nominated Beth Fowler is talking about her latest challenge, the role of Mrs. Matthew Harrison Brady in the current Broadway revival of Inherit the Wind. The part is smaller than Fowler usually accepts, but she's taken it for the chance to work opposite Brian Dennehy and Christopher Plummer and to be directed by Doug Hughes. It's also her first Broadway play; she's best known for creating leading roles in Broadway musicals like Baby, the first revival of Sweeney Todd, Beauty and the Beast, and The Boy From Oz.
Recently, however, it's been nothing but plays for Fowler. In 2005 she was seen Off-Broadway in Woody Allen's A Second Hand Memory and at Westport Country Playhouse in J.M. Barrie's Dear Brutus and an adaptation of Dickens' David Copperfield. Last summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival she was Aunt Nonnie in Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. But whether singing or not, Fowler approaches acting in the same way.
"Acting is acting," she says. "That's what you're doing when you're [singing]…. Because of my musical theatre training, I work from the outside in. I always do, and I'm always intimidated by the role." Her approach has occasionally gotten her into trouble. Allen spoke with her privately during early rehearsals for A Second Hand Memory, which he directed, because he was unhappy with her work. "As he started to speak, I interrupted him," Fowler remembers. "I said, 'Woody, I want to hear everything you have to say. But I want to tell you that the way I work is I start very big and then I get more and more real. And by the time it's time, I'm a real person. But I start in broad strokes—with my voice, with my body—and I do too much. But the more I get to know who I am and where I am and where the beats are and where the reality is, then it all comes together.' Well, he ignored what I had to say and demanded to make his speech anyway. But it wound up that we were great pals and he was very happy with what I was doing, or so he said."
Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who began her career as a singer, voice is the key to a characterization for Fowler: "I never know whose voice is going to come out on the first day of rehearsal at the read-through. Halfway through the play, I say to myself, 'Oh, that's who she is.' I learn it when I'm with the other actors at the table. That's when the voice starts to happen. The color of the voice, the timbre that matches the character, comes first. It just comes naturally out of the situation: talking to people as the person."
Which helps to explain why her current role is a unique challenge: Mrs. Brady exists as much if not more in her reactions. And she reacts a great deal, as she is on stage for much of the play, sitting in a prominent seat in the courtroom observing her husband argue the case against Darwin. "I live moment to moment on the stage. I'm engaged, but I don't articulate my feelings," Fowler says of her character. "I never do but once…. If you don't nail just who you are and your relationship with your husband in one or two little lines, and then in 10 minutes you have another little line, it's really hard…. I really wanted to be there for Brian to help him create [Brady], because it's important to his character. And that's what my role is about."
Director Hughes gave Fowler a key to the character. "Pretend that this is the last place she wants to be," he told her. Fowler explains, "The trial is very painful for her…. She knows her husband's weaknesses, but she adores him, and she's very proud of him, because he was a giant…. He's a vulnerable giant now, and she knows that better than anybody in the entire world.
"She's very smart. I did some homework: He trained her as a lawyer when they were married, so that she could be at his side and advise him and help him and do work for him and research for him. After his death, she did write about it. She had misgivings about this trial…. She had very strong feelings about the First Amendment. She really did not believe in [her husband's] cause."
Fowler tells of a memory she uses every night to make Mrs. Brady's concern for her husband, whose courtroom performance begins to unravel, palpable for the audience. She was touring with a troubled musical production, and the star gave an apologetic opening-night pre-curtain speech detailing all the woes the show had been through. Fowler was standing backstage with the star's wife, who was also in the show: "Her eyes were closed, and she was digging her nails into my fingers"; she was repeating her husband's name "as if to say, 'Stop. Stop.' And I have that image in my head. I'm not doing anything but just that in my head."
Fowler graduated from Caldwell College, a small Catholic women's college in Caldwell, N.J., in the early 1960s with a degree in music education and the intention of joining the convent and teaching children. "I thought, 'Oh, I'll be the singing nun,' " she says. But she never entered the convent, choosing initially to teach fifth grade. She sang in a school show, however, and it led to her being offered the role of Philia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the Bergen County Players, which in turn led to her being asked to audition for a season of summer musicals at the Grist Mill Playhouse in Andover, N.J. She got a chorus gig and her Equity card. "I got bitten," she recalls. Buoyed by the encouragement of her fellow professionals, she decided to try her luck in the business. She gave herself two years.
Her very first audition was in 1969 for a Broadway musical version of Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry. She got a chorus part and understudied star Rita Moreno. Gantry closed on opening night, but Fowler got to go on for Moreno at a preview and was seen by Helen Hayes, who became her champion. This increased Fowler's self-confidence, as did her continued success at getting work. She stood by for or understudied Patricia Elliott in A Little Night Music, Constance Towers in an early tour of The King and I (opposite Yul Brynner), the Andrews Sisters and Janie Sell in Over Here!, and, perhaps most challengingly, Patricia Routledge in Alan Jay Lerner and Leonard Bernstein's ill-fated 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She worked as an understudy and standby "to make extra money," she says. Her agent persuaded her to stop: "That was a decision that we made together. He told casting directors, 'Thank you, but that's a role that Beth should be doing eight times a week.' " And soon she was being offered those roles.
Fowler has never studied acting formally, though she has always had a vocal coach during her professional career. "My voice is like a very close friend," she says. "If I'm good to her, she's good to me. She's traveled through my life with me, and she's always growing and changing. I may be getting older, and so is she, but we're still working, and we're still discovering and finding new things."
Fowler thinks it would be almost impossible today for an actor to build a career as she did, through the encouragement of "guardian angels" and learning on the job, particularly with all the well-trained students coming out of schools and universities. But she does think some advice she received early on from Hayes remains useful: "She said, 'Take every job you're offered, especially the comedy…. You need to refine your timing, and that only comes with experience. The comedy will help to teach you that.' It was very fine advice, and I took it. I learned as I observed."